Contact

Crime & Punishment

True crime about money, as audiobooks.

126 books · 3 podcasts · Complete and free

Podcasts

All series and books

TitleSynopsis
ALBANIA - SPEEDBOATS, CANNABIS AND CONCRETEAlbania, 1992 to 2026. A country that left communism with no banks and no land register poured its savings into pyramid schemes that collapsed into armed revolt, then watched speedboats, cannabis fields and cocaine brokers make fortunes while its state looked on — or, in the cases its courts and prosecutors have documented, took part. This book follows the money from the Otranto strait to Tirana's empty towers, and the special prosecutors who, after 2019, began trying the country's most powerful figures. Covers VEFA Holding and Vehbi Alimuçaj, the former interior minister Saimir Tahiri and his cousins' cannabis network, Kompania Bello and Dritan Rexhepi, the incinerator concessions and Lefter Koka, and SPAK and its cases against Ilir Meta, Sali Berisha and Erion Veliaj.
ALGERIA - PRIME MINISTERS IN THE DOCKAlgeria, 1998 to 2026. The country lives on oil and gas, and the fortunes in this book were made where that money came back in: a private bank that took public deposits, 197 million euros an Italian contractor paid to an intermediary's Hong Kong company, a highway of the century, licenses to assemble cars. Then 701 kilograms of cocaine turned up in Brazilian beef at Oran, the police chief fell, the street rose, and two former prime ministers went to prison — while the oil scandal's central figures stayed abroad and the cocaine case went untried. Covers Rafik Khalifa and El Khalifa Bank, Chakib Khelil and Sonatrach, Farid Bedjaoui and Saipem, Ali Haddad and ETRHB, Kamel Chikhi and the Oran cocaine case, and Ahmed Ouyahia and Abdelmalek Sellal.
ANGOLA - OIL, DIAMONDS AND THE WASPS' NESTAngola, 1992 to 2026: an oil state where, for nearly four decades, oil and diamond money passed through an oil company, a central bank and a sovereign fund run by the circle around one president, then through a Dubai consultancy, Lisbon banks, a Geneva jeweler and Amsterdam holding companies. Told from the judgments, the leaks and Angola's own reporters, it follows the money out, the campaign to bring it back, and what became of everyone involved. Covers José Eduardo dos Santos and the presidency, Isabel dos Santos and Sonangol, José Filomeno dos Santos and the Fundo Soberano de Angola, Carlos de São Vicente and AAA Seguros, Pedro Lussaty and the presidential security house, Generals Kopelipa and Dino and the China International Fund, and Trafigura and Sonangol Distribuidora.
ARGENTINA - BAGS OVER THE CONVENT WALLArgentina, 1976 to 2026. Before dawn in June 2016, a former secretary of public works was caught throwing bags holding nearly nine million dollars over a convent wall; a court later convicted him because he could not explain them. This book follows the money of a country that keeps its savings in dollars at home: through road contracts that ended in a former president's house arrest, a driver's notebooks now on trial, a Rosario gang that ordered shootings at judges from a prison cell, football's television rights, casino prizes on the Triple Frontier and eight tax amnesties. Covers José López and the bags at the convent, Lázaro Báez and Austral Construcciones, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the Santa Cruz road contracts, and Ariel Máximo Cantero and Los Monos.
ARMENIA - WHO OWNED THE DOORSArmenia, 1991 to 2026: a landlocked republic with two closed borders, where a few men came to own the doors everything passed through — customs posts, import licenses. Coffee importers who complained of bribes went to prison; 788 kilograms of cocaine arrived in banana boxes; a tax chief's sons built a Los Angeles mansion the United States seized and sold. Then a revolution promised to take the money back; by 2026 its confiscation law had collected one percent of its claims, and the government's three chief rivals were in custody or on trial. Covers Robert Kocharyan and the Hayastan alliance, Serzh Sargsyan and the Republican Party, Gagik Tsarukyan and Multi Group, Gagik Khachatryan and the State Revenue Committee, Samvel Karapetyan and Tashir, and Nikol Pashinyan and Civil Contract.
AUSTRALIA - TOMATO TINS AND ROYAL COMMISSIONSAustralia pays some of the highest prices on earth for cocaine, ice and cigarettes, and for half a century that margin has drawn Calabrian families, a Hong Kong syndicate and motorcycle clubs to its ports. The money ran through tomato tins on a Melbourne wharf, casino bank accounts, deposit machines and a remitter's shopfronts. A country of independent courts and royal commissions answered with inquiries, informers and an encrypted phone that turned out to be the police, while its own police ran a defense barrister against her clients. Covers Nicola Gobbo and Victoria Police, Tony Mokbel, Pasquale Barbaro and the tomato tins, Tse Chi Lop and Sam Gor, Hakan Ayik and the ANOM sting, Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald, Crown Resorts and The Star, and Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank.
AUSTRIA - PART OF THE GAMEAustria calls itself an island of the blessed. This book follows the money through the other Austria: a small-town bank whose deposits did not exist; a freighter sunk with six of its crew for the insurance; a province that guaranteed its bank's debts to eight times its budget; a commission on sixty thousand public flats; a vice chancellor filmed on Ibiza; a lawyer's laundering confession filed as foreigners' business; and an intelligence officer convicted, not finally, of spying for Russia. Covers Karl-Heinz Grasser and the BUWOG sale, Jörg Haider and Hypo Alpe Adria, Heinz-Christian Strache and the Ibiza video, Sebastian Kurz and the ÖVP polls affair, René Benko and Signa, Martin Pucher and Commerzialbank Mattersburg, Udo Proksch and the Lucona, Egisto Ott and Jan Marsalek, and Dmytro Firtash and RosUkrEnergo.
AZERBAIJAN - THE BUNKER AND THE BANKIn March 2005 Azerbaijan's security service opened a bunker outside Baku and found the kidnapped wife of the country's most powerful banker. The bunker belonged to a police colonel. That rescue opens the story of a petrostate where crime ran through the institutions meant to stop it: a kidnapping gang inside the Interior Ministry, security generals convicted of extortion, a state bank a court found was run by an organized group under its chairman, and $2.9 billion moved through British shell partnerships. The money leads to London, Prague and Milan; the reporters who traced it, to prison. Covers Jahangir Hajiyev and the International Bank of Azerbaijan, Haji Mammadov and the Interior Ministry, Akif Chovdarov and the Ministry of National Security, and Khadija Ismayilova and the OCCRP.
BAHAMAS - PIRATES EXPELLED, COMMERCE RESTOREDSeven hundred islands fifty miles from Florida, a country of four hundred thousand that has long sold distance from other countries' law. A minister paid by the casino interests for his work on their exemption; a Colombian trafficker's private island and runway in the Exumas; an inquiry that found a prime minister's unexplained money but not its source; a lawyer convicted in Miami of a cocaine conspiracy; a crypto exchange whose property company had no bank account; a senior airport police officer charged in New York; and an envelope bearing a politician's name, pulled from the sea on election day. Covers Carlos Lehder and Norman's Cay, Lynden Pindling and the 1984 Royal Commission, Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX Digital Markets, and Elvis Curtis and the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
BAHRAIN - THE STATE THAT VOUCHEDBahrain, 1989 to 2026. The smallest state in the Gulf lives on land made from the sea, an aluminum smelter, a banking center and the work of people who are not its citizens. It follows what foreign courts, an arbitral tribunal, a short-lived parliament and a newspaper since closed found inside it: twenty years of payments around the smelter's alumina, which an American company admitted and a British trial could not prove; undersea land granted by royal decree; a Manama bank owned by Iranian state banks, convicted at home and compensated abroad; visas sold for jobs that did not exist. It asks who paid, and why so few did. Covers Alcoa and Aluminium Bahrain, Victor Dahdaleh, Premier Group, and Future Bank with Bank Melli Iran and Bank Saderat Iran.
BELARUS - PRISONERS FOR POTASHIn Belarus the state did not lose its war with organized crime; it won it and kept the businesses. From the disappearances of 1999 to a state cigarette factory that makes twice what the country smokes, this is the story of fortunes made by presidential decree, of a presidential travel company that processed "hunting tour" visas for Iraqi families bound for the EU border, of a Russian potash chief arrested at Minsk airport, of money parked in Vilnius and Zurich, and of the reporters and prisoners who paid — until the prisoners were traded for potash. Covers Aliaksei Aleksin and the Neman tobacco factory, Yury Chyzh and Triple, Viktar Sheiman and the Presidential Property Management Directorate, Viktar Babaryka and Belgazprombank, and Vladislav Baumgertner and Uralkali.
BELGIUM - THE JUDGE IN THE SAFE HOUSEFor thirty years Belgium's port, its diamond quarter and its capital have been doors for Europe's cocaine and other people's money. This book follows a veterinary inspector murdered by men from the cattle trade, ministers convicted over helicopter bribes, a law that let prosecutors settle cases already in court, police reading traffickers' encrypted phones, a drug boss flown home from Dubai, cash found in the homes of European lawmakers, and an investigating judge who wrote from a safe house that her country was evolving toward a narco-state. Covers Othman El Ballouti and his Antwerp network, Franc Çopja and the Capja clan, Flor Bressers and the Kriva Rochem case, Patokh Chodiev and Armand De Decker, Pier Antonio Panzeri and Eva Kaili, Didier Reynders and ING Belgium, and Sky ECC.
BENIN - THE WAREHOUSE STATEBenin is a sliver of West African coast that lives by warehousing goods bound for Nigeria, and its fortunes grew in the gap between two countries' prices: frozen poultry, used cars, bottled petrol. This book follows the money from a savings scheme that took the deposits of over 100,000 people to a year of piracy off Cotonou, a tax office whose safe was found four billion francs short, cocaine in containers of food and sugar, and six bags of cash that put the president's oldest friend in prison for twenty years. It asks who polices a trading state when a trader becomes the state. Covers ICC Services and its promoters, Patrice Talon's cotton and port businesses, Sébastien Ajavon, Komi Koutché, Olivier Boko and Oswald Homeky, and the CRIET special court.
BOLIVIA - THE PRICE PER KILOGRAMBolivia grows the leaf, refines more of it each year and sits where southern cocaine routes begin. From a scientist shot at a laboratory on the Huanchaca plateau in 1986 to an attorney general detained in 2026 on charges he denies, this is the story of a state whose anti-drug chiefs kept ending up in foreign courtrooms, of foreign traffickers who found Santa Cruz a safe house with real Bolivian papers, and of public money and gold that vanished. Covers Roberto Suárez Gómez and the 1980 regime of Luis García Meza and Luis Arce Gómez; René Sanabria and Maximiliano Dávila of the FELCN anti-drug police; Sebastián Marset and Roger Mariaca; Luis Arce Catacora and the Indigenous Fund; Santos Ramírez and YPFB; Arturo Murillo and Bravo Tactical Solutions; and Banco Fassil.
BOTSWANA - A HUNDRED BILLION THAT NEVER EXISTEDBotswana is Africa's model country: diamonds shared with De Beers, elections held on time, the continent's cleanest reputation. This book goes behind the reputation, into the land scandals that founded its anti-corruption agency, a diamond chief who died before his trial, an intelligence service on whose request a quarter of a billion pula left the national fuel fund in weeks, a public servants' pension fund that lost nearly half a billion, and a prosecution that swore a hundred billion pula had been stolen from the central bank, in accounts the High Court found never existed. Covers Isaac Kgosi and the Directorate of Intelligence and Security, Bakang Seretse and Kgori Capital, Carter Morupisi and the Botswana Public Officers Pension Fund, Louis Nchindo and Debswana, and Ian Khama and Mokgweetsi Masisi.
BRUNEI - SPECIAL TRANSFERSBrunei is an oil sultanate on Borneo, governed under a state of emergency since 1962. Between 1983 and 1998 its sovereign fund paid out some forty billion dollars in "special transfers," billions of them to accounts of the ruler's youngest brother, a dispute settled in private and never tried as a crime. Brunei's courts, often led by judges from abroad, did convict a minister paid in houses by a contractor, a police superintendent paid in a truck, and two judicial officers who emptied 255 bankrupts' accounts. Around them: smuggling, a visa trade, a lost Contra gift and Harrods. Covers Prince Jefri Bolkiah and the Brunei Investment Agency, Ramzidah and the High Court's Bankruptcy Office, Pengiran Ismail Damit and TED Sendirian Berhad, and Mohamed Al-Fayed and House of Fraser.
BULGARIA - INSURANCE AGAINST THE INSURERSIn 1990s Bulgaria a car owner bought a sticker from an insurer so that the insurer's own men would leave the car alone. This book follows that bargain from the wrestlers who sold it to the fortunes that followed: a bank whose 2014 collapse drained the deposit fund of 3.7 billion leva, a lottery owner and a politician sanctioned by Washington, a deputy prosecutor shot dead at his door, and OneCoin, run from an office in Sofia, whose founder vanished in 2017 — and the Bulgarian reporters who did the work their state would not. Covers Ruja Ignatova and OneCoin, Tsvetan Vasilev and the Corporate Commercial Bank, Vasil Bozhkov and the National Lottery, Delyan Peevski and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, and Vasil Iliev and VIS.
CAMEROON - LIGHT CRUDE AND ENTERTAINMENTA London court finds a commodity trader drew cash at a Swiss cash desk, marked for "Cameroon entertainment," to pay officials of Cameroon's national oil company and refinery; no Cameroonian is named or charged. A president's anti-embezzlement campaign fills Kondengui prison with former ministers, while a UN body calls one trial null and a minister walks free by repaying the money. A Cameroonian checks into a Johannesburg hotel as a king, a crypto platform promises that poverty is over, and the state's own intelligence chiefs stand trial over a radio host's death. Covers Glencore and the Société Nationale des Hydrocarbures, Marafa Hamidou Yaya and the presidential-aircraft affair, Yves Michel Fotso and Cameroon Airlines, Donatien Koagne and the feymen, Émile Parfait Simb and Liyeplimal, and Martinez Zogo and the DGRE.
CANADA - THE POLITE LAUNDROMATCanada, 1920 to 2026. A country the world thinks of as polite has been, for a century, one of the most convenient places to make criminal money usable. Here are the distillers who supplied a dry America, tobacco companies that pleaded guilty over smuggling across the St. Lawrence, a Montreal café where a police camera watched cash being divided, a government casino that took twenty-dollar bills by the bagful, an underground bank whose prosecution collapsed, a crypto exchange whose vaults were empty, and the federal police intelligence director convicted of offering secrets to its targets. It asks why so few paid. Covers Vito Rizzuto and the Montreal Mafia, Maurice Boucher and the Hells Angels, Cameron Ortis and Phantom Secure, Gerald Cotten and QuadrigaCX, and Paul King Jin and Silver International.
CHAD - CRUDE, GOLD AND CLEMENCYChad from Hissène Habré's political police to the oil state of Idriss Déby and his son. A World Bank law meant to keep oil money for the poor lasted six years. A Calgary start-up admitted wiring two million dollars to a Washington company owned by an ambassador's wife. A general went to prison over pills bound for Libya; a minister was convicted over food aid that never arrived. And in August 2026 the auditors who asked for the oil company's invoices were, by their authority's account, hooded and driven away. Covers Idriss Déby and Mahamat Idriss Déby, the oil company SHT and its buyer Glencore, Mahamoud Adam Bechir and Griffiths Energy, Idriss Youssouf Boy and Aboud Hachim Bouder, CFE and Abderahman Moussa, and Hissène Habré and the DDS.
CHILE - ETHICS CLASSESFor thirty years Chile was Latin America's clean country. This book follows what it hid: a dictator's accounts found by the US Senate, an army corporal who took the military's secret copper money to a casino, police officers who robbed their own payroll, conglomerates that paid politicians through false invoices and whose owners were sentenced to an ethics course, and a lawyer's recorded words that led to the removal and arrest of a Supreme Court justice. Then the new trade: cocaine through the northern ports and a Venezuelan gang in Arica. Covers Augusto Pinochet and Riggs Bank, Carlos Délano and Carlos Eugenio Lavín and Empresas Penta, Julio Ponce Lerou and SQM, Luis Hermosilla and Factop, Ángela Vivanco and Belaz Movitec, and the Tren de Aragua and Los Gallegos.
COLOMBIA - THE SINISTER WINDOWThis book follows what the films left out: the money from cocaine, gold and the public purse into the places where it bought decisions. A central bank that changed drug dollars without questions; a presidential campaign that took Cali money; an intelligence director convicted in a candidate's murder; a president's bodyguard who took paramilitary bribes; an anti-corruption prosecutor who sold delays; gold bought from dead men; seized ingots that turned to base metal. The traffickers mostly died or went to American prisons. The officials mostly went home. Covers Pablo Escobar and the Medellín organization, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers and the Cali organization, Salvatore Mancuso and the AUC, Dairo Antonio Úsuga and the Clan del Golfo, Luis Gustavo Moreno and the toga cases, and Odebrecht and Corficolombiana.
COSTA RICA - NO ARMY ON THE COCAINE ROADCosta Rica abolished its army in 1948 and promised never to hand its citizens to a foreign court. That made it Central America's peaceful exception, and a convenient address: for a fugitive American financier, for lenders paying retirees three percent a month, for a digital currency American prosecutors called a black-market bank, for offshore sportsbooks, and for cocaine moving north and to Europe. Two former presidents were jailed in 2004; a police director was convicted of escorting cocaine; in 2026 a former security minister and magistrate was among the first Costa Ricans ever extradited. Covers Celso Gamboa and the Texas case against him, Rodrigo Chaves and the BCIE accusation, Rafael Ángel Calderón Fournier and the Caja-Fischel loan, Arthur Budovsky and Liberty Reserve, and Gilbert Bell Fernández and the US Treasury.
CYPRUS - A DOOR FOR THE WORLD'S MONEYAfter losing a third of its territory in 1974, an island of under a million people sold foreign money what it had left: English-style law, a company register, banks six times the size of its economy and, from 2007 to 2020, its citizenship. This book follows the bankers, lawyers, accountants, developers and politicians who ran that trade and what the courts made of them — convictions, acquittals, and a former president whom an anti-corruption body found may have abused his office — and, beside them, the island's own underworld of car bombs and unsolved contract killings. Covers Nicos Anastasiades and his family's law firm, Demetris Syllouris and the Cyprus Investment Programme, Christodoulos Christodoulou and the Central Bank of Cyprus, Demetris Ioannides and MeritServus, and Tal Dilian and WS WiSpear Systems.
DENMARK - PAID ON TRUSTDenmark, 1983 to 2026. The country ranked first in the world for clean government paid billions of kroner in dividend-tax refunds on shares that, a London judge found, were never held — and called its controls almost non-existent. A trusted civil servant took 117 million kroner of grants meant for the vulnerable over twenty-five years. A carbon registry opened accounts for strangers; Copenhagen partnerships carried billions through a Danish bank's Estonian branch. On the street, bikers fired anti-tank rockets, a free town ran a cannabis market for fifty years, and gangs hired Swedish teenagers. Covers Sanjay Shah and Solo Capital, Britta Nielsen and the National Social Agency, Irene Ellert and Danske Bank's Estonian branch, Jørn Nielsen and the Hells Angels, and Shuaib Khan and Loyal to Familia.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - GHOSTS ON THE PAYROLLThe Dominican Republic sells beaches and baseball; its own courts and reporters tell another story. A general who guarded the president, sentenced in 2026 over a security payroll on which, prosecutors said, men who never served handed back most of their pay. A Brazilian builder that admitted ninety-two million dollars in Dominican bribes, and nine years later not one Dominican conviction. A bank that kept two sets of books until the whole country paid. A rigged lottery draw, a former attorney general on trial, traffickers home from American prisons. Covers Adán Cáceres and the presidential security corps CUSEP, Alexis Medina and the Antipulpo companies, Ángel Rondón and Odebrecht, Ramón Báez Figueroa and Baninter, César Peralta and his Santo Domingo nightclubs, and Jean Alain Rodríguez and the attorney general's office.
ECUADOR - AFTER THE ISLAND OF PEACEEcuador was once called an island of peace between Colombia and Peru, the world's largest coca producers. Then its prison gangs became partners of Mexican cartels and suppliers to Balkan buyers, and in 2025 it counted 9,216 killings, the most in its history. This book follows the money behind that turn: a dead trafficker's phone that led to the head of the judiciary, a presidential candidate shot in Quito, cocaine hidden in banana containers, and bribes paid on oil, a Chinese-built dam, a campaign and a police pension fund. Covers José Adolfo Macías and Los Choneros, Wilmer Chavarría and Los Lobos, Leandro Norero and Wilman Terán in the Metástasis case, Carlos Pólit and Odebrecht, Lenín Moreno and Sinohydro, and Gunvor and Petroecuador.
EL SALVADOR - ENVELOPES ABOVE, RENT BELOWEl Salvador, 1992 to 2026: a dollarized country of six million living on remittances, robbed from two directions at once. From above, presidents drew on a cash fund nobody audited; one confessed to appropriating it, one died before trial, one died in exile, never tried for the $351 million prosecutors say his government diverted. From below, MS-13 and Barrio 18 taxed bus routes and market stalls, and courts and the US Treasury have found that officials of three successive eras bargained with their jailed leaders. Covers Elías Antonio Saca and the secret fund, Mauricio Funes and the Saqueo Público case, José Adán Salazar Umaña and the Texis cartel, Raúl Mijango and the 2012 truce, Nayib Bukele's prisons chief Osiris Luna and MS-13, and José Luis Merino and Alba Petróleos.
EQUATORIAL GUINEA - TWO SIGNATURES ON THE OIL ACCOUNTIn 1995 oil was found off a small country on the Gulf of Guinea that one man and his family had ruled since 1979. Within a decade its income per head rivaled Europe's while its people stayed among the poorest on earth. This book follows the oil money from a Washington bank to a Malibu hillside, a Paris mansion, a Canarian ship supplier, an airport with no flights and the family's own companies, and the courts, reporters and leaks that tried to make anyone answer — from a Senate report in 2004 to a yacht seized in Cape Town and two Malabo verdicts in 2025. Covers Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Riggs Bank, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue and Somagui Forestal, Gabriel Mbega Obiang Lima, and Vladimir Kokorev and Kalunga Company.
ESTONIA - THE CLEAN CORRIDORThe small Baltic republic that sold the world digital residency was also, from 1991 to 2026, one of the busiest doors between post-Soviet money and the European Union. About €200 billion passed through one Danish bank's Tallinn branch; a crypto license briefly made Estonia home to more than half the world's licensed crypto providers; fentanyl gave it an overdose death rate almost six times Europe's. The capital's mayor was charged and never tried, a former governing party was convicted, a port bribery case died on a time limit. Covers Danske Bank and the six former employees of its Tallinn branch on trial, Edgar Savisaar and the Center Party, Hillar Teder and Porto Franco, Nikolai Tarankov and the common fund, Sergei Potapenko and HashFlare, and Artur Yermolayev and his phone-scam organization.
ETHIOPIA - GOLD THAT WAS STEELEthiopia, 1991 to 2026. In 2008 a consignment of the national bank's gold came back from South Africa as gilded steel. From that vault the book follows the money of a state that owned the land and much of the economy: a military conglomerate given the turbines of the great Nile dam, a customs chief convicted, then freed, famine relief sent to displaced people who did not exist, donated wheat found in sixty-three mills, a smuggler who walked out of a federal courthouse, and prosecutions ended "for lasting public benefit." Covers Kinfe Dagnew and the Metals and Engineering Corporation, Mitiku Kassa and the National Disaster Risk Management Commission, Melaku Fenta and the Ethiopian Revenues and Customs Authority, and Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam and the Libyan smuggling network.
FINLAND - THE SHIELD MENFinland ranks among the world's least corrupt countries. In 2000 the head of Helsinki's drug police explained on national television how crime bosses hide behind front men he called shield men; twelve years later investigators watched him meet a leader of one of the country's largest gangs, and the courts convicted him of organizing hashish smuggling. This book reads the files behind the clean reputation: therapy patients extorted one by one, an internet Ponzi club, a youth-housing foundation emptied by its managers, Thai berry pickers bound by debt, 135 million euros that crossed a shell company with no crime ever proven. Covers Jari Aarnio and the Helsinki drug police, Keijo Vilhunen and United Brotherhood, Aleksanteri Kivimäki and Vastaamo, Hannu Kailajärvi and WinCapita, and Aki Haaro and the Youth Foundation.
FRANCE - SEVEN TONNES ON THE BOULEVARDIn October 2015 French customs found over seven tonnes of cannabis below the Paris apartment of a trafficker who was the informant of the head of France's anti-drug police; a decade later a court convicted that official of complicity. From there the book follows the French underworld and the state beside it: the judge Marseille's heroin trade killed, Corsica's gangs, a carbon-credit fraud that drained the treasury, drug cash swapped for Swiss tax-evasion money, dictators' mansions in Paris, encrypted phones the gendarmerie read, and the 2025 law that followed a prison-van ambush. Covers François Thierry and the OCRTIS, Sofiane Hambli, Arnaud Mimran and the carbon-quota fraud, Jacques Santoni and the Petit Bar, the DZ Mafia, Mohamed Amra, the El Maleh network, Teodorin Obiang, and EncroChat and the gendarmerie.
GABON - SELF-MADE AS A RESULT OF POSITIONGabon, 1967 to 2026. For fifty-six years one family, Omar Bongo and then his son Ali Bongo Ondimba, ran a small oil state, and the money left in ways other countries recorded: per-barrel payments from Elf, a New York private bank that called the president self-made as a result of position, a lobbyist's wire to Malta, Paris apartments, cash-bought Maryland houses. In 2023 the president's cousin seized power and put the family's last circle on trial; the former first lady and her son were sentenced in absentia and deny it. Covers Omar Bongo Ondimba and Elf's André Tarallo, Sylvia Bongo Ondimba and Noureddin Bongo Valentin and the Young Team, Brice Laccruche Alihanga and Operation Scorpion, and Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema and Gabon's special criminal court.
GEORGIA - A CRIME TO BE A THIEFGeorgia, 1989 to 2026. A small Caucasus republic whose sons were, by one count, a third of the post-Soviet world's crowned thieves made it a crime in 2005 simply to be one — then found its gravest crimes inside its own ministries. Here are the 1990s militias, the thieves' wars from Moscow to Barcelona, a banker beaten to death by police officers, a former prime minister taken from his cell at night to meet the chief prosecutor, a security chief convicted of taking money to protect scam call centers, and that prosecutor charged, in his absence, with organizing a contract killing. Covers Otar Partskhaladze and the Prosecutor's Office of Georgia, Grigol Liluashvili and the State Security Service, Vano Merabishvili and the Interior Ministry, and Aslan Usoyan and the thieves-in-law.
GERMANY - EVERYTHING IN ORDERGermany, 1990 to 2026. The country famous for rules is where some of postwar Europe's largest financial crimes were committed on paper: refunds of tax never paid, a DAX company whose cash did not exist, an intelligence unit that deleted its own warnings, a regulator that had the reporters investigated. Beside them runs the street economy: a Calabrian mafia's rear base, family members convicted of museum thefts, a licensed brothel where, a court found, motorcycle gangs controlled the women. It follows the money from a Moselle bunker to a Bavarian lake and asks what became of the people who took it. Covers Hanno Berger and the cum-ex trade, Markus Braun, Jan Marsalek and Wirecard, Christian Olearius and M.M. Warburg, and the Remmo family and the Green Vault theft.
GHANA - GATHER THEM AND SELLGhana, from the firing squads of 1979 to the brown rivers of 2026. West Africa's model democracy paid a party financier millions the Supreme Court later ordered him to refund, watched tens of thousands of Chinese miners and their Ghanaian partners industrialize illegal gold mining, lost savers' money to a gold-investment scheme and a wave of bank failures, and saw 229 tons of gold vanish from its export figures. Its reporters filmed judges taking goats, and one of them was shot dead. Its prosecutions rise and fall with its elections. Covers Alfred Woyome and the judgment debt, Aisha Huang and the galamsey trade, Bernard Antwi Boasiako and Akonta Mining, Nana Appiah Mensah and Menzgold, Ken Ofori-Atta and the SML revenue contracts, and Anas Aremeyaw Anas and Tiger Eye.
GREECE - THE ENVELOPE AND THE KALASHNIKOVA crime reporter is shot outside his Athens home, and four years later his case file turns up in a murdered gangster's car. A defense minister buys a house below the Acropolis through an offshore company; a procurement official admits taking fifteen million euros and hands nine back; a monastery trades a lake for Olympic buildings; a drug company admits paying doctors through a sham study; subsidies are claimed on pastures across the border; spyware lands on journalists' phones. Behind many of the escapes stands one constitutional clause: only Parliament may prosecute a minister. Covers Akis Tsochatzopoulos and the submarine contracts, Michalis Christoforakos and Siemens Hellas, Vatopedi Monastery, Novartis Hellas, OPEKEPE and the European Public Prosecutor's Office, Tal Dilian and Intellexa, Dimitris Koutsolioutsos and Folli Follie, and Vassilis Paleokostas.
GUATEMALA - THE PRESIDENT ON THE LINEGuatemala, 1996 to 2026. Prosecutors count 122 million quetzales in suitcases in Antigua and nobody claims them. A customs network inside the tax authority, which a court found was led by the president and vice-president, falls to wiretaps in 2015, and a United Nations-backed commission helps bring cases against a former president, ministers and cocaine clans. Then the commission is expelled, the prosecutor's office changes hands, and the investigators become the accused while many of the accused go free, until a new attorney general takes office in 2026. Covers Otto Pérez Molina, Roxana Baldetti and La Línea; Alfonso Portillo and Taiwan's checks; the Lorenzana family and Los Huistas; Marllory Chacón; Manuel Baldizón and Odebrecht; José Luis Benito; and Consuelo Porras, Rafael Curruchiche and the CICIG.
GUINEA - I AM JUSTICEGuinea holds a quarter of the world's bauxite and one of its richest iron-ore mountains, and for forty years the men who ran it turned that ground into private fortunes. A dying president opens a prison for two allies; his son confesses on junta television to the cocaine trade; a permit given away for nothing sells for $2.5 billion; a mines minister banks Chinese bribes in Hong Kong; and after the 2021 coup an economic crimes court jails a government, then lets its convicts fly abroad for treatment. Covers Lansana Conté and his household, Mamadou Sylla and Futurelec, Ousmane Conté and the presidential guard, Beny Steinmetz and BSG Resources, Mahmoud Thiam and China International Fund, Rio Tinto and François de Combret, and Ibrahima Kassory Fofana and the CRIEF.
GUYANA - WAITING FOR WASHINGTONGuyana, 2002 to 2026. A coast of fewer than a million people became a cocaine route, a gold exporter and then an oil state, and the blows that landed on its biggest criminal figures came mostly from abroad: a Brooklyn courtroom, a Florida grand jury, the US Treasury. At home, a trafficker caught with government-grade listening equipment walked free, fraud charges against the man who became president were withdrawn under the immunity of his new office, scanner images of a cocaine container vanished, and a gold trader named by Washington became Leader of the Opposition while fighting extradition. Covers Roger Khan and his lawyer Robert Simels, Nazar and Azruddin Mohamed and Mohamed's Enterprise, Mae Thomas, Barry Dataram, Calvin Brutus, and the Pradoville 2 and NICIL affairs.
HAITI - JUSTICE IN ANOTHER COUNTRYAn audit court finds a future Haitian president's company was paid for fuel on a road before it had been asked to bid, and that its rival for the same contract shared its tax number. Two senators who investigated the oil fund are later sanctioned by the United States for drug trafficking. A kidnapping gang buys its rifles in Florida with ransoms. A dictator's money waits forty years in Swiss vaults while his finance minister's turns up in Quebec. Most who faced a jury faced one in Miami or Washington. Covers Jovenel Moïse and Agritrans, Michel Martelly and Laurent Lamothe, Guy Philippe and Beaudoin Ketant, Jimmy Chérizier and the G9, Germine Joly and 400 Mawozo, Rony Célestin and the Belladère border, and Jean-Claude Duvalier and his Swiss accounts.
HONDURAS - THE ROUND TRIP TO MANHATTANHonduras, 1988 to 2026. By 2012 most of the cocaine flights leaving Colombia and Venezuela landed on this small country's airstrips, and the money bought police chiefs, mayors, deputies and campaigns. A trafficker's notebooks are cited in Manhattan and he is killed in prison eight days later. A social-security institute is emptied in an election year. A clan films the politicians it meets. A bank lands on the Kingpin list. Then extradition sends the bosses north, and the record shows many of them coming home. Covers Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in New York, pardoned and his conviction vacated, and his brother Tony Hernández; Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga and the Cachiros; the Valle Valle family; the Rosenthal family and Banco Continental; and Mario Zelaya and the Honduran Social Security Institute.
HONG KONG - GOLDEN FETTERSHong Kong, 1841 to 2026. A city founded in an opium war broke its own police syndicates in the 1970s and built the anti-corruption commission the world copies, then became a great conduit for other people's money. Between those facts: detectives never tried, a kidnapper executed across the border, a Chief Secretary convicted over a developer's payments, a former minister convicted in New York, a football club owner convicted of laundering, and a fire that killed 168 people in an estate whose renovation now faces manslaughter charges. Covers Peter Godber and the colonial police syndicates, the Sun Yee On triad society, Cheung Tze-keung, George Tan and the Carrian Group, Rafael Hui and Sun Hung Kai Properties, Patrick Ho and CEFC China Energy, and Carson Yeung and Birmingham City.
HUNGARY - EVERY DOCUMENT HAS ITS FATEA car bomb in central Budapest kills a police informer and three passers-by, and the bomber is not questioned as a suspect for fifteen years. Heating oil sold as diesel makes fortunes amid killings; a bank lends cheaply to every party; a brokerage sells bonds it had no right to issue, prosecutors say. After 2010 the money is the state's: street lights, tobacco licenses, residence permits, a central bank's foundations, and closed files. In 2026 the government falls and the arrests begin. Covers Tamás Portik and Energol, Jozef Roháč, Tamás Gyárfás, Gábor Princz and Postabank, Csaba Tarsoly and Quaestor, György Schadl and the bailiffs' chamber, Pál Völner, György Matolcsy and the central bank's foundations, István Tiborcz and Elios, Lőrinc Mészáros, Antal Rogán and the residency bonds, and Nikola Gruevski.
ITALY - THE WORLD IN THE MIDDLEItaly wrote the laws the world copied to fight the mafia, then found the crime inside its own house: a Palermo judge who ran seized mafia fortunes for her circle; the anti-mafia face of Sicilian business, convicted of corruption; a false witness the courts say police built after Borsellino's murder; some four hundred council dissolutions. This book follows the money from the pizzo ledger to Gioia Tauro, Maltese betting licenses, European farm subsidies and Dubai, and asks who escaped, and how. Covers Silvana Saguto and Palermo's seized-assets court, Antonello Montante and Confindustria Sicilia, Matteo Messina Denaro and Cosa Nostra, Marcello Dell'Utri and Silvio Berlusconi, Rocco Morabito and the 'Ndrangheta, Francesco Schiavone and the Casalesi, and Benedetto Bacchi and his Maltese betting platform.
IVORY COAST - WAIVED ONCE AND FOR ALLAbidjan, 2002 to 2026. In the world's largest cocoa producer, the farmers' levies paid for a war, a chocolate factory in New York and a cocoa chief's barbed wire, while the state kept selling, waiving or pardoning its right to punish. It signed away, once and for all, its right to prosecute the trader whose waste poisoned its capital; it let convicted men walk out of court; it made rebel commanders colonels without asking where the money went. Then cocaine came through the port, and officers paid to stop it were convicted of joining in. Covers Trafigura and Compagnie Tommy, Laurent Gbagbo and the cocoa regulation funds, Guillaume Soro and the Forces Nouvelles, Amadé Ouérémi, and Miguel Ángel Devesa Mera and Armand Agnin Angbonon.
JAPAN - THE UNDERWORLD WITH AN ADDRESSJapan, 1945 to 2026. One of the safest countries on earth never made it a crime to belong to a gang: its gangsters kept headquarters with crests at the door and the police counted them. This book follows the money that moved around that underworld in plain sight — a trucking company's loans to gang-linked firms and its cash to a kingmaker, a trading house's overpriced paintings, a utility's gifts, a gang treasurer's notes in a tax court — and the anonymous fraud economy that replaced it, which in 2025 took a record ¥142 billion by telephone, mostly from the old. Covers Satoru Nomura and the Kudo-kai, Kenichi Shinoda and the Yamaguchi-gumi, Shin Kanemaru and Tokyo Sagawa Kyubin, Tsukasa Akimoto and 500.com, and Mark Karpelès and Mt. Gox.
JORDAN - THE DEPARTMENT'S SEALJordan sells the world stability, and its own courts tell a different story. A former intelligence director is convicted of having his department's seal copied so a businessman could borrow from the banks; a later director is jailed for money laundering; a banker convicted in his absence over Petra Bank's collapse goes on to sit in Iraq's government; a royal in-law is sentenced four times in absentia and stays in London; counterfeit cigarette factories run for years in a free zone; and the north loses half a billion dinars to trading schemes. Then the leaks, the border war, and the gaps. Covers Ahmad Chalabi and Petra Bank, Samih al-Battikhi and the General Intelligence Department, Walid al-Kurdi and the Jordan Phosphate Mines Company, and Awni Mutee and the tobacco case.
KAZAKHSTAN - A NARROW CIRCLEKazakhstan, 1991 to 2026. For thirty years a country of twenty million people was run by one president and his relatives and in-laws. This book follows the money the record can follow: oil fees an American indictment traced into Swiss accounts, a bank whose chairman was found in contempt in London and convicted in absentia at home, a former mayor's family sued in New York over Manhattan property, a security service whose chiefs ended up in the dock. Then January 2022 broke the circle, and a new government began taking fortunes back in closed courtrooms and secret settlements. Covers Mukhtar Ablyazov and BTA Bank, James Giffen and Mercator Corporation, Rakhat Aliyev and Nurbank, Kairat Satybaldy and Kazakhtelecom, Karim Massimov and the National Security Committee, and Viktor Khrapunov and Triadou.
KENYA - A LITTLE SOMETHINGKenya, 1990 to 2026. A Central Bank clerk stamps compensation claims for gold the country does not mine; a commission later traces billions through 487 recipients, and no court ever tries the case. From that desk the book follows East Africa's hub economy: a passport system contracted at five times a rival's quote, a Mombasa heroin family that admitted paying Kenyan officials to delay its extradition, an army accused of taxing the sugar trade of the enemy it fought, a lawyer and his client murdered by police officers, and the clerks and reporters who paid for finding out. Covers Kamlesh Pattni and Goldenberg International, John Githongo and the Anglo Leasing contracts, Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha and their Mombasa trafficking organization, and Smith & Ouzman and Kenya's electoral commission.
KOSOVO - THE BILL NOBODY PAIDKosovo, 1989 to 2026: a territory of 1.6 million that financed a parallel state with emigrants' cash, spent nine years as a United Nations protectorate and became Europe's youngest country using someone else's currency. This book follows the money through a clinic that recruited poor men for their kidneys, recorded calls about who got which public job, a veterans' register that grew after the war, a north that paid no electricity bill for two decades, and an armed attack whose admitted organizer lives across a border that does not extradite. Covers Lutfi Dervishi and the Medicus clinic, Milan Radoičić and the Veselinović network, Adem Grabovci and the Pronto recordings, Agim Çeku and the veterans' list, Hashim Thaçi and the Specialist Chambers, and Maria Bamieh and EULEX.
KUWAIT - THE SECRET EXPENSESKuwait, 1979 to 2026: the officials trusted to guard a small, rich state's oil wealth are best placed to take it. A pension chief runs the workers' fund for thirty years and dies in London, convicted in his absence; American prosecutors allege that defense-ministry money reached a Beverly Hills hilltop; a residency undersecretary is convicted of taking bribes in the visa trade; the highest court rules that a minister need not explain secret expenses. Kuwait's courts convict sheikhs and ministers, yet little money is known to have come back. Covers Fahad Al-Rajaan and the Public Institution for Social Security, Khaled Al-Jarrah Al-Sabah and the army fund, Talal Al-Khaled Al-Sabah and the secret expenses, Mazen Al-Jarrah Al-Sabah and the visa trade, and Fahad Mohammed Al-Sabah and Grupo Torras.
LATVIA - CLOSER THAN SWITZERLANDRiga, 1991 to 2026. For twenty-five years Latvia's banks took in the money of the former Soviet Union through companies nobody owned on paper, its oil port made one mayor a national power, and its anti-corruption bureau recorded the country's richest men discussing how to divide its newspapers and its government. Then, in eleven days of February 2018, an American notice destroyed the third-largest bank and the governor of the central bank was detained. This is the story of what Latvia's own investigators knew, why its courts took so long, and what became of the people they caught. Covers Aivars Lembergs and the port of Ventspils, Ilmārs Rimšēvičs and Trasta Komercbanka, Ernests Bernis and ABLV Bank, Ivans Haritonovs and the Riga rackets, and Vladimir Antonov and Latvijas Krājbanka.
LEBANON - WHERE THE SAVINGS WENTLebanon, 1990 to 2026. In 2022 depositors held up their own banks to get their own money, three years after the banks shut and a country's savings vanished into a central bank that owed far more than it held. This book follows where the money went: commissions of three-eighths of one percent that investigators say went to a company in the Virgin Islands, used cars shipped to West Africa, checks leaving a collapsing bank, subsidized fuel carried over the mountains, Paris apartments and Cayman companies, and a port where 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate sat for six years. Covers Riad Salameh and the Banque du Liban, Raja Salameh and Forry Associates, Samir Hanna and Bank Audi, Rana Koleilat and Bank al-Madina, and Ayman Joumaa and the Lebanese Canadian Bank.
LIBYA - THE TREASURY WITH TWO KEYSLibya, 1969 to 2026. Under Muammar Gaddafi the state owned nearly everything; after him it was divided among two governments, two central banks and armed groups on its own payroll. Fuel sold at three US cents a liter left by sea for Malta and Sicily; dollars sold for imports that never arrived paid Tripoli's militias; cash in a Benghazi bank vault went to an unknown destination; detained migrants were priced by nationality. The book follows the money out of Libya and asks who took delivery. Covers Saddam Haftar and the Libyan Arab Armed Forces, Mohammed Kashlaf and the Zawiya coast guard, Abdelghani al-Kikli and the Stability Support Apparatus, Ali Ibrahim Dbeibah and ODAC, the Debono fuel network and Kolmar, and Société Générale and the Libyan Investment Authority.
LITHUANIA - A BOX WITH CASHLithuania, 1990 to 2026: the first republic to leave the Soviet Union, on the frontier between Russia, Belarus and Europe. A gang leader who had a newspaper editor shot became the last man the country executed. Two banks with Russian-born owners failed within fifteen months; one owner was found in 2025 living in Brittany on a Ukrainian refugee's papers and pleaded guilty in Vilnius, while the other lives under asylum in Russia, never tried in person. A business group, two parties and their politicians were convicted of bribery; cigarette balloons from Belarus closed Vilnius airport. Covers Vladimir Antonov, Raimondas Baranauskas and Snoras, Vladimir Romanov and Ūkio bankas, Raimondas Kurlianskis, Eligijus Masiulis and MG Baltic, Viktor Uspaskich and the Labor Party, and Boris Dekanidze and the Vilnius Brigade.
LUXEMBOURG - THE DISCRETION BUSINESSLuxembourg, a Grand Duchy of 680,000 people, holds eight trillion euros in funds and has spent a century selling discretion. This book follows what that discretion bought: tax rulings stamped the day they arrived, a clearing house accused and never tried, funds that sent European savings to Madoff, a private bank convicted over Malaysia's stolen millions, a notary who approved what she should have refused, a secret service that recorded its own prime minister, bombings no court has solved, and a charity emptied of 61 million euros in five months. Covers PricewaterhouseCoopers and the tax official Marius Kohl, Clearstream and Denis Robert, UBS and LuxAlpha, Edmond de Rothschild (Europe) and 1MDB, Caritas and the fraud that emptied it, Flavio Becca and his watches, and Mikhail Fridman and the Luxembourg state.
MACAU - UNDER THE TABLEMacau, 1990 to 2026: a city half the size of Manhattan on the edge of a country where gambling is a crime. For most of two decades it was the world's largest casino market, and the biggest of the licensed middlemen who carried money across its border ran bets the tax never saw. Its prosecutor general rigged his own office's contracts; its public-works secretary hid his bribes in Hong Kong and London; four or five inspectors checked two hundred junkets. A mainland warrant ended it. Covers Alvin Chau and the Suncity Group, Levo Chan and Tak Chun, Wan Kuok Koi and the 14K, Ao Man Long and Joseph Lau, Ho Chio Meng and the Public Prosecutions Office, and Stanley Au and Banco Delta Asia.
MALAWI - THE MAN AT THE GATEMalawi, 1994 to 2026: one of the poorest countries on earth, whose largest crimes ran through its own treasury. A budget director shot at his gate in 2013, as junior officials were found with cash in their cars, was later charged himself and vanished. Then came a police rations contract and a ruling party's K145 million deposit, a president's bodyguard whose K5 billion forfeiture case no court decided, a British supplier whose case reached the vice-president, a wildlife trafficker jailed, pardoned and freed, and a pension fund that agreed to pay nearly three times a hotel's valuation. Covers Paul Mphwiyo, Ralph Kasambara and Cashgate, Zameer Karim and Pioneer Investments, Norman Chisale, Zuneth Sattar and Xaviar Limited, Yunhua Lin, Thom Mpinganjira, and Martha Chizuma and the Anti-Corruption Bureau.
MALI - A BOEING IN THE SANDA Boeing from Venezuela burns in the desert north of Gao, and its cargo is never found. In Bamako, auditors count more than 1,266 billion francs of irregularities in fifteen years; a presidential jet and an overbilled arms contract stop the IMF's money; a UN panel reports monthly payments from a sanctioned deputy to the head of State Security; and the gold the Emirates record as Malian outweighs Mali's declarations nearly eighteen times. Then the soldiers who seized power try the old elite, mostly in its absence. Covers Bouaré Fily Sissoko and the Guo-Star contract, Boubou Cissé and the Paramount-Embraer case, Mohamed Ould Mataly and the UN Panel of Experts, Karim Keïta and the Birama Touré case, Bakary Togola and the cotton confederation, and Barrick and the Loulo-Gounkoto mine.
MEXICO - THE PRICE OF THE PLAZAMexico, 1984 to 2026. Again and again, the men Mexico paid to fight organized crime were found to be paid by it too: a security minister convicted in Brooklyn of taking the Sinaloa cartel's bribes, a state attorney general who pleaded guilty to trafficking, a drug-war general convicted of protecting a trafficker. This book follows the money through pill chemicals, iron ore, governors' ghost companies, banks cut off by Washington, smuggled diesel and Florida condominiums, and asks what became of those who took it. Covers Genaro García Luna and the Sinaloa cartel, Édgar Veytia and the H-2 cartel, Javier Duarte and the government of Veracruz, Zhenli Ye Gon and Unimed Pharm Chem, and Nemesio Oseguera and the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
MONGOLIA - THE COAL AND THE FOGMongolia's Constitution says its coal, copper and gold belong to its three and a half million people; this book follows who got them, 1990 to 2026. A state coal company whose former chief was imprisoned while nobody could say how much coal had left; a fund for small business that lent to officials' families; a development bank whose loans sent a sitting legislator to prison; copper contracts that American prosecutors allege bought two Manhattan apartments; a Swiss transfer in a finance minister's first month; a democracy hero's murder whose convicts were tortured. Covers B. Gankhuyag and Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi, S. Batbold and the Erdenet copper contracts, S. Bayartsogt and Oyu Tolgoi, Kh. Battulga and Genco, Yo. Baatarbileg and the Development Bank of Mongolia, and N. Önörtsetseg and Zarig.mn.
MONTENEGRO - A TUNNEL TO THE COURTHOUSEA country of 623,000, told through its own courts. In the 1990s a state company licensed the transit of cigarettes that Italian prosecutors called a mafia trade; the prime minister they indicted was never tried. In 2014 two clans from the Bay of Kotor split over cocaine, and their war has killed more than seventy people across Europe. Then decrypted phone messages put a Supreme Court president, an intelligence officer and a chief special prosecutor in the dock, and someone dug a tunnel to the courthouse evidence depot. Covers Milo Đukanović and the Bari tobacco inquiry, Vesna and Miloš Medenica and the free zone of Bar, Radoje Zvicer and the Kavač clan, Jovan Vukotić and the Škaljari clan, Svetozar Marović and Budva, and Duško Knežević and the Atlas Group.
MOROCCO - NINE MILES FROM EUROPEMorocco, 1995 to 2026. The kingdom that grew much of Europe's hashish lies nine miles from Spain; its drug money reached courtrooms, prisons and councils: Tetouan judges arrested on suspicion of selling verdicts, a trafficker who walked out of Kenitra unreported, a palace security chief convicted of taking a trafficker's money, and in 2026, on a Malian prisoner's accusations, a regional president sentenced at first instance to twelve years. Beside it ran other thefts: a social-security fund's lost billions, diaspora savings sent to Panama, houses taken with forged deeds. Covers Saïd Naciri, Abdenbi Bioui and Hadj Ahmed Ben Brahim in the Escobar du Sahara case, Mounir Erramach and the Tetouan judges, Mohamed El Kharraz and Abdelaziz Izzou, Mohamed El Ouardi and Bab Darna, and Rafiq Haddaoui and the CNSS.
MOZAMBIQUE - THE SPIES WHO BORROWED TWO BILLIONIn 2013 and 2014 three companies run by Mozambique's intelligence service borrowed about two billion dollars in secret, for coastal surveillance, a tuna fleet and shipyards, under guarantees the finance minister signed without telling parliament. The fishing boats were invoiced at about ten times their worth; the bribes, prosecutors said, came to some two hundred million dollars; when the loans surfaced in 2016 the economy broke. Around it lies an older story the world never heard: a banker killed after publishing a list of debtors, an editor murdered over a bank fraud, a heroin coast, a kidnapping trade, horns vanishing from a police strong-room. Covers Manuel Chang and the hidden debts, Privinvest and Credit Suisse, Ndambi Guebuza and Gregório Leão, and Mohamed Bachir Suleman and the Maputo Shopping Centre.
MYANMAR - THE BORDER GUARDSMyanmar, 1989 to 2026. To buy peace the army let armed allies keep their guns and trades, then made some of them its border guards. In Kokang, families wearing the state's uniforms rented buildings to fraud financiers until China's police ended them; on the Moei River, land held by an army-allied Karen militia became the scam city of Shwe Kokko. From opium warlords to jade, methamphetamine and the army's companies, it follows the money and names the gaps the protectors escaped through. Covers Saw Chit Thu and the Karen National Army, She Zhijiang and Yatai International Holdings Group, the Ming and Bai families of Kokang, Wei Hsueh-kang and the United Wa State Army, Lo Hsing Han and Asia World, and Min Aung Hlaing and Myanma Economic Holdings Limited.
NAMIBIA - FOR GOVERNMENTAL OBJECTIVESNamibia is the African country foreign report cards praise: a free press, independent courts, peaceful handovers of power. This book opens the other ledger, on the record of Namibia's own courts and reporters: a pension fund's loans to the well connected, social-security money lost in four months, a bank for small business emptied while 23,000 depositors waited, rhino horn at an airport scanner, and the horse-mackerel quotas a minister allocated "for governmental objectives" that prosecutors say became payments to officials. It follows the trial that has not yet heard a witness, the money that reached Dubai, and what became of everyone. Covers Bernhardt Esau, Sacky Shanghala and the other Fishrot accused, with Samherji and the state fishing company Fishcor, and Enock Kamushinda and the SME Bank.
NEPAL - THE FILES THAT BURNEDNepal, 1990 to 2026: a country that lives on what its young send home, where almost every door had a price. A former deputy prime minister was convicted of selling Nepalis the identity of Bhutanese refugees. Gold came through Kathmandu's airport in brake shoes, and a courier was tortured to death over missing gold. A former anti-corruption chief was convicted over the land beside the prime minister's house. Cooperatives lost billions. Foreign insurers paid for rescues that, police say, were staged. In September 2025 the young burned the parliament, and court files burned with it. Covers Top Bahadur Rayamajhi and the fake Bhutanese refugee scheme, Chudamani Uprety and the 33-kilogram gold case, Deep Basnyat and Lalita Niwas, Rabi Lamichhane and Gorkha Media Network, and Deepak Bhatta and Infinity Holdings.
NETHERLANDS - HELP FROM INSIDEThe Netherlands is orderly, rich and honestly governed, and for forty years it has also been where Europe's drugs arrive and their money is counted. This book follows the trade from the Heineken ransom and the hashish fortunes, through a police unit that let drugs onto the market, a prosecutor's deal that handed a dealer back his millions and banks that failed to stop criminals using their accounts, to the murders of a crown witness's brother, his lawyer and his confidant, a six-year trial in a fortified courtroom, and a fugitive living openly in Freetown. Covers Ridouan Taghi and the organization an Amsterdam court found he led, Willem Holleeder and the developer Willem Endstra, Jos Leijdekkers and the Antwerp-Rotterdam cocaine route, and the banks ING and ABN AMRO.
NEW ZEALAND - A CLEAN ADDRESSNew Zealand ranks among the least corrupt countries on earth, and its good name became a product. This book follows what came in under it and what grew beneath it: an Auckland company factory whose shells turned up in a North Korean arms flight and Russian laundering cases; tax-free foreign trusts the Panama Papers exposed; a businessman wanted in China who became a citizen; drug cash handed over bank counters; a methamphetamine market that turned gangs into businesses; and the MP, the roading manager and the airport insiders the courts convicted. Covers Terry Clark and the Mr Asia syndicate, Geoffrey Taylor and GT Group, William Yan and Tonghua Golden Horse Pharmaceutical, Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters, Pasilika Naufahu and the Comancheros, and the former MP Taito Phillip Field.
NICARAGUA - BLOOD, BEEF AND GOLDNicaragua, 1972 to 2026. A Managua clinic, reported to be partly owned by the dictator's family, bought the blood of the poor for export. Six vans painted as a Mexican television crew carried 9.2 million dollars across the border. A president convicted of laundering in 2003 had his conviction annulled in 2009. Venezuelan oil credit passed into companies outside the budget, and a fuel chain bought with it ended up, the US Treasury says, with the ruling family. A government charged newspaper executives with laundering, while beef from illegally cleared forest and gold went north. Covers Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the Plasmaféresis clinic, Arnoldo Alemán and Byron Jerez, Henry Fariñas and the Élite clubs, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo with Albanisa, Caruna and DNP, and Bayardo Arce.
NIGER - YELLOWCAKE, HASHISH AND HELICOPTERSNiger has fed France's reactors for fifty years and stayed among the world's poorest countries. In December 2011 a third of a billion dollars passed through a new Paris account of its state mining company in six days. In 2020 its military auditors found arms contracts inflated or never delivered while soldiers died at Inates and Chinégodar, and the people arrested were activists and reporters. A record hashish seizure was burned before ministers, and two journalists were sentenced for sharing a report that questioned it. The money ran from the desert roads of Agadez to Prague, Dubai and Paris; almost none came back. Covers Aboubacar Hima and Brid A Defcon, Aboubacar Charfo and Agacha Technologies, Areva and SOPAMIN, Cherif Ould Abidine and Goumour Atoua, and the CoLDEF commission.
NIGERIA - THE CASH IN FLAT 7BNigeria, 1993 to 2026. In April 2017 anti-corruption officers find forty-three million dollars in a Lagos flat; a spy agency says it is its own; no court ever says whose it was. From that flat the book follows the money of Africa's largest oil state: a dictator's cash from his own central bank, a governor acquitted at home and convicted on his own pleas in London, an eleven-billion-dollar award a London judge found was obtained by fraud, crude stolen through a pipe into the sea, the ransom market, and the reporters who paid for finding out. Covers Sani Abacha and his family's foreign accounts, James Ibori and the London solicitor convicted with him, P&ID and the official a court found it bribed, and Ramon Abbas and the detective Abba Kyari.
NORTH MACEDONIA - THE STATE THAT RECORDED ITSELFSkopje, 2015. An opposition leader plays the country its own government's voices, recorded by a counterintelligence service run by the prime minister's cousin and carried out by three of its officers. Europe brokers a special prosecutor to try the people on the tapes. The courts convict a prime minister, his interior minister and his cousin. Then the special prosecutor is convicted too, after a television host carries a tycoon's money out of his house in a designer bag, and a law passed in one day ends most remaining cases. Covers Nikola Gruevski and VMRO-DPMNE, Sašo Mijalkov and the UBK counterintelligence service, Katica Janeva and the Special Public Prosecutor's Office, Bojan Jovanovski and 1TV, and Jordan Orce Kamčev and Orka Holding.
NORWAY - TOO CLEAN TO CHECKNorway, 1993 to 2026. The country ranked fourth for clean government keeps its crime where trust hides it. A senior Oslo police officer was convicted of helping a hashish importer for a decade, after Norway's last jury acquitted him on the drug count and judges overturned it. Robbers killed a policeman in Stavanger and the money vanished. A water-works director with the King's medal built a South African hunting estate on public money. State-owned champions paid bribes abroad; the one executive convicted lives in Florida. In 2026 investigators opened a corruption case against a former prime minister. Covers Eirik Jensen and Gjermund Cappelen's network, David Toska and the NOKAS robbery, Ivar T. Henriksen and Nedre Romerike Vannverk, Kendrick Wallace and Yara, Statoil and Horton Investments, and Thorbjørn Jagland and Økokrim.
OMAN - TWENTY-THREE YEARS AND THEN SILENCEOman, 1970 to 2026: a quiet sultanate facing Iran across the Strait of Hormuz, bordering Yemen, running on oil and imported labor. In 2014 its courts sentenced a national oil company's chief executive, an oil tenders chief and a former minister to prison for bribery. Then the record went silent. This book follows those trials, the Khasab speedboats to Iran, the missile tubes hidden in generators bound for Yemen, the domestic workers who said they had been sold, and the money that left. Covers Ahmed al-Wahaibi and the Oman Oil Company, Myung Jae Yoo and LG International, P. Mohamed Ali and Galfar Engineering and Contracting, Juma Al Hinai and Petroleum Development Oman, and Mahmood Rashid Amur Al Habsi and the tanker Oman Pride.
PAKISTAN - IN A POOR MAN'S NAMEPakistan, 1979 to 2026. A Karachi garment factory burns with its exits locked; two courts find it was arson over an extortion demand; the Supreme Court acquits the only men condemned. The same court finds an intelligence agency handed politicians Rs 140 million before an election; nobody is prosecuted. A police superintendent is sanctioned in Washington and acquitted at home. Frozen millions return from London to pay a developer's debt. Billions move through accounts in the names of a peon, a rickshaw driver and a man beside a sewage canal. Covers Malik Riaz and Bahria Town, Asif Ali Zardari and the PPP, Nawaz Sharif and the Avenfield flats, Imran Khan and the Al-Qadir Trust, Agha Hasan Abedi and BCCI, Uzair Baloch and the People's Aman Committee, and Rao Anwar.
PALESTINE - EMPTY DOCKS AND HIDDEN ACCOUNTSThe West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, 1993 to 2026. A government born without a currency, a port or a border still produced fortunes, because every door out of it was a place to charge a fee. This book follows the money through the Authority's monopolies, an account in a Tel Aviv bank, Hamas's tunnels and investments, work permits, a Jerusalem house sold offshore and the cash brokers of wartime Gaza, to a Ramallah courtroom where the best-known officials ever convicted of corruption were sentenced in their absence. Covers Mohammed Rashid and the Palestinian Commercial Services Company, Mohammed Dahlan and Gaza's Preventive Security service, Nazmi Muhanna and the General Authority for Crossings and Borders, Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas and its Investment Office.
PANAMA - THE ISTHMUS OF SECRETSPanama, 1971 to 2026. A canal republic sold the world a flag, an anonymous company and a quiet bank account, and crime became one of its best customers. In 1971 White House staff wrote of information that Panama's rulers were deeply involved in narcotics; the officer they named as its anti-drug coordinator became the general convicted in Miami. A newspaper company was bought, a court found, with contractors' money, and the president convicted for it left for asylum in Colombia without serving a day of that sentence. The law firm whose files became the Panama Papers saw its trial at home end in acquittals. Covers Manuel Antonio Noriega and the Panama Defense Forces, Ricardo Martinelli and Editora Panamá América, and Jürgen Mossack, Ramón Fonseca and Mossack Fonseca.
PAPUA NEW GUINEA - THE WARRANT NOBODY EXECUTEDIn June 2014 a magistrate in Port Moresby signed a warrant to arrest Papua New Guinea's sitting prime minister over the state's payments to a law firm. Nobody executed it. This is the story of how money left a resource-rich country through the state's own instruments — sixty-five checks to one lawyer, undefended claims, forest leases over a tenth of the land, a Swiss bank's loan — and of the investigators, judges and reporters who tried to follow it, from 1987 to the return to the international gray list in 2026. Covers Paul Paraka and Paul Paraka Lawyers, Sam Koim and Investigation Task Force Sweep, Peter O'Neill and the UBS loan, Noah Musingku and U-Vistract, and Djoko Tjandra and his Papua New Guinea passport.
PARAGUAY - THE BORDER IS A STREETParaguay is a landlocked country of six and a half million people, beside two of the world's largest dams and South America's busiest smuggling frontier. Its dictator treated contraband as the price of peace, a historian writes, and the trade outlived him: cigarettes, marijuana, cocaine in sugar sacks, European pistols for Brazilian gangs. It follows a prosecutor murdered on his honeymoon, a senator convicted of laundering for a cocaine network, a minister convicted over a yacht, a moneylender who filed false complaints against his own debtors, a former president sanctioned by Washington and never charged at home, and murdered reporters. Covers Horacio Cartes and Tabacalera del Este, Sebastián Marset and Miguel Ángel Insfrán's network, Erico Galeano and Deportivo Capiatá, and Darío Messer and his Paraguayan estates.
PERU - THE STATE THAT FILMED ITS BRIBESPeru, 1990 to 2026. A president's intelligence adviser films the congressmen, judges and television owners he pays, and when one tape airs in September 2000 the government falls within weeks. Then a Brazilian builder confesses to bribing its way through Peruvian public works, former presidents follow one another into a small prison outside Lima, and Callao judges are caught on wiretaps. Beneath them grow larger trades: coca in the Apurímac valleys, gold from Amazon reserves and Andean tunnels sold to refiners abroad, and extortion charging bus drivers a daily fee. Between 2024 and 2026, much of the machinery that prosecuted the powerful is taken apart. Covers Vladimiro Montesinos and the National Intelligence Service, Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo and Odebrecht, Fernando Zevallos and Aero Continente, and the NTR Metals gold traders.
PHILIPPINES - GHOST PROJECTS AND CASINO CHIPSForty years of Philippine crime, from the Marcos fortune to the flood-control arrests of 2026, told as one business: the cut for whoever could stop it. A numbers game that paid the police and brought down a president; a pork-barrel network of foundations that fed no one; stolen Bangladeshi dollars turned into Manila casino chips; offshore gaming compounds and a mayor the courts found was a Chinese national; a drug war whose reward tiers a former colonel swore to before Congress; and flood-control cash carried, a witness testified, in grocery boxes. Covers Joseph Estrada and jueteng, Janet Lim-Napoles and her foundations, RCBC and the Bangladesh Bank money, Alice Guo and the Bamban compound, Rodrigo Duterte and the International Criminal Court, and Martin Romualdez, Zaldy Co and the flood-control cases.
POLAND - SIGNED, STAMPED AND STOLENPoland, 1989 to 2026. The transition the world admires also built one of Europe's most inventive criminal economies, and most of it ran on paper: a state debt fund whose dollars went abroad, a company that earned interest twice on the same money, tax refunds claimed on invoices, gold deposits without the gold, a credit union that prosecutors say lent to straw borrowers, and a crypto exchange whose bitcoin nobody can move. Beside them run the Warsaw suburb gangs, a deputy minister who leaked a police raid, and two killings no court has solved. Covers Grzegorz Żemek and the Foreign Debt Service Fund, Bogusław Bagsik and Art-B, Jarosław Sokołowski and the Pruszków group, Lew Rywin and Gazeta Wyborcza, Marcin Plichta and Amber Gold, and Sylwester Suszek and Zondacrypto.
PORTUGAL - THE BILL ARRIVED ON A SUNDAYPortugal is sold abroad as Europe's quiet corner; its courts tell another story. A banking dynasty that began as a Lisbon exchange shop in 1869 collapsed in 2014, and the public put billions into what was left. An economy minister was convicted of taking €15,000 a month from that bank while in office. A prosecutor at the elite investigation department was convicted of being paid to close files. A former prime minister went on trial eleven years after his arrest, presumed innocent. And the Atlantic made the country a door for South American cocaine. Covers Ricardo Salgado and Banco Espírito Santo, Manuel Pinho and the EDP case, José Sócrates and Operação Marquês, Orlando Figueira and Operação Fizz, and João Rendeiro and Banco Privado Português.
PUERTO RICO - A BORDER WITHOUT CUSTOMSPuerto Rico is inside the United States for everything a smuggler cares about and outside it for much of what a voter does. This book follows its criminal economy from the housing-project drug points of Bayamón to the offshore bank licenses of San Juan: a police force the FBI caught guarding cocaine deals, an education secretary with contractors' cash in his office safe, a convicted murderer who walked out of prison, a bank branch where gym bags of cash became wires, and a governor's case that ended in a pardon. Covers Ángel Ayala Vázquez and the Barbosa drug organization, José Figueroa Agosto and his lawyer Ramón Negrón Colón, Víctor Fajardo and the Department of Education, Wanda Vázquez Garced, Julio Herrera Velutini and Bancrédito, and Banco Popular de Puerto Rico.
QATAR - MONEY WITH NO NAMES ON ITQatar has no mafia and a great deal of money, and its crimes follow the money. This book traces it out of Doha — to football's voters, a British bank's hidden fees, an American contractor's sham studies and a militia's hostages — and traces the workers' money in, through illegal recruitment fees and sold visas. It asks what a state with appointed courts can reveal about itself, and finds a five-page document recording a finance minister's conviction for laundering more than $5.6 billion. Covers Ali Sherif Al Emadi and Qatar's Ministry of Finance, Mohamed bin Hammam and FIFA, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani and the Qatar Investment Authority, Barclays and Qatar Holding, Raytheon and the Qatar Emiri Air Force, and Kevin Chalker and Global Risk Advisors.
ROMANIA - THE CLOCK RAN OUTRomania after 1989 lost its savings to pyramid schemes, handed a royal farm and a stretch of beach to claimants in deals its courts later found criminal, and then, for a few years, put its rulers on trial: a prime minister, the governing party's leader, ministers, mayors, the head of its own organized-crime prosecutors. Then the rules changed. An ordinance at night, a chief prosecutor removed, and a statute of limitations that closed thousands of cases, while the convicted settled in Greece, Italy and France. Covers Liviu Dragnea and the Social Democratic Party, Elena Udrea and the Gala Bute case, Alina Bica and DIICOT, Remus Truică, Beny Steinmetz and the Băneasa royal farm, Florian Tudor and the Riviera Maya case, and Hexi Pharma and Gazeta Sporturilor.
RUSSIA - FROM BANDITS TO BADGESRussia, 1988 to 2026. In the 1990s bandits sold protection, the roof, to a country whose courts could not enforce a contract; within two decades Russian courts were convicting a police colonel, an FSB officer and Investigative Committee generals of taking bribes. The book follows the money through that transfer: a Kuban district run by one family until twelve people died in a single night; the Moldovan court orders and Baltic banks that carried twenty billion dollars out; a darknet market that sold drugs by dead drop for seven years; and the exchanges and battlefield pardons that sent convicted men home. Covers Sergei Tsapok and the Tsapok gang, Vladimir Barsukov and the Tambov group, Alexander Grigoriev and Russian Land Bank, Kirill Cherkalin and the FSB, and Stanislav Moiseev and Hydra.
RWANDA - FROM TEA TO TANTALUMRwanda, 1990 to 2026: a small, orderly country that jails ministers for bribes and has never put the trade in Congo's minerals before a court. The money begins with tea — 615 tons promised to Egypt for mortars in 1992, state tea-factory trucks lent to the militia in 1994, a tea magnate accused of bankrolling a hate radio, dead untried in The Hague. It runs through an army Congo desk and army coltan earnings UN experts put at $250 million in eighteen months, pale Congolese ore sold as Rwandan, a rebel ministry of mines at Rubaya and a Kigali gold refinery sanctioned by Washington. Covers Félicien Kabuga and RTLM, Michel Bagaragaza and OCIR-Thé, James Kabarebe and the Rwanda Defence Force, Alain Goetz and the Aldango refinery, and Gasabo Gold Refinery.
SAUDI ARABIA - THE HOTEL AND THE SWORDSaudi Arabia, 1970 to 2026. In November 2017 foreign evaluators visiting the kingdom found that it did not confiscate criminal money, while in a Riyadh hotel princes handed the state, it said, more than four hundred billion riyals without a trial. Behind both lies a longer story: oil-boom agents, the Saudi bankers of BCCI, a family money exchange a Cayman court called one of history's largest Ponzi schemes, a prepaid-card scheme, the trade in borrowed names, and the couriers executed for Captagon. Covers Maan Al-Sanea and Ahmad Hamad Algosaibi & Brothers, Adnan Khashoggi and Lockheed, Khalid bin Mahfouz, Ghaith Pharaon and BCCI, Alwaleed bin Talal, Miteb bin Abdullah and the Ritz-Carlton detentions, Saad Aljabri and Sakab Saudi Holding, and GPT Special Project Management.
SENEGAL - SEVEN BILLION OFF THE BOOKSSenegal has never had a coup, and three times its voters have removed a president. This is what happened to public money while that reputation held: a president's cash gift to the IMF's departing man and, sixteen years later, the IMF's discovery of some seven billion dollars of debt off the books; a president's son convicted of illicit enrichment, then pardoned; oil blocks awarded to a company not yet formed; children forced to beg; a dictator's unpaid victims; and two accountings in which each government prosecuted the last. Covers Abdoulaye Wade and the IMF, Karim Wade and the special court, Aliou Sall and Petro-Tim, Lamine Diack and the IAAF, Lat Diop and the national lottery, Hissène Habré and the Extraordinary African Chambers, and Macky Sall and the audit court.
SERBIA - THE STATE'S OWN UNDERWORLDSerbia, 1991 to 2026. Under sanctions, pyramid banks drained citizens' marks while the regime moved money to Cyprus. State-security officers were convicted of political murder, and a special-forces commander of organizing a prime minister's assassination. A cocaine broker's associate was filmed meeting the interior minister; a football gang's leader told a court his group served the state; intelligence officers stand accused of guarding a cannabis farm; and on a railway prosecutors say was corrupted, a station canopy fell and killed sixteen people. Why do so many cases end unanswered? Covers Darko Šarić and his cocaine network, Veljko Belivuk and the Principi, Milorad Ulemek and the Zemun clan, Željko Ražnatović and the Serb Volunteer Guard, Predrag Koluvija and the Jovanjica farm, and Aleksandar Vulin and the US sanctions against him.
SINGAPORE - ONE NEEDLE IN SEVERAL HAYSTACKSSingapore, 1990 to 2026: the cleanest government in Asia, and a safe place for other people's dirty money. In August 2023 four hundred officers raided the homes of ten Fujian-born men and seized about three billion dollars in cash, condominiums, cars, gold and handbags. The book follows that money from illegal gambling in Manila through private banks, family offices and an auction room, beside Singapore's own cases: a refinery robbed by its staff, an oil legend's hidden losses, a minister's gifts, warnings for bribes paid in Brazil. Covers Su Haijin, Su Wenqiang and the 2023 money-laundering convicts with the banks penalized over them, S. Iswaran and Ong Beng Seng, Lim Oon Kuin and Hin Leong Trading, the Shell Bukom syndicates, Keppel Offshore & Marine, and Dan Tan.
SLOVAKIA - THE PRESIDENT'S SON IN THE TRUNKSlovakia, 1995 to 2026. A secret service that, investigators found, left the president's son in the trunk of his car in Austria, and a prime minister who amnestied the case. Gangs tried twenty years late. A wiretap file on a financial group and politicians, never tried. A businessman jailed for forging €69 million in promissory notes, and three trials over the murder of the reporter who followed his money. Then the arrests of a police president and a special prosecutor, and a government that abolished the office behind them. Covers Ivan Lexa and the Slovak Information Service, Ján Kuciak and Aktuality.sk, Marian Kočner and TV Markíza's forged notes, Jaroslav Haščák and Penta, Tibor Gašpar and Norbert Bödör, Antonino Vadalà and his companies, and Mikuláš Černák and the Černákovci.
SLOVENIA - A BILLION THROUGH LJUBLJANASlovenia left Yugoslavia first, joined the euro in 2007 and became the Balkans' star pupil. Its courts and reporters found another country. A defense ministry traded arms under a UN embargo; managers bought their companies with state-bank loans the taxpayer later covered; a former prime minister was convicted over Finnish armored vehicles and freed when the verdict was annulled; one NLB account moved over a billion dollars for sanctioned Iranian banks; and two Slovene brothers, a court found at first instance, ran a Montenegrin cocaine clan's cell and had a man killed. Covers Janez Janša and Patria, Igor Bavčar and Istrabenz, Boško Šrot and Pivovarna Laško, Uroš Rotnik and the TEŠ 6 power plant, Iraj Farrokhzadeh and NLB, and Klemen and Blaž Kadivec and the Kavač clan.
SOUTH AFRICA - THE TENDER AND THE GUNSouth Africa, 1994 to 2026. The country with one of the world's most admired constitutions became, on one index, the seventh most criminal of 193, and the line between its underworld and its state was hard to find. A police commissioner who led Interpol was convicted of corruption. A judicial commission found that a business family helped capture ministries and state companies. A rural bank of burial societies was looted; its chairman went to prison. A retailer's profits proved inflated. A hospital accountant who followed the money was shot; nobody has been charged with paying her killers. Covers Jackie Selebi and Glenn Agliotti, the Gupta brothers and Oakbay, Angelo Agrizzi and Bosasa, Tshifhiwa Matodzi and VBS Mutual Bank, Markus Jooste and Steinhoff, and Vusimuzi Matlala and the Madlanga Commission.
SOUTH KOREA - THE BORROWED NAMESouth Korea, 1961 to 2026: a country with strong institutions, whose courts convicted presidents, a Samsung heir and the prosecutors meant to police them, and whose most powerful convicts kept walking out on pardons, some with forfeitures unpaid. From a four-trillion-won pyramid scheme whose founder left by boat for China, through the generals' slush funds and Samsung's secret tapes, to savers' deposits sunk in a half-built town in Phnom Penh, a stablecoin's collapse and Cambodia's scam compounds, it follows money hidden in borrowed names to the prosecution service's last day. Covers Jo Hee-pal and BMC, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, Lee Kun-hee and Samsung, Kim Woo-choong and Daewoo, Busan Savings Bank and CamKo City, Do Kwon and Terraform Labs, and Kim Keon-hee and the Unification Church.
SPAIN - MONEY IN THE WALLSSpain is the main door for Morocco's hashish and much of Europe's cocaine, the coast where foreign criminal organizations come to rest, and a democracy whose police chiefs, mayors and party treasurers kept turning up in its courts. From the tobacco launches of the Galician estuaries to a Madrid police chief indicted after some twenty million euros were found in his walls, and from Marbella's dissolved town hall to stamp schemes that took the savings of 460,000 people, this book follows the money. Covers Sito Miñanco and the Galician clans, Juan Antonio Roca and Marbella's town hall, Luis Roldán and the Guardia Civil, Francisco Correa and the Gürtel network, Luis Bárcenas and the Partido Popular, José Manuel Villarejo and his Cenyt companies, and Óscar Sánchez Gil and the UDEF.
SRI LANKA - THE EMPTY DOCKSri Lanka, 1977 to 2026. A gang leader shot dead in the dock of a Colombo courtroom, in a killing police say was directed from Dubai. A narcotics unit whose own officers were arrested on allegations of selling seized heroin. A central bank auction in 2015 that put five billion rupees of bonds with the governor's son-in-law's firm, and still has no verdict. An Airbus count headed "Sri Lanka" in a London judgment, an airline chief found dead before trial, a convicted murderer pardoned and sent back to prison, and an elephant laundered through a government registry. Covers Arjuna Mahendran and Perpetual Treasuries, Kapila Chandrasena and Airbus, Duminda Silva and the presidential pardon, Kehelbaddara Padme and the Dubai-based gangs, and Deshabandu Tennakoon and the Sri Lanka Police.
SUDAN - RETURN IT AND GO HOMESudan, 1989 to 2026. In December 1989 a new Islamist regime hangs a young man over foreign currency his family says sat in a safe; thirty years later its president is convicted over millions of euros found in his residence. Meanwhile men with guns become men with businesses: an army whose companies stay off the budget, a security service that buys gold and settles its own corruption cases, a militia whose commander's family runs a gold conglomerate. A European bank clears Sudan's dollars through New York; the gold flows to Dubai. A committee that tries to recover it is undone by a coup, and the armed businesses go to war. Covers Omar al-Bashir and the National Congress Party, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and the Rapid Support Forces, and BNP Paribas.
SWEDEN - THE LIMITS OF TRUSTSweden, 1994 to 2026. The country filed under trust — open records, a welfare state that pays on a signature, one electronic identity for everything — became the European country where fatal shootings rose as nowhere else, where networks hired children by message, and where quieter criminals spent the state's confidence: pension savings switched by telephone, assistance companies tied to gangs, waste dumped, laundering sold to builders. A great bank's Baltic subsidiaries courted high-risk money; an exporter admitted bribery abroad. It follows the money and asks what became of the people who took it. Covers Rawa Majid and the Foxtrot network, Ismail Abdo and Rumba, Swedbank and its acquitted former chief executive Birgitte Bonnesen, Rade Kotur and his gaming machines, Bella Nilsson and Think Pink, and Ericsson and its bribery.
SWITZERLAND - A CLEAN COUNTRY FOR DIRTY MONEYSwitzerland, 1932 to 2026. A country with honest police and little violent crime has spent ninety years keeping other people's money, some of it dirty: a drug ring's cash in Zurich, the millions a Swiss court confiscated in the case of a dictator's daughter, the bribes a former bankers' association president admitted paying to the head of Kuwait's pension fund. Its courts have lately begun to convict, and to acquit, settle and run out of time. This book follows the money to the courtroom in Bellinzona and asks what became of those who took it. Covers Credit Suisse and the Bulgarian trafficker Evelin Banev, Pierre Mirabaud and Kuwait's pension fund, Marc Rich and Glencore, Trafigura and Michael Wainwright, Lombard Odier and Gulnara Karimova, and Michael Lauber and FIFA.
SYRIA - PILLS, RUBBLE AND RANSOMSyria, 1970 to 2026. Four days after the Assad regime fell, fighters opened a warehouse outside Damascus where amphetamine pills were packed into voltage stabilizers for export. The book follows the money behind it: an uncle whose European fortune French courts traced to Syrian public funds, a cousin awarded the telephones, an army division whose security bureau, reporters found, held $80 million in cash, sieges and prisons turned into markets, aid skimmed at the exchange counter. Then the reckoning: death sentences in absentia, a trafficker freed, settlements worth fortunes, and a new state deciding what to do with the old money. Covers Bashar and Maher al-Assad and the Fourth Armored Division, Rami Makhlouf and Syriatel, Rifaat al-Assad, Mohammad Hamsho and Hamsho International, Samer Foz and Aman Holding, and Hassan Daqqou.
TAIWAN - THREE FUNERALSTaiwan, 1949 to 2026. In 1984 the director of Taiwan's military intelligence bureau had a gang leader trained under an alias and sent to California, where his men shot a writer dead; in 2026 police screened every mourner at the funeral of the man who fired the first shot. Between those funerals: gangsters who became council speakers, owners who emptied banks and left, frigate commissions frozen in Switzerland and released to the broker's family, a president's bribe, and a scam industry taking hundreds of millions a day from ordinary Taiwanese. Covers Chen Chi-li and the Bamboo Union, Wong Hsi-ling and the intelligence bureau, Andrew Wang and the Lafayette frigate commissions, Chen Shui-bian and the Longtan land bribe, and Wang You-theng and the Rebar group.
TAJIKISTAN - A TOLL ON EVERY ROADTajikistan, 1992 to 2026. The commanders who won the civil war were paid in ministries and border posts while Afghan heroin crossed the Panj in tons; within twenty years most were in prison, in exile or dead, and the president's family held the commanding heights. The book follows a drug agency whose first director got life, a smelter whose metal was sold through offshore companies with unnamed owners, a central bank that misled the IMF, a toll road, two rescued banks, a murdered banker and apartments in Dubai. Covers Emomali Rahmon and his government, Ghaffor Mirzoyev and the Drug Control Agency, Avaz Nazarov and Ansol, TALCO and Talco Management Limited, Murodali Alimardon and Credit Invest, Shamsullo Sohibov and Faroz, Umarali Quvvatov and Group 24, and Hasan Asadullozoda and Orienbank.
TANZANIA - THE GRAVES THAT STAYED SHUTTanzania, 1967 to 2026: East Africa's calm country, where the largest sums moved through its most trusted institutions. A central bank paid out Sh203 billion in escrow money to a company whose claim a court later held illegal; an emergency power contract went to a firm that could not deliver and cost a prime minister his office; a British arms maker paid its agent nearly a third of a radar's price; a British bank's local partner took a fee for no evident work; elephants fell by more than half. Few senior figures ever stood trial. Covers Harbinder Singh Sethi and Pan Africa Power Solutions, James Rugemalira and VIP Engineering, Richmond Development Company and Dowans, BAE Systems and Shailesh Vithlani, Standard Bank and Stanbic Bank Tanzania, and Harry Kitilya and EGMA.
THAILAND - THE LAND OF INFLUENTIAL PERSONSThailand's organized crime has long run through the state. A subdistrict headman's bodyguard shoots a highway police officer at a dinner attended by two dozen police guests, and the host's state contracts surface. A deputy minister has a waterway deeded to a company and sold to the state for a plant that never runs. An army general is convicted of trafficking the Rohingya held in jungle camps. A police colonel who seized supercars suffocates a suspect on video. Thai companies become the Myanmar junta's leading suppliers, and scam money surfaces in Thai shares. Covers Praween Chankhlai and his construction companies, Vatana Asavahame and the Klong Dan land, Manas Kongpan and the Rohingya camps, Thitisan Utthanaphon and the Nakhon Sawan police, and Supachai Srisupa-aksorn and the Klongchan cooperative.
TOGO - ONE PORT, ONE FAMILYTogo, 1963 to 2026: a deep-water port that serves half the Sahel, and one family in power since 1967. A Dubai businessman says he paid 48 million dollars for a dead general's fortune held in a central bank Lomé does not have; the three men charged were never tried. French judges say a French group's agency ran the president's 2010 campaign at a discount while its Lomé concessions were extended; its chairman faces trial in Paris. Gold that Togo does not mine leaves from a tire dealer's building for Switzerland. And the people jailed were journalists. Covers Faure Gnassingbé and the Port autonome de Lomé, Vincent Bolloré and the Bolloré group, Bertin Sow Agba and Pascal Bodjona, the Ammar Group and Wafex, and Ferdinand Ayité and L'Alternative.
TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO - THE COMMUNITY LEADERSTrinidad and Tobago, 1990 to 2026: an oil and gas state seven miles from Venezuela, where an airport terminal, an insurance empire and a football confederation each became a test of whether the islands could bring their powerful to a verdict, and where, researchers found, the state's own welfare contracts paid gang leaders whom officials called community leaders. From a coup to a clause proclaimed on Independence Day, from a prosecutor shot dead in her car to twenty-two million dollars in seized cash handed back overnight, the record shows investigations everywhere and convictions almost nowhere. Covers Ishwar Galbaransingh and Steve Ferguson and the Piarco airport contracts, Lawrence Duprey and CL Financial, Jack Warner and CONCACAF, Yasin Abu Bakr and the Jamaat al Muslimeen, and Dole Chadee and his Piparo organization.
TUNISIA - THE PRICE OF PERMISSIONTunisia, 1987 to 2026. For twenty-three years the relatives of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali moved into the businesses that needed the state's permission — airlines, car dealerships, banks, telecom licenses, imports cleared at customs — and, by the World Bank's count, took sixteen percent of the country's private profits. The revolution confiscated their fortune and could not manage it. At the Libyan border, customs waved trucks through for fifty dinars; north of Sfax, organizers sold seats on welded boats; and a new president's anti-corruption drive filled the courts while announcing no money recovered. Covers Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Leïla Trabelsi, Belhassen Trabelsi and Groupe Karthago, Sakher El Materi and Princesse El Materi Holding, Marouane Mabrouk and Al Karama Holding, and Imed Trabelsi and Chafik Jarraya.
TURKEY - ONE MINUTE OF DARKNESS1996 to 2026. One November evening a Mercedes hits a truck near Susurluk, and the wreck holds a police academy director, a member of parliament and a fugitive carrying papers in another man's name; that winter, Turks switch off their lights in protest. From that crash the book follows money and the state: owners who emptied their own banks, a gold trader who testified in Manhattan that he paid a minister, a mob boss freed by a pandemic law, a crypto exchange that went dark behind a maintenance notice, a farm sold on a phone, and passports sold for flats. Covers Abdullah Çatlı and the Susurluk affair, Reza Zarrab and Halkbank, Alaattin Çakıcı and the Türkbank tapes, Sedat Peker and his Dubai videos, and Faruk Fatih Özer and Thodex.
TURKMENISTAN - A MANIFESTO IN A GOLDEN BOXTurkmenistan sits on some of the largest gas reserves on earth and for decades kept most of its money outside the budget. Its first president held the revenue in funds under his effective control, with an account in Frankfurt; a German carmaker admitted giving a senior Turkmen official an armored Mercedes and his manifesto, translated, in a golden box. Prosecutors, bankers and oil chiefs who served him were purged on television; several died in prison. Under his successor, reporters traced food and fertilizer contracts to companies tied to the president's nephews, who bought sixteen Dubai flats and have not been charged. Covers Saparmurat Niyazov and the Foreign Exchange Reserve Fund, Daimler and its distributor IPC, Gurbanguly and Serdar Berdimuhamedov, Hajymyrat Rejepov and Caran Holdings, and Igor Makarov and Itera.
UGANDA - IRON SHEETS FOR KARAMOJAUganda, 1986 to 2026. A government sworn to end the looting built every anti-corruption institution donors wanted; the record shows whom they reached. Roofing sheets bought for the poorest region were received by ministers and MPs; money for AIDS patients, vaccines, the postwar north and pensioners moved through officials' hands; a commission found the president's brother took a bribe on helicopters found in a sorry state. Accountants and a junior minister went to prison; senior ministers were acquitted; a Speaker's investigation ended in a general's post: no prosecution. Covers Agnes Nandutu and the Karamoja iron sheets, Anita Among and Parliament, Salim Saleh and the helicopter purchase, Geoffrey Kazinda and the Office of the Prime Minister, Kale Kayihura and the Uganda Police Force, and Alain Goetz and African Gold Refinery.
UKRAINE - PAGES FROM THE RESERVOIRUkraine, 1991 to 2026. A state that owned almost everything at independence was taken, piece by piece, by the people who ran it: a prime minister later convicted of laundering in California, a gas intermediary whose owners stayed hidden for nearly two years, a president whose files were thrown into the reservoir below his estate, a bank whose owners a London court found had defrauded it. Then Ukrainians built the machinery to fight back, and in wartime it reached the Supreme Court, the president's chief of staff and the prosecutor general's own office. Few of the accused have been convicted. Covers Pavlo Lazarenko and the Ukrainian gas trade, Dmytro Firtash and RosUkrEnergo, Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, Ihor Kolomoisky and PrivatBank, and Timur Mindich and the Energoatom case.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - THREE REPORTS IN SIX YEARSDubai sold access — to its creek, free zones, gold market and towers — and for decades asked little about whose money arrived. This book follows what came through, from the 1960s to 2026: a bank manager who sent AED 890 million to a man promising to multiply it, a ruling family that owned most of a collapsing bank, a gold audit whose rules a government free zone changed midway, leaked property records naming fugitives, and the extraditions granted and refused once the world pushed. Did dirty money build the boom? In part. Covers Foutanga Babani Sissoko and Dubai Islamic Bank, Abu Dhabi and BCCI, Amjad Rihan and the Kaloti audit, Arif Naqvi and Abraaj, B. R. Shetty and NMC Health, Balvinder Singh Sahni, and OCCRP and E24's Dubai Unlocked.
UNITED KINGDOM - FROM GOLD BARS TO BITCOINBritain from the Brink's-Mat gold of 1983 to the bitcoin seized in London in 2018: a country with some of the world's best criminal investigators and some of its most permissive machinery for cleaning money. A solicitor brings robbers' gold money into Docklands property; an independent panel finds a form of institutional corruption in the Metropolitan Police's handling of an axe murder; a Bradford jeweler pushes hundreds of millions in cash through a high-street bank; an accountant registers a minister's name to prove nobody checks; a British territory's premier is convicted in Miami. Covers Kenneth Noye and the Brink's-Mat gold, Michael Relton and the Docklands, Curtis Warren and the Jersey cannabis plot, Fowler Oldfield and NatWest, Qian Zhimin and the seized bitcoin, and Andrew Fahie and the British Virgin Islands.
UNITED STATES - WHERE THE MONEY SLEEPSThe United States built the world's machinery against organized crime. It is also where criminal fortunes were made inside lawful institutions and parked with the fewest questions. From a Kansas bank emptied by its own chief executive to utilities that admitted paying for favor in two statehouses, a contractor who bribed Navy officers, a drug company that pleaded guilty twice and an exchange founder pardoned after four months, this book follows the money from 1946 to 2026 and asks why the reckoning fell so unevenly. Covers Larry Householder and FirstEnergy, Michael Madigan and Commonwealth Edison, Leonard Glenn Francis and Glenn Defense Marine Asia, Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road, Changpeng Zhao and Binance, and TD Bank and Da Ying Sze.
URUGUAY - THE SWITZERLAND NEXT DOORUruguay has Latin America's cleanest government, and for a century kept the money its neighbors hid from their own states. This book follows what it sheltered: a secrecy decree with prison for talkative bankers, a family bank's 2002 collapse, ruled fraudulent, tonnes of cocaine leaving the port, a passport issued to a trafficker jailed in Dubai, a president's bodyguard convicted of influence peddling, a cattle fund its auditor called a Ponzi scheme, and a grenade in the chief prosecutor's patio. Covers Sebastián Marset and what US prosecutors call the First Uruguayan Cartel, Rocco Morabito and the 'Ndrangheta, Gerardo González Valencia and Los Cuinis, Eugenio Figueredo and CONMEBOL, Juan Peirano Basso and the Banco de Montevideo, Alejandro Astesiano and the president's security detail, and Pablo Carrasco and Conexión Ganadera.
UZBEKISTAN - THE SECOND POCKETFor a quarter of a century Uzbekistan paid for itself with money it never published: cotton picked by conscripted teachers and doctors, the gap between two exchange rates, and mobile licenses that three foreign telecoms admitted buying with bribes to the president's elder daughter. Then the president died. His successor freed the currency and ended the forced harvest; three prosecutors general in a row were convicted; reporters traced the new era's towers, gas fields and copper contracts to opaque companies. A cough syrup with a bought registration, a boxing president on a US sanctions list, a Swiss trial ended by the clock. Covers Gulnara Karimova and Takilant, Bekhzod Akhmedov and MTS, TeliaSonera and VimpelCom, Rashid Kadyrov and Ikhtiyor Abdullaev, Gafur Rakhimov, Salim Abduvaliev, and the Geneva bank Lombard Odier.
VENEZUELA - TWO PRICES FOR ONE DOLLARVenezuela, 1983 to 2026: a state that controlled every dollar in the country sold dollars cheaply to the people it chose, and the door to its oil money was sold again and again — as currency, bonds, contracts, food, crude and gold. Two of Hugo Chávez's own attendants ran the national treasury and were later sentenced in Florida; a food trader exposed by exiled reporters pleaded guilty in Miami; a prison gang built a business behind walls with a zoo; and the money landed in Coral Gables, Andorra and Switzerland. Covers Alejandro Andrade and Claudia Díaz and the National Treasury, Raúl Gorrín and Globovisión, Alex Saab and the CLAP food program, PDVSA and Banca Privada d'Andorra, and Héctor Guerrero and the Tren de Aragua.
VIETNAM - GREEN WOOD MUST BURNVietnam, 1975 to 2026. A one-party state set out to burn corruption in a furnace and did it in public: a property developer sentenced to death for embezzling twelve and a half billion dollars from a bank she controlled through nominees, two police generals convicted over an online casino run through a front company of the cybercrime police, an intelligence officer who acquired a city's public buildings, a fugitive oil executive taken from a Berlin park. The courts left three questions open: where the cash went, who chose the cases, and what a sentence costs to shorten. Covers Trương Mỹ Lan and Vạn Thịnh Phát Group, Phan Văn Vĩnh and the CNC company, Phan Văn Anh Vũ and Bắc Nam 79, and Trịnh Xuân Thanh and PetroVietnam Construction.
YEMEN - THE WAR THAT PAYSYemen, 1978 to 2026. For thirty-three years Ali Abdullah Saleh ran the Arab world's poorest country through his family; a UN panel reported allegations that he amassed up to $60 billion, and in 2026 two of his sons stood trial in Paris over apartments near the Arc de Triomphe. When his state broke apart, the armed authorities that took its pieces made the war pay: fuel levies, seized companies, payrolls of soldiers who did not exist. A reporter who followed the fuel money died of carbon monoxide poisoning in Sanaa. Covers Ali Abdullah Saleh and his sons Ahmed Ali and Khaled Saleh, the Houthi movement and its judicial custodian Saleh Mesfer al-Shaer, the arms trafficker Fares Manaa, Ahmed al-Essi and the Alessi Group, and the journalist Mohammed al-Absi.
ZAMBIA - SEVENTY-TWO PAIRS OF SHOESZambia, 1985 to 2026: a peaceful copper republic whose largest crimes were committed from office. An intelligence service's London account moved about fifty-two million dollars out of the finance ministry; an English court found a former president liable, a Lusaka magistrate acquitted him, and the shoes his Geneva tailor made were counted in evidence. Then came a pharmacy's eighteen-million-dollar health-kit contract, diverted cash transfers for the poorest, forty-eight houses nobody owned, a minister's helicopters, a scam call center and a jet full of fake gold. Every government prosecuted the last; some went to prison, some walked free, one president died uncharged. Covers Frederick Chiluba and the Zamtrop account, Xavier Chungu and Access Financial Services, Joseph Malanji and his helicopters, and Faith Musonda and the Anti-Corruption Commission.
ZIMBABWE - THE VIP ROUTEZimbabwe, 1965 to 2026: a state born smuggling under Rhodesian sanctions, a liberation government that pardoned its first lying minister within a day, and a central bank that printed a hundred-trillion-dollar note. The book follows the money through the army's Congo joint ventures, the Marange diamond fields cleared by helicopter, the fuel and farm financing of the post-coup government, a sovereign fund that paid 1.6 billion dollars to sellers it will not name, a Johannesburg ballot printer and a gold trade filmed undercover, and counts who was convicted, acquitted, sanctioned abroad or promoted. Covers Emmerson Mnangagwa and the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, Kudakwashe Tagwirei and Sakunda Holdings, Henrietta Rushwaya and the Zimbabwe Miners Federation, Wicknell Chivayo and Ren-Form, Billy Rautenbach and CAMEC, and Uebert Angel and Al Jazeera's Gold Mafia.