'The Gold' Recap: Season 2 Episode 3

The Gold airs Sundays at 9:00 pm is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episode.
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Not quite legally, Lundy and Nicki tap the phones of Charlie in Spain and Douglas on the Isle of Man, respectively. Tony has to distract Douglas as he walks towards his office to buy time for Nicki to slip out unseen. 

Boyce has returned to London, sending Bowman to Tenerife to observe John and serve as handler for Shirley, whom Boyce has tapped to get inside information on John’s business. In London, he brings on a volunteer from the customs department to peruse John’s accounts – but she says the accounts Shirley has shared are not the real ones, as they don’t show any debt even as John’s business is rapidly growing. Shirley is ordered to find the real accounts.

When she asks John for the full picture of the business, he tells her to never ask again. 

John has the former employee Enriqué laundering money through the real accounts in a basement of his building – and more and more money is arriving to be cleaned. As John launders ever-increasing amounts of money for his new allies the Russians, Enriqué needs more places to hide it, so John buys more land. The property he wants is public land, so he has to increase his bribes to government officials, soon after already doubling them on the insistence of his contact.

John is being stretched ever thinner, which has led him to cocaine in an effort to be awake for more hours in the day. The drug is proliferating in Tenerife. In addition to his timeshare business and money laundering, John is also regularly flying to France to visit his former employee Léna, who is pregnant with his child. She has begun demanding a plan for her and her child’s future – and envelopes of cash won’t do it.

John’s visits to Léna make him late to his own family in England, and exhausted once he arrives. When he tells his wife Marnie that he wants to get security for the house since he’s now working with the Russians – not that he tells her that – she snaps that, if his work is dangerous for his family, maybe he should stop visiting them in England.

Back in Tenerife, Shirley sneaks into John’s office at night in search of the real accounts and instead finds cocaine. She hides when she hears movement: it’s Enriqué, fetching account information on John’s orders so that he can further expand the money laundering operation to accommodate even more Russian money. Shirley follows Enriqué and discovers that he is working out of the basement.

She returns later when she sees Enriqué leave and shuffles through his papers. But she is soon confronted by John and Jerren. She flees but ends up stuck on a balcony in one of John’s timeshares. Fortunately for her, Bowman has been watching her. He pretends to be a drunken timeshare owner stumbling into the wrong room, thus saving Shirley from John and Jerren. She asks him to escort her out, and he does so, getting her out of the country.     

Shirley won’t testify against John, but she says what she saw in the basement points to a large money laundering operation. Boyce will get her earlier conviction for embezzlement cleared so she can once again live in England.

John is also betrayed by Jerren, who has noted John’s cocaine use. He offers John some purer cocaine acquired from a Colombian contact – but has spiked it. As John struggles to think clearly, Jerren drives him to the Russians, with whom he has cut a deal to take charge of John’s business.

But John anticipated this. He didn’t take Jerren’s drugs, and he already negotiated with Ivan to make sure this didn’t happen. Jerren is taken away. Ivan tells John that they are now full partners, and insists over John’s objection that he now keep a Russian bodyguard.

Scott Errico is also turning out to be an errant partner. He had to kill two people in running money and drugs between Florida and Tortola, and then frustrates Logan by flying to Tortola, thus ensuring evidence of his entry to the island, even if he used an alias. And he’s in Logan’s office and makes himself seen when Logan’s girlfriend Kadene arrives.

Kadene works in the office of Tortola’s governor, Lauretta. She thus hears when the American DEA agent on Tortola asks Lauretta for the whereabouts of Scott. Two drug dealers’ bodies have been found off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, and they were last seen with Scott – plus, the Americans know he flew to Tortola. 

Lauretta privately calls Logan and tells him that if he knows Scott he must give him up. Logan gives Lauretta Scott’s location, but by the time American agents move in he has helped Scott escape the island on a boat.

Lauretta confronts Logan over his business with Scott. He can operate in gray areas of the law on Tortola when it comes to finances, but not drugs. Logan counters that she has no power over him: he has proposed to Kadene and she has said yes, which means he will soon be a citizen of Tortola. He will be protected from extradition to other countries for prosecution by the island’s own laws.

Since they failed to apprehend Scott, the DEA is now moving a whole team to Tortola. Kadene surreptitiously looks in Lauretta’s desk for the reason why and finds Scott’s file, with a photo. She recognizes him from her fiancé’s office.

Scott is now in England. He calls Douglas and demands money. Douglas has just reunited with Sarah, his college girlfriend, hoping that his newfound wealth from the Brink’s-Mat gold would help him recover the future he thought he had with her. His life fell apart when she left him for someone else at the end of college. She shuts down his idea of any relationship with her, and reveals that she left him for Logan, whom he thought was a friend. Logan left her in turn just a week later.

Douglas meets Scott at the airport with the requested money and is then threatened into joining Scott on a flight to Spain. Nicki and Tony are observing both men, thanks to their tap of Douglas’ phone. Douglas tries to escape Scott before getting on the flight by going to the bathroom and calling Charlie from a stall, telling him that Scott is coming to Spain and has killed two people.

The observant Charlie has already noticed that his phone was tapped and desperately tries to prevent Douglas from saying any of this but fails. So he goes for his escape plan: he has bought himself a fancy boat. Lundy, who overhears Douglas’ call thanks to the tap, has been waiting for this moment: he can arrest Charlie once he is in international waters, ten miles out. 

But Charlie is ahead of Lundy: he doubles back after leaving his house to find Lundy in a phone booth, calling Boyce with this new information. Charlie now knows who tapped his phone.

Back in England, Douglas tries to run from the bathroom. Tony follows, eventually catching him. Scott also tries to run, and Nicki nicks him as well.

In Tenerife, John receives a call from an old acquaintance: Ken Noyes, who first brought him into the Brink’s-Mat business.