The next step was to prepare a proposal for the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the department that oversees Nigeria’s significant fossil fuel reserves. P.&I.D. would build the $500 million facility. Nigeria would inject wet gas at no cost to the company. Then P.&I.D. would process it and release the lean gas free of charge to the country. But in return, the company would keep the valuable byproducts of the gas downsizing process, such as propane and butane, which it could sell at a profit. If Nigeria pulls out at any time before the end of the 20-year contract period, it could be held liable for damages. All in all, it looked like a huge commitment to Nigeria that might be met with skepticism when it finally reached the ears of the ministry’s lawyers.

Around this time, a lawyer named Grace Taiga got a new job at the ministry as legal director. This was fortunate, because Quinn and Cahill had known Taiga for years, since she was in the Defense Department, and they were businessmen who occasionally received business from her. Approximately a year before P.&I.D. submitted its proposal. Quinn and Cahill sent Taiga and one of their daughters just over $25,000 in partial payments. Quinn also took Taiga’s colleague, a ministry employee named Taofiq Tijani, to dinner at Chopsticks, a Chinese restaurant in Abuja. The cost of this dinner was recorded in the books as $2,800. (A Chinese dinner doesn’t cost $2,800 in Abuja.) Shortly before the contract was signed, Cahill then transferred another $5,000 from a bank in Cyprus to Taiga’s daughter’s account, which was coded as a “commission payment.”

Taiga sent the contract to her boss, Rilwanu Lukman, the Minister of Petroleum Resources. It wasn’t much: 20 pages, mostly of text blocks, written on the ministry’s stationery with a green border. It was a draft rather than a fully developed proposal for a multimillion-dollar gas contract. But Taiga assured Lukman in a memo that it would be “a leap forward” for Nigeria. On January 11, 2010, Lukman, Quinn and Taiga signed their names. The deal was done.

Days later, a man named Neil Hitchcock—P.&I.D’s only full-time employee—wrote. – to Cahill and said he needed $1.5 million to begin clearing the site for the facility. But P.&I.D. didn’t have $1.5 million. The plan was to raise capital for the project based on the signed 20-year contract and then hire engineers and workers. This is how they had always done things in Nigeria.

In June, Quinn opened his morning paper with an unwelcome twist. The oil drilling company that Nigeria had promised to supply the wet gas to had decided to keep it; The gas proved useful in maintaining pressure in the wells. Quinn might have picked up the phone and protested to his friends within the government, but most of them were gone. A new president had recently come into office. Lukman had been replaced. In February 2011, Hitchcock sent a text message indicating that the company was in a difficult situation. “Given the rapidly deteriorating situation here, I see no other option than to liquidate some P.&I.D. companies. assets,” he wrote. “With your approval, I propose to sell the Honda Civic.” Quinn emailed new president Goodluck Jonathan, but his appeal was unsuccessful.