The BP Gulf spill was, hands down, the single biggest environmental disaster in American history. Oil industry reps talked a fierce game about how it was a one-in-a-million catastrophe, technology has made drilling safe, and it won't happen again -- but anyone who buys that line is being duped.

Perhaps Big Oil's PR campaigns and its clamping down on the press will distract the public from a damning open secret -- that there are already hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells leaking oil into US water and land at this very moment -- and the combined damage of these wells could make the BP spill look like child's play. Especially considering that some of these wells -- plugged up, left behind, and relegated to the shadows -- could blow.

Shuttered wells are everywhere: along the California coast and the eastern seaboard, across Texas and the Southwest, all over the Gulf of Mexico. The government knows about these wells. The oil industry knows about these wells. But according to recent reports, that hasn't stopped them from leaking out oil -- and poisoning the environment and threatening human health.

Both are hoping that the public won't care enough to bother poking their noses into government and industry records. So far, they haven't. But if you did look, you'd finda culture of corruption, where government officials, charged with protecting American shores from certain disaster, took bribes, gifts, and drugs directly from the very companies they were supposed to keep tabs on.

Next: Leaked Documents, Leaky Wells