2025-07-16
50 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hi, my name is Alexander Klapp.
I'm the author of The Sludge King,
How One Man Turned an Industrial Wasteland into His Own El Dorado, published in 2022.
I stumbled upon this story almost by accident.
I was in Romania in the autumn of 2020 researching how and why Romania had become one of the greatest recipients of garbage in the European Union.
As I was leaving a police station,
an officer asked me almost in passing if I had ever heard the strange story of Daniel Baldor.
He gave me the quick version of the man in his life.
I was instantly obsessed and knew that I had to travel to the other side of Romania to meet Daniel and to learn his story firsthand.
I think two things drew me to this piece.
The first was the idea that a Roma man, a member of Romania's poorest and most despised minority,
had become a kind of Robin Hood in his hometown,
stealing from the old communist past and giving hope and money to its future.
And there was also a certain symbolism in Daniel Boldor's story that I found alluring.
A generation after the assassination of Nicolae Ceausescu,
Romania's Cold War dictator, an entrepreneur from the middle of nowhere,
had single-handedly taken over one of communism's signature industries and turned it into a kind of personal fiefdom.
One thing that strikes me
as I reread this piece three years after its publication is the persistence of so many themes within the story.