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One morning last November, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located some six hundred miles east of Moresby, across the Solomon Sea. Its southern shore is just three miles from the politically independent Solomon Islands, and its people share a culture, linguistic links, and dark skin tone with their Solomon neighbors. But thanks mostly to European colonizers, who drew the borders, Bougainville is the farthest-flung province of Papua New Guinea, whose lighter-toned inhabitants Bougainvilleans often call “redskins,” betraying a sense of otherness in their own country that partly explains why I am writing about them here.

I say partly because if not for the islands’ having fought a bitter, decade-long war against the Australia-backed Papua New Guinea—which remarkably they won—and demanding Papua New Guinea allow Bougainville’s independence by 2027, the story I am about to tell would likely never have happened, nor would it have piqued the interest of an American magazine. In October 2023, I booked a trip to Buka to report on these developments, budgeting some days at the end to interview leaders of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG), the formal authority that expects to secure self-rule for its people. But over the previous months I had become transfixed instead by the strange tale of Noah Musingku, a Bougainvillean scam artist who had made a fortune, lost it, then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he declared himself the islands’ king. He wore crowns of brass and cowrie shells that, lest there be any ambiguity, spelled out king. An academic who has described Musingku as “Bougainville’s Bernie Madoff” wrote him off as an “irrelevance,” while a diplomatic envoy to Papua New Guinea told me he was a “fucking joke.”

Bougainvilleans had other ideas. Musingku’s purported con—a vast, millenarian Ponzi scheme called U-Vistract—had, since the late Nineties, raked in some $232 million dollars, perhaps far more, and near as I could tell, it was still plodding on. In 2006, a militia allegedly aligned with the ABG stormed Musingku’s hideout and almost killed him. One man told me that U-Vistract was “just like a Mafia”; police have also accused Musingku of plotting to overthrow the ABG. An ABG minister told me that Musingku was just the excuse, or “thorn,” that Papua New Guinea needed to forestall independence. Not since 2012, it seemed, had a foreign reporter set foot in the Royal Kingdom of Papaala, Musingku’s name for his compound in the village of Tonu. Nobody entirely knew what he had been up to in the intervening years, but they were sure it wasn’t good.

Which is all by way of saying, I wanted to meet the king. But after several months, the best lead I had was an obscure YouTube channel offering shaky videos of U-Vistract events. It belonged to a man named Nawera Karrenna, who claimed he could introduce me to Musingku—though when I revisited these messages at my hotel bar in Moresby, I realized that most of them were just his replying “yes” and generally dodging my increasingly desperate and long-winded proposals, which made me suspect that the entire thing was some sort of hoax.

So I was more than a little relieved when, in the early afternoon, I landed and, having sweat so quickly in the heat that I felt as if somebody had thrown a pail of water over me, spotted my royal envoy in a crowd outside Buka Airport’s rusting corrugated-steel terminal. Short and broad with sepulchral eyes, Karrenna wore a bucket hat, polo shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. We shook hands. He told me he’d once spent several weeks in Manchester, England, trying out for various professional soccer teams. But he didn’t look like a sportsman. Given the scant number of media visits to Papaala, I remarked glibly, he hardly had his work cut out as a media rep. He shrugged. “HM is a busy man,” he said, using a royal honorific (His Majesty) that I would hear a lot in the ensuing days. Together we rode a taxi five minutes into town, exchanged some cash at a Chinese-run convenience store, and, paying the equivalent of fifty American cents, hopped aboard one of the dozens of brightly painted banana boats darting across the narrow Buka Passage that cleaves its namesake island from the far larger island of Bougainville. It’d be at least another day, Karrenna told me, before we reached the king.

On the other side of the water was Kokopau, a town that doubles as a cab stand for vans and 4x4s headed up-country, and triples as Bougainville’s premier live-music spot. Australia’s primary legacy on Bougainville is Panguna, a colossal, open-pit copper and gold mine that, while dormant, is still one of the largest on earth, and whose controversial operation kindled the Bougainvillean uprising. The secondary is a taste for heavy metal music. Seemingly every other person dresses in denim shorts and band T-shirts—Slayer, Megadeth, Pantera, AC/DC, Metallica, Judas Priest, Van Halen, Black Sabbath. You’d be hard-pressed to find a difference between many Bougainvilleans and a convocation of Midwestern roadies if not for the band names that recalled Bougainville’s darkest days: Crisis Survivors, Trouble Zone, Dooms Vein, Mortal Revenge. Almost everybody who climbed into our taxi, a tattered Toyota Land Cruiser, was a metalhead, it seemed. Karrenna wasn’t keen; “white music,” he called it.

We left Kokopau by means of a shoreside highway cradled by coconut palms. It was around two o’clock. By early evening, we would reach Arawa, Bougainville’s former capital, which was built by the Australians to service Panguna. Not coincidentally, it was also the gateway to a sprawling “no-go zone” established by Bougainville’s great, bushy-bearded war hero, Francis Ona, at the tail end of the conflict, in 1998. Tonu and its elusive leader, Musingku, were nestled in the center of this zone. With any luck I would be shaking the king’s hand in a day or two.

If I really believed that at the time—and I think I did—I was no more deluded than most outsiders who have visited Bougainville.

The maritime historian Samuel Eliot Morison once noted that Bougainville possessed “wilder and more majestic scenery” than he’d encountered anywhere in the South Pacific. The islands offer almost every geographic feature imaginable, from mountains and volcanoes to coral reefs, waterfalls, and a sparkling, pristine coastline. Almost everything is quilted in a dense canopy of palm fronds. Copra—the dried white flesh of coconuts—was Bougainville’s prime export long before copper or gold.

In part owing to this wild abundance, Bougainville and its neighboring isles have enticed a succession of fair-skinned cads, colonizers, and crazies. The French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville lent the island his name after an eighteenth-century voyage, and he named Buka after a word bellowed at him from the shore (most agree that it likely means “who”). Later, at the end of the nineteenth century, a wayward Breton nobleman, Charles Marie Bonaventure du Breil, dreamed up his very own empire nearby, promising “paradise” to the hundreds of European colonists he recruited. But the effort—opposed by Italy, Spain, and France itself—was a disaster. No colony awaited the four starving ships, hundreds died, and the few survivors mostly moved to Australia or made the long journey back home.

Soon afterward, Germany swallowed Bougainville and incorporated it into its empire, forcing locals into labor on the copra plantations. In 1902, a German named August Engelhardt established a cult on nearby Kabakon Island, based on the holy trinity of sun, God, and coconut. Engelhardt demanded his acolytes remain unclothed, and he ate only the palm-proffered fruit. (He was reportedly found dead on the beach seventeen years later, legs covered in ulcers and weighing sixty-six pounds.) By this time Australia had wrested control of Bougainville from Berlin after the outbreak of the First World War. But in 1942, Japan captured the island and incorporated Bougainville into its so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—a prosperity enforced under penalty of islanders’ rape, torture, or beheading. U.S. troops landed on Bougainville a year later and constructed a Quonset-hut and corrugated-metal city that soon housed some seventy thousand GIs, including a thirty-year-old Navy lieutenant named Richard Nixon. The Americans and Japanese proceeded to bomb each other and the island as Bougainvilleans looked on, powerless. As much as a quarter of the population was killed. After Japan surrendered, Australia resumed control.

In 1961, a colonial geologist named Jack Errol Thompson visited a site in central Bougainville, near the sacred mountain of Panguna, and found evidence of a large deposit containing sizable quantities of porphyry copper, gold, and silver. By 1972, Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL), a subsidiary of the conglomerate Conzinc Riotinto of Australia Limited (later simply Rio Tinto Limited), had dug one of the largest man-made holes on earth—wide enough to fit the span of the Golden Gate Bridge twice over, and deep enough for more than five Statues of Liberty to be stacked on top of one another.

The Panguna mine soon became one of the world’s most profitable, accounting for nearly half of Papua New Guinea’s exports. Conzinc Riotinto connected it to Arawa via a vertiginous, sixteen-mile road and filled the town with rows of whitewashed, two-story apartment blocks the likes of which Bougainvilleans had never seen. Aussie roughnecks and their families arrived en masse, bringing beer, pies, and music. Arawa was an unlikely boomtown.

Those days are long gone. Visitors to Arawa today are greeted by great braids of rusted pipelines that encircle the city, ducking belowground and rising above like huge, mechanical boas. Smokestacks and substations have been overtaken by ferns and creepers. It reminded me of Chernobyl. His Majesty, our driver told me, as we approached the city, “helps many people.” Bougainvilleans were suffering from a cost-of-living crisis, and the ABG “doesn’t have enough money even for the roads.” Just then, the Land Cruiser jolted across the broken tarmac. He smirked at his own good timing. Bougainville, he said, “is a wrong-way place.”

We arrived at Arawa at dusk, an orange sun disappearing beneath the ridge of a mountain range. Families scurried home from school and work, and plumes of woodsmoke filled the air. Karrenna, who grew up in Arawa, was keen to see his folks. I was grateful to be alone. We agreed to meet the next day for an early walk and parted ways. I checked into a guesthouse and ordered fish. They didn’t serve coconuts.

Arawa’s painted homes and gardens shimmered in the light of dawn. But night had obscured its many scars, from pocked streets to improvised war machines that looked like armored tractors and sat rusting in bushes and culverts. The city’s focal point is still a three-story husk nicknamed the White House, which Papua New Guinea Defense Force soldiers allegedly converted from an administrative center into a torture and execution chamber during the war. Karrenna guided me around town, pointing out streets where major battles had been fought. He was thirty-four, and his memories of the Crisis, as it is known, were vague. But envisioning the privation that followed, with Panguna shut down, requires little imagination. We passed a row of apartments that once housed BCL’s foreign staff and were now gutted and inhabited by squatters. Beside them was a modest globe erected as a peace memorial but which had long since been stripped down to its wire frame. Karrenna pointed out homes whose owners, he claimed, had invested in U-Vistract: “He’s invested, they’ve invested, this one has invested,” and so on. Investors are still expecting payouts. The poverty is the ABG’s fault, he told me, as we hurled rocks into the Pacific Ocean. “Money is just a belief system.”

“If HM delivers on what he says,” he added, “everyone will run to him.” When will he do that? I asked. Karrenna ignored my question. The morning heat was stupefying. We walked back to my guesthouse, and I packed my things. The Land Cruiser would depart at midday, head into the mountains and the no-go zone, and deliver us to Tonu.

His Majesty was born in 1964, far from Arawa, in a village in southern Bougainville. He says he is the last of eight children—in fact, he claims to be “the lastborn of the lastborn of the lastborn” going back no fewer than fourteen generations. But the truth is unclear. What’s certain is that, as a young boy, he joined the island’s Pentecostal movement, a fundamentalist faith that put as much emphasis on financial reward as on liberation from the daily trials of life. Musingku was a “mysterious kind of student,” James Tanis, a schoolmate of his and future ABG president, told me. He’d reveled in rags-to-riches tales about “a beggar who became a millionaire.”

When Musingku was young, Tanis recalls, he boasted that his father had spied for the Japanese during World War II, and that he had taught his son to read palms. “He would grab us,” Tanis said, “and tell us we were bad . . . he would make us feel guilty.” Musingku once told Tanis he could mix limestone and herbs into an invisibility potion. When the boys drank the potion but got caught anyway for stealing equipment from a school lab, Musingku complained that they should have stirred in some crow’s feathers.

Musingku is thought to have served briefly in the Papua New Guinea Defense Force after graduating from high school; some suspect he was groomed to sow chaos in Bougainville. He was quiet but persuasive, writes the anthropologist John Cox, in possession of “a kind of anticharismatic charisma.” Tanis encountered his old friend Musingku again in 1986, at university in Papua New Guinea’s second-largest city, Lae. Musingku was studying architecture, attending classes in full army uniform, and he ran distance races holding a wooden stick as if it were a rifle. “It was not strange to me,” Tanis told me. “It was just a continuation of his childhood fantasies.”

Musingku says his father planted in him the idea to found an alternative banking system “with very high interests.” He claims to have traveled across Papua New Guinea, then to Australia and the United States, in search of suitable business models. Somewhere during this period, God appeared to him. “You are the answer,” the Lord told Musingku. “You are the solution.” And so Musingku returned to Port Moresby.

Bougainville was, by this point, mired in conflict. In 1975, as Papua New Guinea prepared for independence from Australia, Bougainville declared itself the Republic of the North Solomons, but the next year settled for increased autonomy and abandoned the name. Meanwhile, Francis Ona, aged twenty-three, joined BCL as a surveyor before switching to driving dump trucks. But over the years, Panguna had swallowed Ona’s home village of Guava, and he distrusted BCL. He took on night shifts as a cleaner, which gave him access to company files, which he photocopied. The files confirmed that the company was lowballing landowners; soon, Ona began to spread the word, including the extent of Panguna’s ecological destruction. In 1988, BCL commissioned an environmental inquiry, but Ona, puckish and with a talent for political theater, stormed out, declaring it a sham. He demanded ten billion kina in damages, local ownership, and consultation on all future projects in the region. “Land to us is our lifeline and we cannot be separated from it,” he wrote. “We are fighting to save our land from foreign exploitation.”

Not long afterward, local men used stolen dynamite to blow up transmission pylons in the pit of the mine. Regional fighters created the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, or BRA, with Ona as its commander in chief. Papua New Guinea sent in police officers at what it claimed was BCL’s behest, but the sabotage continued. Moresby dispatched the Papua New Guinea Defense Force, which burned homes and fired on civilians from Australian-made helicopters that had been repurposed as gunships. In 1989, Panguna shuttered, and its roughnecks fled from Arawa. “We are the ‘sacrificial lamb’ for the few capitalists whose hunger for wealth is quenchless and unceasing,” read a November 1989 communiqué by Ona. The Crisis had begun.

In 1990, Papua New Guinea blockaded the islands with gunboats, but the BRA’s numbers swelled nonetheless. They squared off against a modern, Western-backed military armed with little but slingshots and weapons left behind by the Japanese. After centuries, they’d finally had a chance to defend their home, fighting primarily, Ona told a documentarian, “for man and his culture . . . land and environment”—and independence.

The blockade took a grim toll on Bougainville. Thousands died from lack of medicine, as the occupying force herded many people into makeshift “care centers,” where rights groups recorded revenge attacks and “disappearances.” Fuel reserves ran low. The rebels who’d worked at Panguna—miners, turners, fitters, forgers, joiners, plumbers, painters, smelters, glaziers—scavenged pipes and vehicle parts and refashioned them into more than fifty hydroelectric generators. They also made weapons from the mine’s twisted wreckage.

But the most extraordinary aspect of the BRA’s resistance was the use it made of Bougainville’s erstwhile staple crop: the coconut. Islanders ate its flesh, drank its milk, and sealed their wounds with its leaves. They wove it into baskets and homes, burned it to ward off mosquitoes, and even made music from the husks. They cooked with it and cleaned their guns with its oil, boiled it into soap, and when they fermented and cooked it, they distilled a fuel that yielded double the mileage of regular diesel. August Engelhardt had been right about coconuts all along; he just never had the tools to make full use of them. “In some ways the war’s been good to us,” the photojournalist Ben Bohane recalls Ona telling him. “We’ve gone back to our customary ways. There’s no more meat pies and beer . . . we don’t need money.”

The BRA’s homemade guns weren’t very accurate, but they didn’t have to be. Guerrillas ambushed enemies, one former rebel told me, and finished them off with axes or knives before stealing their weapons. He added that he’d salvaged U.S.-made rifles, machine guns, and an M79 grenade launcher from just a single raid on Buka.

In 1997, Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, Julius Chan, secretly hired a group of South African mercenaries to storm Bougainville in a desperate bid to win the war. The deal leaked. New Guineans rioted in protest, and PNGDF troops took the mercenaries hostage, forcing Chan’s resignation. Eight previous peace efforts had failed, but the ninth, held at a military camp near Christchurch, New Zealand, was successful, thanks to a tarout, or “vomiting session,” that might be understood today as an extreme form of radical honesty. These discussions paved the way for the signing of the Bougainville Peace Agreement in 2001, in which Papua New Guinea promised to enact in Bougainville, among other things, a disposal of weapons, the formation of the ABG, and within fifteen years of that formation, the right for islanders to vote in an independence referendum. But by then, nearly a tenth of Bougainville’s population had been killed, and Ona had refused to take part in the peace talks. “He’d already declared independence,” Shane McLeod, an Australian reporter who covered Ona, told me. “He didn’t really need to go through the hoops of this crummy Bougainville peace process.”

Ona sealed himself and several former BRA men inside a no-go zone surrounding Panguna, rebranding themselves the Me’ekamui Defense Force, or MDF, using a local word meaning “Holy Island.” People flocked to the hero’s new enclave. But he needed money. Fortunately, he’d just met a Bougainvillean man in Moresby who was about to make more than anybody there could imagine.

The next time that James Tanis heard Noah Musingku’s name was in 1997, when Bougainville leaders traveled to Moresby during the peace talks. What was the old trickster up to this time? Tanis wondered—had he turned lead into gold, or finally perfected his invisibility potion? Apparently not. Instead, a friend told Tanis, Musingku had come up with “a clever way of making people rich.”

Years before, Musingku and his brother had devised a scheme they called the Pei Mure Association, spinning a wild, picaresque tale that might have been torn from the diaries of one of Bougainville’s early European interlopers. Pei Mure—“the law of King Pei”—had been forged at an ancient, Edenic kingdom called Papaala, whence he claimed the island’s first ancestors had come. A conclave of chiefs had revived the law in 1922, Musingku said, and added plans to implement a new world banking system.

Musingku then tried, and failed, to insinuate himself into the Bougainville peace process, offering leaders a ten-step plan, the last step of which was to pay him and his brother more than a million dollars. While the scheme proved unsuccessful, it won Musingku a meeting with Francis Ona that would prove fateful. Then Musingku aimed higher.

In 1997, a financial crisis rocked Asia and destabilized the Papua New Guinean economy. Schemes with names like Bonanza, Windfall, Gold Money, and Money Rain proliferated across the nation, promising investors fantastical returns. U-Vistract, which promised up to 100 percent returns per month, was different. Musingku positioned himself as a man of deep faith, preaching a prosperity gospel that resonated with people crawling from war to deprivation. He sermonized to U-Vistract investors for hours, and demanded their unalloyed loyalty; he created a government, renaming months of the year for gemstones, a move that drew comparisons to the cargo cults prevalent across the Pacific. (Inhabitants of the nearby Vanuatuan island of Tanna, for example, worship an apocryphal U.S. soldier named John Frum, and have paraded with American flags and bamboo “rifles” since the Second World War. Others venerate the late Prince Philip of Britain.)

For U-Vistract, Musingku courted foreign investors, including the architects of similar frauds elsewhere. Reports circulated of his lavish spending on private jets and events. Senior political figures in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji were believed to have invested. Some of U-Vistract’s early investors saw returns, but the vast majority never did. Within a couple of years, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the World Bank moved to freeze U-Vistract’s assets, which were estimated at almost a quarter of a billion dollars. Musingku responded by folding the scheme into his bogus Kingdom of Papaala, crowning himself King David Peii II. (Musingku claims that Papaala’s first king, David Peii, “used to rule the world.”) U-Vistract’s missives blamed Papua New Guinea’s poor economy on the country’s godlessness, and in 2001, a promoter told angry investors at a U-Vistract event that only born-again Christians would receive payouts, a provision that would preclude adulterers, gamblers, and smokers. The payments would come “soon,” the promoter vowed—but they would be made according to “God’s will and timing.”

As authorities liquidated U-Vistract’s accounts, Musingku fled to the Solomon Islands. But in 2003, under legal pressure, he returned to Bougainville, where he hooked up with his old acquaintance Francis Ona. The war hero had changed. He now claimed that he could cure cancer, AIDS, and other illnesses, and traveled to Arawa and Buka on the bed of a truck, telling crowds that he was Bougainville’s king. More ominously for his followers, Ona shaved off the Garibaldi beard that had been the emblem of his arcadian struggle.

Ona had broken “the covenant he signed with God and his people,” one former BRA soldier told me. So when, at a bizarre coronation ceremony near Guava, on a drizzly morning in May 2004, Musingku placed a crown of cowries upon Ona’s head and declared him “King Francis Dominic Dateransy Domanaa, head of state of the Royal Kingdom of Me’ekamui,” even a onetime leader in Ona’s militia called it “bullshit.” Bougainville’s revolutionary hero, stripped to the waist, looked less like a monarch than a tired, vulnerable old man standing in the rain, surrounded by con men.

Me’ekamui and Papaala would be “twin kingdoms,” Musingku announced, and would open a new Central Bank of Me’ekamui. He moved the U-Vistract headquarters to Tonu, where unpaid “helpers” brought him food, built homes, or did yard work. The whole thing was a farce—but still it threatened the legitimacy of the ABG. In April 2005, Musingku hired five Fijian mercenaries to protect him, and said that eight hundred more were on their way. “God has bigger plans for Bougainville and the region,” he wrote, “and no one can change or stop it from happening regardless of his education, position, power, or authority.” It looked to anybody outside the no-go zone as if Ona and Musingku were preparing to take Bougainville by force. Their bizarre partnership “could utterly destroy the fragile social fabric of PNG,” read a 2004 editorial in The National. “We call upon the Government to take immediate action to kill-off this pyramid menace once and for all.”

Then, late that July, Ona died at the age of fifty-two. Some suspected foul play. Musingku declared that Ona had recently granted him control of Me’ekamui, and he quickly conscripted more than two hundred people as security personnel, training them at Tonu under the Fijians. Musingku quickly grew into the role of mad king, spending entire days in his office hammering away at a laptop or talking on a satellite phone. His subjects lived by a strict regimen of fasting, church, and military drills. Musingku would emerge only if accompanied by security, his helpers sweeping the ground before him. He would fast for long periods and, when he did eat, allowed only close family members to prepare his meals. He reportedly believed in sorcery, like many Bougainvilleans. (He has denied this, writing: “My Spiritual Power is too high for it. Sorcery only catches those who operate at its level of power.”)

Musingku spoke to his followers via a weekly paper called the Papala Chronicles. He inveighed against a “conventional international” finance system like those of

the Commonwealth of England, the United Nations, the Colonial Masters, the G7, G8, G10, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, illuminati, the world religions, the Moslems, Hindus, the conventional Christian churches, you name it.

He didn’t much care if outsiders thought him a fraud, either. “Bill Gates earns money,” he allegedly told a Solomon Islands minister. “I create money.”

In May 2006, the local police clashed with members of the Me’ekamui Defense Force and two of Musingku’s Fijians. The rebels reportedly stabbed a policeman and torched three police stations, and authorities captured two of Musingku’s lieutenants as they attempted to flee. “This is the beginning of more arrests to come to make sure at the end of the day we totally get U-Vistract out of Bougainville,” said ABG leader Joseph Kabui. Then, one November morning at around four o’clock, one of the Fijians, a former U.N. peacekeeper named Maloni Namoli, heard a dog bark around Tonu’s King Square. Moments later, a column of ex-BRA combatants and two police officers burst into the village and fired on Musingku’s royal guards. Amid the ensuing raid, the attackers reportedly killed four men and lost one of their own. Musingku tried to escape, but an M16 round tore through his jaw, spraying blood all over the floor of his royal office.

According to Namoli, he grabbed the wounded king and sped into the surrounding jungle. He had feared the worst, but Musingku survived—and after around a month in hiding, he returned to his bamboo casbah, his battle scar serving as a symbol of the suffering that his people had endured in the war. ABG leaders denied they’d sanctioned the raid but had already lost credibility with the public. They had come for the king and missed. Worse yet, they had created a living martyr, a man convinced it was God’s plan for him to revive U-Vistract and lead Bougainville to independence. He hasn’t left Tonu since.

The skies above Arawa darkened as we left town, and by the time we reached a roadblock at the border of the no-go zone a half hour later, rain was falling in ropes. Beneath a tarp on the side of the road, I paid sentries three hundred kina, or around eighty dollars, for a Papaalan “visa”; it resembled a dry-cleaning ticket. We trundled over the mountain ridge soon after, the rains subsiding as we descended along a gravel track into Panguna. It is an eerie place. Vast factories and processing plants slumped into the earth, stripped bare like knotted jungle gyms. The pit itself extended almost to the horizon, its stepped ramparts sinking below the earth like an upturned pyramid.

Panguna is believed to still possess a bounty of some sixty billion dollars’ worth of minerals. It could be a key instrument in someday securing the finances of a Bougainvillean state. But since it would cost a projected six billion dollars to resume extracting the mine’s estimated 5.3 billion tons of copper ore, its primary yield today is gold, which is panhandled by an estimated three to four thousand people, some of whom have built shanties in the rubble and, unlicensed, sell their finds to the many would-be Fitzcarraldos who drink the bars of Buka and Port Moresby dry. The local Jaba River still runs a shrill, toxic blue, and some locals have to walk hours for fresh water. Only in 2021 did Rio Tinto agree to undertake a “legacy impact assessment” of the mine’s environmental destruction, an effort many Bougainvilleans say is an empty gesture. “At the end of the day, it’s corporate politics,” Theonila Roka Matbob, an ABG minister from the area, told me. “This is just another report—it’s not going to do anything.”

Beyond the mine, the road disappeared altogether, and we spent the remaining four or so hours crawling through wet, cleft tongues of mud. It was dark when we rolled into a tiny village that housed around fifty people in a dozen thatch residences. My audience with His Majesty would have to wait until tomorrow. Our accommodation for the meantime was a dilapidated guesthouse run by Philip Mapah, a gray-haired man with jaundiced eyes who had been U-Vistract’s long-serving finance minister, and his wife, who went only by “Missus.” The storm returned as Karrenna and I ate chicken and rice in his halogen-lit living room, their cats mewing and chasing tarantulas down the hall. In Mapah’s home was the Bougainvillean flag that flies from almost every building on the islands, on which a red and white upe—the phallic, wound-straw headdress that Bougainvillean boys wear to mark their passage into manhood—is circumscribed within a bed of ocean blue. Here it hung beside the flags of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands and a photo of Queen Elizabeth II. These were strange bedfellows in the only lodging in a secessionist kingdom, I told Karrenna. He seemed upset. “Me personally, I don’t like the Papua New Guinea flag. I really hate it,” he said. Then, pointing to the queen, he added, “Some people are big on symbols. Some people, they just . . . ” He tailed off, taking another bite of his food. “We have our own flag,” he said after a while. “Maybe you will see it up there.”

“Up there” meant the king’s residence, about a twenty-minute walk from the guesthouse. Rumor suggests there was friction when a notorious scam artist and his cabal of armed ex-combatants showed up in Tonu almost two decades ago. Thanks in part to Musingku’s largesse, however—and perhaps the realization that they were completely powerless—the locals fell in line. According to Karrenna and Mapah, the villagers all invested in U-Vistract. Was this really the kingdom Francis Ona had envisaged? Again Karrenna retorted defensively: Ona “put everything in HM’s name before he died.” The ABG, he continued, “are puppets. If you follow the money, who’s at the top?”

He meant the leaders of Papua New Guinea. In 2019, Bougainville held a referendum in which nearly 98 percent of voters chose independence. But Moresby has drawn the ABG into a legal battle since then, threatening not to ratify the poll’s results. The stalemate plays into the hands of the “U-Vistract faction,” as politicians have called Musingku’s rogue kingdom. In 2009, Musingku minted his own Bougainville kina (BVK) to compete with the official currency, the Papua New Guinea kina (PGK), believing that whoever controls the currency controls the islands. He should also pay back his investors, I suggested. Mapah chimed in. “HM will come good,” he said, raising his eyebrows emphatically, a local tic. I began to ask another question, but he cut me off. “Yes,” he reiterated. The eyebrows remained motionless. “He’ll come good.”

It was late, and the guesthouse had no cell service. I asked Karrenna, who had had enough of my inquiries for the day, whether there was a way to contact my family. There was, he replied—but the only Wi-Fi belonged, of course, to HM. We traipsed via flashlight to a hut on the edge of Tonu where a half dozen men stood, lit only by the glow of their phones. When the village’s generators howled to life, at 6 pm, two networks appeared on my screen: PEII1 and PEII2. Everyone bowed their heads and scrolled. Noah Musingku may well be a financial genius with magic powers, but in Tonu his greatest gift may be wireless internet.

I rose early the following morning. Mapah left for Tonu, a tattered satchel tucked under his arm like a Willy Loman of the tropics. Karrenna showed me YouTube videos by anti-Western influencers and a late Bulgarian mystic named Baba Vanga, who had predicted a great economic shift from the West. He told me to read John Perkins’s Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and added that the mainstream media was all lies. I attempted to make a case for it, but it was pointless: to him, the enterprise—and myself, as its representative—was freighted with centuries of colonialism and bloodshed. And perhaps we were. I wondered again why he’d agreed to bring me here.

Karrenna told me that we would be summoned to Papaala at any moment, but that HM had “his own priorities.” I told him that, as I’d traveled more than three days to meet him, I hoped I’d be one of them. He gave me a noncommittal nod. Lunch came and went. Karrenna warned me not to interview the villagers, who were wary of foreigners, and left to charge his phone. By three o’clock, when storm clouds drew near, he still hadn’t returned. Missus counted coins in the dining room. I reread my notes and smoked cigarettes, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d been foolish to come at all. Musingku was a con man and a cult leader who had no real incentive to speak with me. Mapah was one of his most trusted followers. I was trapped in a village miles from anywhere else. Karrenna told me months ago that I’d have to invest in U-Vistract before meeting the king, and I was now in a pretty bad negotiating position. Surely—surely—I was at best a mark in his eyes.

Around four o’clock, Karrenna returned and told me that we should have sent a slip of paper with Mapah, explaining the purpose of my visit to HM. I sulked. “You know,” he clucked, “people have been waiting twenty years, not just a few hours.” Nonetheless, he added, we should head down to the king’s headquarters and see if we could get lucky. I threw on a shirt and had sweat through it by the time we reached a roadblock beside a sign announcing the border of tonu city; papaala meekamui; twin kingdom; u vistract protectorate; ophir peace zone. (Ophir is another name for Bougainville.) A wiry man of about sixty, wearing dark fatigues, a wide-brimmed hat, and an MDF armband, beckoned me into the compound. We walked past a couple thatch huts to the immaculately mowed King Square. Skirting the square’s bamboo fence, we passed the squat, olive-painted headquarters of the “Central Bank of Bougainville” (closed) before reaching a sky-blue chapel, twelve pews deep and bathed in late-day sunlight that crept through an upe-shaped cutout in the rear wall. In front hung a banner with a paraphrased extract from Philippians 2:

u-vistract vision

every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that the word of god is the lord of lords king of kings and emperor of emperors

Within moments, a stranger introduced himself as a Papaala government minister. He was tall and broad, with a kind smile. “All of us are going to pray,” he said. “Then we can release you.” I hadn’t quite realized until that moment that I had been a captive. A larger man with a thick beard paced back and forth outside the church. The old, thin soldier and the minister then placed their hands on my shoulders and petitioned the Almighty in a combination of English, pidgin, and tongues, marking my purification with a growled, guttural Amen. Karrenna played soccer with a couple other guys in King Square—he didn’t play like somebody a professional would scout.

It was now five-thirty, and the sun was setting. The king was ready for me. Musingku, however, would not check my credentials until the internet came on at six. I had submitted them weeks ago, I told Karrenna, losing patience. Didn’t he see through all this? I asked him, unwisely. Had he himself invested in U-Vistract? “I’m not poor,” he snapped back. “I can eat.” All well and good, I replied, but it’s pretty rough to rob somebody’s home and then tell them they should feel lucky to have food. He bristled. “You cannot use that word,” he said. “I’m gonna let these guys know you said that. I think you wasted your time coming here. The king is busy. So I think it’s bad luck, the wrong timing.” His mouth curled into a snarl. I thought he might strike me. I backtracked, seeing that in Karrenna’s eyes I had finally become the duplicitous foreign hack bent on bad-mouthing HM that he’d suspected I was all along. Ten minutes passed before I was saved by the bearded man and his clipboard. It was Maloni Namoli, the Fijian soldier who’d arrived in Tonu almost two decades before and helped save Musingku’s life. He told us that HM was ready, and that I’d have thirty minutes with him. It was dark now, and bugs tangoed in the halogen light of a small hut tucked behind a chain-link fence. Namoli escorted me through. I signed a guest book, removed my shoes, and stepped into the king’s office.

I had spent the past few months watching so many videos of Noah Musingku, reading about him, hearing of him from others, that when I finally entered the citadel of the Kingdom of Papaala and shook the hand of the short, smiling man before me, I was stunned into silence. The room was about the size of a studio apartment. Its walls were decorated with woven coconut leaves, canes, fans, and other traditional items. Musingku’s Acer laptop sat at the center of his desk, which was crowded with strange ornaments and gewgaws: potted plants; perfume jars; plastic bottles filled with scented oil; business cards; maps; loudspeakers; a globe; several smartphones and tablets; towers of well-thumbed paperwork; and stacks of illegal blue, green, and purple Bougainvillean kina notes. The king’s throne was draped in a purple satin throw. Behind him was a plastic banner in blue and green that read, in what looked like Comic Sans, hm king david peii ii government of bougainville island. Below it was the Papaalan flag, a more stylized version of the Bougainvillean one, with colored rings and a rainbow and stars, and a clip-art-style upe. The king smiled as I scanned the room in near disbelief.

And here was Musingku himself. A little tighter in the belt than he was in the videos I’d played on repeat, his eyes were still wide and unyielding, half hidden beneath cowries that hung like bangs from a beaded crown that read king along the band and clacked quietly as he spoke. He smiled giddily the entire time and wore the red coat of an eighteenth-century British soldier, with a gold aiguillette and a powder-blue sash.

He looked a little like a combination of Rick James and Adam Ant. Why the red coat? “Every country is ruled by someone,” Musingku told me. “We talk about a kingdom. A kingdom encompasses everybody—all religions are part of the kingdom, whether you are Muslim or Christian or Hindu.” A lot of answers went this way—wordy, with references to history and religion that might better have been summed up with a shrug. How, I asked him, did Papaala fit into Bougainville’s independence movement?

“Everyone in Bougainville is fighting for independence—we’ve been fighting for it for the past forty-eight years,” he said. “But under the ABG it’s independence. Under Me’ekamui it’s sovereignty. There’s a big difference between independence and sovereignty. Independence: somebody grants it to you. Sovereignty is by declaration—you proclaim it, and you make it work. Just like the U.S. became independent by its own declaration. England did not grant it to the U.S. Sovereignty is under God Almighty. Independence is at the U.N.”

The ABG’s protracted negotiations with Papua New Guinea were tantamount to litigating the terms of Bougainvilleans’ serfdom; no wonder Francis Ona had rejected them outright. Musingku described his relationship with Ona as “connecting the software and hardware”—the hardware of Ona’s no-go zone and the software of U-Vistract’s accounts. He told me that U-Vistract had 930,000 clients until Papua New Guinea shut it down. Nonetheless, “everyone invested” since then, he said, chuckling. “Even the ABG president invested.” (A spokesperson denied this.) Claims that U-Vistract was a Ponzi scheme or a cult, he told me, were simply born of ignorance. “It’s ready for me to just touch the trigger,” he said. “When we kick off, nothing will stop us.”

Namoli, who had joined us, nodded approvingly. Karrenna hitched his phone to a tripod and filmed the scene. “Money answers all things,” he chirped. It was the happiest he’d looked the entire trip. I motioned to the piles of Bougainvillean kina: people had told me that Musingku was stealing gold from Panguna, I said. “We don’t need to dig it up,” he replied. Bougainville itself is the reserve. “We don’t need to disturb it.”

I asked Musingku whether he feared a repeat of the 2006 attack. He didn’t. “Everyone just wants payouts,” he told me. “When they get payouts, they will be united.” Nonetheless, he added, he would “not surrender” his claim to the islands, arguing that they should break the control of a global “serpentine system.” Musingku spoke in platitudes and riddles so plainly preposterous they were almost cleansed of meaning. I suppose this is part of the con; to pour on such grandiloquence that you convince everybody you’re a savant. Like a televangelist, say. Affinity fraud, experts call it: appealing to the commonality of religion, ethnicity, or culture to squeeze money out of a huge number of people. Bernie Madoff did it. Noah Musingku does it, too—and he does it well.

I didn’t say any of this, of course. Karrenna signaled that it was time to wrap things up. “There’s so much more I’d like to ask you,” I said to Musingku, assuming we’d never speak again. “Is there any way I can contact you after today?” Musingku produced a pen and paper. “Of course,” he told me, scribbling down a number. “Here’s my WhatsApp.” I shook the hermit king’s hand and left.

Namoli escorted us back beyond the fence to King Square. He referred to his time as a U.N. peacekeeper—deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Timor-Leste—and claimed he was the only Fijian to remain in Tonu. “I told my comrades, ‘You can go,’ ” he said, running his fingers through his thick gray beard, “ ‘but let me fulfill my contract.’ ” He meant his U-Vistract contract. “There were so many investors in Fiji,” he added, “and I invested a lot of money for them.” He told me that the Kingdom of Papaala was well armed and ready to defend herself: Namoli even had a spy network across Bougainville. When a PNG official arrives in Buka, he told me, “we know exactly where they are.”

That evening at Mapah’s guesthouse, Karrenna and I talked about soccer, mostly. He seemed glad that Musingku had deflected my feeble mainstream-media attempts to trip him up. The next morning we headed back to Arawa. In the Land Cruiser I sat next to a middle-aged man named Thomas, who claimed he worked for the king, processing spreadsheets of investments in U-Vistract. He was concerned that Musingku hadn’t linked the system to Visa or Mastercard, meaning that Bougainvilleans couldn’t withdraw their funds. He added, exasperated, that the king had stolen gold. “Francis Ona gave him gold in two-hundred-liter drums,” he said. “About four drums. Then he smuggled it overseas to Australia . . . he’s a bloody fucking millionaire, Noah Musingku.”

It was hot when we reached the no-go-zone checkpoint, where I sat with its guard, a bald, sixty-year-old man in wraparound sunglasses who introduced himself as Alex. He had worked the roadblock for decades—first for a limestone firm, then for Francis Ona, and today for Musingku. He’d invested in U-Vistract “when it started,” he said. “Most of us who work here are investors.” He has eight kids. Musingku hasn’t paid him a kina in years. “But I still stay,” he said. “Because I believe we will come out in the end. If we move out without seeing what we fought for . . . ” He trailed off, thumbing the visa I’d paid for a couple days earlier before clearing his throat. “I don’t have any doubts.”

Karrenna and I parted the next day, and I returned up the coast to Buka. The independence process was faltering. That week, Papua New Guinea had declared that the 2019 referendum was nonbinding, prompting anger among ABG officials. (This September, both parties agreed to fresh negotiations that would again be mediated by New Zealand.) I expected to find a town in the throes of nationalistic fervor, but it was a sleepy place, and few people wanted to discuss politics.

Ishmael Toroama, who had been one of Francis Ona’s military commanders, became the ABG’s president in 2020 pledging to deliver independence and to vanquish corruption. More recently he has sought to reopen Panguna. Rio Tinto divested from the mine in 2016, reportedly leaving an Arabian-horse breeder, a former Australian government minister, and an American investment banker and novelist as its prospective saviors. Many Bougainvilleans fear that Panguna’s revival could rip open the cultural wounds that had precipitated the Crisis. But an independent Bougainvillean government would require an estimated quarter billion dollars to function, a sum nothing except the mine could come close to matching.

Bougainville has become an unlikely pawn in the struggle between Washington and Beijing for hegemony in the Pacific. Papaala and the ABG “have to resolve and find a compromise,” Aloysius Laukai, the manager of a local radio station, told me. Otherwise, Bougainville could be “like North and South Korea.” James Tanis, too, frets that Musingku could join a growing archipelago of non-state actors, “like Houthis and Hamas . . . I’m not saying he’s dangerous now, but I’m worried about the potential. Because he has access to weapons. What if he decides to become a proxy for Iran? This man is about creating an alternative system to the Western one. So in terms of doctrine and ideology, he’s already where the Iranians are.”

It seemed to me that the ABG was caught in a double bind: try to liquidate Musingku again, and risk Papua New Guinea’s insisting that Bougainville isn’t ready for statehood; leave him untouched, and he just might contrive another scam or foment a violent secessionist movement. “To suggest that probably we’ll go and smoke him out,” Ezekiel Masatt, the ABG’s attorney general, told me, “that’s not our intention. He’s a Bougainvillean. But we say his time will be up shortly. This scheme that he operates will die a natural death. All his brothers and the brothers’ wives and people who surrounded that king will slowly put him out.”

Tanis wasn’t so sure. He’d never come across anybody who was “dead against” the king, he said. “Noah Musingku did not hold them at gunpoint and take their money; they invested because of their own greed.”

Why hadn’t one of U-Vistract’s conned investors tried to kill him? I asked. People have died in Bougainville for far less.

“Killing him will shut the door that they ever get paid,” said Tanis. “Keeping him alive continues to keep the hope alive.”

After I left Bougainville, I continued my conversations with Musingku. He impressed upon me his belief that he wasn’t a danger to the ABG or Bougainville, and that everyone should work together—that U-Vistract would be the software to Papaala’s hardware, as it were. In January, a U-Vistract source leaked to me a letter from Musingku to the ABG that proved he’d kept at his scam. “I have heard that there are outstanding bills and invoices owed by the ABG to our lovely citizens, service providers, business houses, institutions, schools, hospitals, etc,” Musingku wrote in the missive, “dating back to many years and worth many millions.”

Please, compile and send to my Crown Administration a complete list of their names, companies, nature of payment and the amounts owed. My office will immediately instruct the Governor of CBOB (Central Bank of Bougainville) to release the needed funds as a priority. Note that all cheques, bank drafts & instruments from our sovereign banks are denominated in BVK, not in PGK. Also, note that although PNG banks ceased dealing with cheques at the end of December 2023 under IMF instructions, our sovereign banks are not affected in any way. I now look forward to your prompt response so we can together address and resolve the manifold cries, worries, sufferings and lamentation of our people soonest.

Yours Sincerely,

HM King david peii upeii 2nd