October 10, 2025 • 61 mins
When the Financial Times uncovered the billion-dollar Wirecard fraud, it seemed like the story was over. But then the company’s Chief Operating Officer, Jan Marsalek, vanished - leaving behind clues that pointed to a double life as a secret agent.
In his new podcast Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, FT journalist Sam Jones follows Marsalek’s trail through a globe-spanning world of spies, secrets, and corruption. Sam joins Tim to take him behind the scenes of the hunt for Marsalek, share his insights on the future of Russian espionage, and explore what modern spy stories tell us about ourselves.
Find Hot Money: Agent of Chaos wherever you get your podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Audiences have always loved a spy story, be it
The Third Man, the Bourne Identity, or of course, James Bond.
Espionage is a recipe for a box office hit, and
I've recently been enjoying an excellent spy thriller. But unlike
(00:36):
those examples, this one is completely true and the spy
at the center of the story is certainly known James Bond.
My Financial Times colleague Sam Jones, has been on the
trail of an Austrian financial fraudster who ran intelligence networks
across Europe for Russia. The result is the fantastic podcast
(00:59):
Hot Money, Agent of Chaos. I have loved listening to it.
I think you will too. But before we play you
the very first episode on the Cautionary Tales feed, I've
got Sam Jones himself with me to whet your appetite.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Sam, Hey, Tim, nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
It's great to have you, and we should start by
covering your role at the Financial Times. I can't remember
the actual job title, and basically the spy correspondent on you.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I mean that's a fair description. Let's say the cover
description is European security correspondent. But yeah, ah, yes, covering
intelligence and espionage.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
I on any spy stories you can briefly share that
did not involve the subject of agents of chaos.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, a few. I mean I properly used to cover
security and defense for the ft sort of two thousand
and thirteen to eighteen, which was an interesting period. Obviously,
that's when Russia first invaded Ukraine and also when the
crisis in the Middle East with the civil war in
Syria blew up. So there was a lot going on,
(02:00):
especially with Ukraine that felt like the moment where, you know,
the whole kind of geopolitical saga we're now right in
the kind of center of began to first play out,
began to first unschool.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I suppose this this idea of mentioning James Bond or
the old James Bond stories often involved the Soviet Union
and watching some of the films and the sixties, the seventies,
the eighties, you think, oh, well, you know, it's not
like that now, and then you think, well, actually, maybe
it is like that now because Russia is the adversary,
and I guess that's back.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, there was a sort of return to history and
suddenly that's when I think the beginning of the interest
in kind of spying and espionage began to tick up,
and of course there were the Scripple poisonings in the UK,
for the attempted assassination of and Sogo Scripple by the
Russian state, and so suddenly there was this oh my gosh,
what is going on in the shadows. And one of
the striking things was just discovering the extent to which
(02:53):
actually Russian intelligence, aggressive Russian intelligence operations in Europe had
never ended. They were ongoing, and really they were only
just coming to the kind of four in terms of
the headlines, because they'd got so so kind of you know,
far down a road that they got to a point
where they were very happy for are these kind of
aggressive actions to come into the open. So there was,
for example, an ammunition factory in the Czech Republic blown up.
(03:17):
The Russians were willing to do that in Europe, you know.
In Danger Lives, one story we did, which will harken
back to a very classic English spy tale, was we
uncovered an attempt by Russian intelligence to kind of infiltrate
something called the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, which was basically an
academic group in Cambridge staffed largely by ex spies, but
(03:40):
also students have postgrads mostly who were studying you know,
intelligence or security study, and the Russians had sort of
very subtly worked out that this might be a good
recruiting ground, you know, that they could possibly infiltrate this
find people who are interested in intelligence and possibly may
go on to work for Western intelligence, and so they
could potentially find recruits there. So it really sort of
(04:01):
harked back to this kim Philby kind of idea of
agent recruitment going on on the kind of college lawns
of Cambridge University in the UK. Kim philb of course
being the most notorious British traitor of the twentieth century,
who worked his way right to the top of the
secret intelligence service in Britain and who all the while
(04:22):
was a Russian mole. It was a sort of really
striking a rhyme, a historical rhyme if you like. But yes,
being a real kind of rollercoaster in the last ten
years of working out that Russians really, whatever you think
they might be doing, they quite possibly are.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Speaking of roller coasters, we should talk about the series
Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, But first the cautionary Tales theme.
(05:12):
Sam at the center of your series Hot Money, Agent
of Chaos is a character called jan Marcelek, who, on
the face of it seems like a conventional subject for
an FT story. So tell us how you first encountered him.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, that's that's right. So Yan Marsilek was the COO
this big German fintech called Wirecard German financial technology company,
a sort of up and coming web based digital payments company,
but big, you know, really processing millions and millions and
millions of transactions online every day, and so big in
fact that it was actually considering at one point a
(05:47):
takeover of Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest bank. So this really
was an up and coming company. And my colleague Dan
McCrumb here at the FT had essentially discovered or worked
out this company was a huge fraud and he had
spent months years digging into them, trying to work out
(06:08):
what the nature the fraud was. I think he had
a very strong intuition that something was up, and so
he was investigating them for that, and he sort of
came to this conclusion that really the spider in the
center of the web, if you like, was the chief
operating officer was this guy Jan Marcelett, who was very
young relative to other kind of chief operating officers, but
(06:28):
supremely confident and so on.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And we should say this is a this is a
huge story for the Financial Times. It was an amazing,
epic piece of investigative reporting. It absolutely, you know, the
Ft kind of went toe to toe with the German
regulators who who were basically trying to shut the investigation
down because I felt it was a British newspaper trying
to do Germany down and this was kind of the
(06:51):
enron of the day. It was enormous, Absolutely, but it
turns out there's more to it than even than met
the eye.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yes, that's ultimately really how I kind of got entangled
in it was because Dan and his editor Paul Murphy,
the FT's head of investigations, they were reporting this story,
but they also then found themselves essentially under attack. They
were under surveillance, they were being hacked, they were under
constant physical surveillance, and they were the subject of a
very widespread, very expensive dirty tricks campaign. So it stank.
(07:22):
Everything about the company's stank that it made Paul in particular,
I think, begin to wonder whether this was more than
just a fraud. There was something here that was peculiar
and the real You know, the best example of that
was Marcelec himself basically coming to Paul Murphy and offering
him a huge bribe, which is sort of insane because
(07:42):
it's a gamble on Marcelec's part because if Paul says no,
then you've effectively confirmed that the company you're running is
a criminal enterprise. Yeah, and you know, why take that
risk kind of thing? And Paul came to me and
told me about that, And I was working covering intelligence
at the time, and he said, look, I know they
work with a lot of former intelligence people. Maybe you
(08:04):
can ask around, maybe you can work out what's going
on here. Who are the people Marcelect No, what do
we at the FT need to be doing to protect
our own security? So that was the start of it. Yeah,
and it then kind of went in an insane direction
and just continue to get weirder and more surreal.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, it's an enormous risk that Marcelect took in offering
that bribe, but he was very much a risk taker,
and that's something that your series covers over and over again.
I don't want to reveal too much of the series,
but I wanted to ask you about something that you
say which made me think. You say at one point
that spies tell us a lot about our own societies.
(08:43):
So tell us a bit more about that thought.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, I very strongly feel that that spies stories, good
spies stories, good spy fiction, is successful and enduring, kind
of in the same way that good crime fiction might be.
I think, not because there is obviously the palpable interest
and excitement in the adventure, but also because I think
it tells us about flaws in our own societies, or
(09:07):
gaps or weaknesses, vulnerability, and really, you know, spy's stories
are about Okay, yes, they're about betrayal, and they're about
those intense kind of personal relationships, but they also show
how we are vulnerable, how we are exploitable, how people
in our society can undermine us through their own betrayals,
(09:28):
and why they do that. You know, And someone like
Jan Marselex, somebody who was able to reach the kind
of pinnacle of the German corporate world, who developed this
fantastic network of contact all across Europe and beyond, in
government and elsewhere, how is he able to do that,
particularly as somebody who was pretty volatile and risk taking figure.
(09:50):
But that I think illustrates something about our society. You
could look at this and say, look how kind of
aggressive and pernicious Russian influence and agent recruitment activities are.
Or you could say, oh, my gosh, look how vulnerable
we are and how easily people in positions of authority
in our society are swayed by money or the promise
(10:11):
of power, or you know, I'll scratch your about you
scratch mind. Really. I think a lot of modern spying
as well is often a story about corruption, particularly where
it comes to Russia, and that I think is something
that you know, we don't need to blame on Russia.
That's something that's our own to.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Tackle reporting on Russian intelligence. I mean, these guys don't
mess around. Actually that's not quite true. They love to
mess around. They mess around in all kinds of ways.
But the dangerous people and they're unpredictable people. So I'm
just curious about what precautions you have to take as
a reporter traveling around and covering these kinds of stories.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Certainly one is careful online digital security. I suppose where
it spills over is when you become aware that you know, okay,
there's there maybe a physical surveillance element to this too,
So it does affect you personally in that regard. You know,
we know that Marcelek has his agent networks in Europe
have deliberately targeted journalists who have reported on him or
(11:09):
or negatively on the Kremlin. I mean, the most prominent
examples being Christo Grozev and Roman Debrokotov, two journalists who
formerly worked for Belencat and an outpit called The Insider
and reported actually on the Salisbury poisonings and exposed the
Russian agents responsible for those attempted poisoning, and as a result,
Marcelek was one of the people tasked with potentially finding
(11:32):
ways to kill them and kill them quite horrifically as well.
And Marcelek and his network they had these people under
close surveillance, and they were talking about doing quite nasty
things to them, like cutting their heads off in the street,
burning them alive, quite grotesque things as a sort of
sign of retribution. Those elements of it do give one
pause for thought. At the same time, Russian intelligence agencies
(11:55):
and their proxies are prone to misreporting, if you like.
And that's one of the features of authoritarian regimes on
authoritarian intelligence agencies everywhere, is you kind of want to
tell the boss what he wants to hear. And so
there is a natural tendency in Russian intelligence agencies where
I think they overstate their capabilities and ambitions. And with
(12:19):
Marcelek as well, there's this weird element of game playing
and risk taking and venture. And he's a sort of
schroding as spy. You know, he's a very good spy
and he's also simultaneously a terrible spy.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
In what way is he a terrible spy?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
You know, who goes around trying to bribe journalists? Really,
I think if you're successful, you don't exist right, No
one will ever know who you are, and so on
and so forth. Whereas I think Marcelek was driven by
psychology that made him fascinated with spying and willing to
do the bidding of people, you know, in the Kremlin
and elsewhere, and conscious of things like security and surveillance
(12:55):
and stuff like that. But at the same time flamboyant.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
He really liked to live the high life, couldn't they.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Absolutely, he'd fly down to Monaco and Nie all along
the code as who can on team for the week,
n get a little private jet, you know, sometimes take
his girlfriend from Munich there. Sometimes go and meet his
other girlfriend from Russia down there, a woman called Natalia's Labina,
who was actually a former sort of softcore porn actress
(13:24):
who now it is believed as close connections to Russian intelligence.
And you know, he'd just be partying down there on yachts.
There's videos of him sabering champagne in restaurants. He really
loved the kind of ostentation and the glamour of that
kind of lifestyle, which made him all the more peculiar.
I suppose as a.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Spy, champagne saboring should be done in the privacy of
one's own home. But there Ago and he lived across
the road from the Russian consequent which feels like a
bit of a hint.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Right in Munich and sort of you know, make had
people you know, invited into his kind of palatial villa
in Munich and there was like, you know, an air
gapped room and stuff like that. He almost had a
compulsion that people should know. He was entangled with odd things,
you know, in his office in in Munich, for example,
did anyone stop to ask why he had a row
of Russian officers caps on his mantle piece. You know,
(14:17):
it's sort of odd things like that that I think
he wanted the world to know in a way, which
of course is terrible to be a spy.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Well, that feels more like a sort of Hollywood version
of a spy. I mean, James Bond. He'll walk into
some luxury hotel in Monte Carlo and he'll say, the
name's Bond, James Bond. I think, do not maybe use
an alias. I mean, this is extraordinary behavior, but mars
Lek sometimes seemed more like that than a real spy.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yeah, And I think that's this due to observation, because
I think Marslek was kind of cost playing being a
spy in some way and borrowing from the conventions of
spy fiction as much as reality. Not to downplay what
he was doing, because I think this is the important
thing to understand, is that you know, Russia has basically
three spy agencies, and the one that Marslek was most
(15:03):
closely associated with, the gru They don't seek to stay secret.
In fact, a lot of their operation. It's quite good
if they become semi public and listeners might recall, certainly
in the UK with the Salisbury poisonings, when the two
GRU agents who had undertaken that were exposed, you know,
the Russians put them on TV back in Russia saying
they were going to go and look at the cathedral
(15:24):
spire in Salisbury. So they were sort of deliberately taking
the mickey, and they don't mind that. That's okay. They're
kind of active measures, and a proxy like Marslek was
kind of an ideal for them in that regard. He
was arm's length enough but also willing.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yes, and extremely effective in some ways. But another aspect
of his personality that I wanted to ask you about
was his likability. So quite a lot of the people
that you interview, even people who who basically lost everything,
lost all their life savings as a result of trusting Marslek,
they still liked him. I was curious as to whether
(16:02):
you liked him.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yes, definitely. The moral ambiguities are kind of what attracts
me to it. Marcelect has done some terrible things. You know,
he was fascinating as somebody that was so charismatic, so charming,
so to many people, likable and dynamic. How did he
end up going down this path when a large number
of people in Europe were beginning to see Russia as
(16:26):
this kind of destabilizing, aggressive, dangerous threat on their doorstep,
murderous country that Marcelect, highly educated, charismatic Austrian man, went
entirely the other way and decided to kind of essentially
stake everything on Russia. That's fascinating, and I think his
charisma and his dynamism the world were very compelling because
(16:49):
there was that mystery, but also because it wasn't like
you were spending time in the company of a monster.
And you know my colleague Paul, who met him three
or four times, even knowing him to be a fraudster
responsible for the wild card fraud. Assuming that they couldn't
get that story off the ground, Paul would have stayed
in touch with Marcelect because he found him compelling and
interesting more than James Bonds. There's a sort of something
(17:11):
of the Lacare about that perfect spy. You know, characters
like Magnus Pim who are these kind of a moral criminal.
It's a kind of roguishness that's not entirely unlikable. There's
a sort of intro an element of it that's gripping,
an element of that personality that's intriguing and feels kind
of quite human.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Listening to it. One of the things that I learned
was just Wow, the Russians are kind of they'll go
anywhere and they'll try anything. It may or may not work.
I'm wondering what other lessons I should be drawing about Russia.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
They gather information through reconnaissance more than they do through
strict intelligence. Don't get me wrong. They do have the SVR,
a Foreign Intelligence Services, you know, sleeper agents who are
down behind enemy lines for ten twenty years kind of thing.
But the intelligence through reconnaissance is more about pushing, pushing,
and wherever you go, wherever you break through, wherever you
(18:08):
find an advantage, just pouring resources there, Keep pushing, keep pushing,
keep pushing. You need to sort of be testing all
the time, seeing what works, seeing what fails. That's the
sort of reconnaissance element of it, and is much more
about engaging with your objective. You know, things like the
troll farms and all of their online campaigning. You know,
initially I think that was just a sort of let's
(18:29):
see what we can do here, and then it worked,
and then they kept you know, more resources went into it.
And I think that that's the kind of thing that
they do. And I also think that some you know,
another lesson is that we tend to have discrete outcomes
in intelligence operations. Here's what we want to achieve. Is
it achieved, tick, let's do it. Whereas the Russians, by virtue,
(18:51):
I think quite a lot of Soviet thinking. But even
before that, I think it's deeply ingrained just in the
whole strategic thinking of the country. Being a country that's
so big and dominated by such a tiny ruling cast,
they don't think of conflict, for example, as something that
is on or off. We are at war, we are
at peace. They think of everything more as a sort
(19:14):
of constant competition. People that worked in Russian intelligence services,
that was the sort of milk that they imbibed when
they were younger, and that's exemplified in Putin. You know,
his entire kind of intellectual worldview was honed within the KGB.
So yeah, I think that's the other key thing to
think about the Russians is they will never go away.
(19:35):
For example, if we have cease far in Ukraine. That
is not the end of the conflict with the West.
You know, it's not just a small localized issue for Putin.
It's about a whole broader range of issues to do
with NATO, to do with Russia's role in Europe, to
do with his belief that you know, there's him, there's China,
and there's America, and everyone else is just zones of
(19:57):
influence for those three. So I think you know that
he won't. You know, we should definitely have in mind
that the Russians won't be seeing a cease far as
the end of anything. It will be the beginning of
a new phase of conflict with Europe, which might move
back towards you know, other other kind of non violent means.
(20:17):
It might be economic, it might be political pressure, it
might be more espionage, more online misinformation, that kind of thing.
But it will not stop. There will be no kind
of enduring, you know, period of concord between Europe and Russia.
I don't think, which is a pretty bleak outlook, but
that would definitely be my my perspective.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Sam, I'm curious, is there anything that you couldn't quite
squeeze into the podcast that you wished you could.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
I think what we reported on with Marcelek and what
he is up to, we covered, you know, the tip
of the iceberg. There was some fantastic little anecdotes that
I was sad didn't get in. I mean, one of
my favorite moments really was this point where Paul Murphy,
the FT's investigation editor, discovered that there was this huge
physical surveillance operation against him and Dan McCrumb in London,
(21:06):
that they were being tailed, and that also a lot
of his contacts, a lot of his sources were being
tailed by people in London. Anyway, one of the kind
of more more roguish sort, shall we say, of these
sources confronted one of his trails and basically pushed this
guy up against the wall and said, you know, tell
me who you're working for kind of thing. And found
out that this guy was working for the former head
(21:29):
of Libyan intelligence, who was this chap called Ramiella Baby.
So Paul thought, okay, well I'll just get in contact
with mister Obaby, and he did and discovered that this
guy was quite the sort of playboy really and often
to be found in Mayfair hotels. So the next thing
(21:49):
Paul knows is that he sat at his desk in
the ft and he gets a call from reception saying,
mister Murphy, we've got a huge bunch of flowers down
here for you. And Paul's Baffle doesn't know what on
earth this is to do with. And he comes down
to reception and he finds dozens and dozens of red
roses and a little note and it says, dear mister Murphy,
(22:11):
I'm so sorry for the inconvenience we've caused you. I'm
a big fan of your work. Your sincerely, Rammy Elbaedy.
And it kind of illustrates this weird, kind of semi
playful world in which everything's taken a little bit lightly.
You know, yeah, we spied on you, but you know,
here have some red roses. Yea.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So it's the head of Libyan intelligence, just to be clear.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah, yeah, And by these roses came along with a
card for like a gift voucher at the Dorchester Spa
and for like hundreds hundreds of pounds.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Were they sort of a playful apology or a kind
of reveiled.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Threat, Well exactly so. And this is the best bit, right,
So these roses and the spa voucher had actually been
sent from the Dorchester's concierge service because mister Obedy likes
to stay there, and inadvertently or maybe not, they had included,
by accident as well, the sort of the email, the
original email from mister Baedy to the Dorchester concierge team
(23:06):
with the instructions, you know, please send to the Financial
Times six dozen red roses. And in this email, which
has sort of scrumpled up in the bottom of the package,
it also said please make sure that they are extra
thorny roses, which I thought was like a particularly piquant
little touch. I mean, it is a bit of a
(23:26):
veiled threat. But I think the kind of game playing
element to it, that sort of that sense in which
everything is a bit of a game and everything's up
for grabs and who cares about, you know, the seriousness
of things. That's definitely a thread that kind of runs
all the way through. And it was true of Marcelek
as well. I think he loved to play games.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Well, there you go. If that story wasn't even good
enough to make it into the podcast, you know how
good the podcast must be. It's called Hot Money, Agent
of Chaos, and you can find it wherever you get
your podcasts. I've been talking to Sam Jones. Thank you Sam,
Thank you sim And you don't need to go anywhere
to hear the first episode, because we are going to
(24:06):
play it for you after this break.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
It's a winter's day in twenty eighteen. Paul Murphy is
standing in front of the mirror of the gents lavatory
at work. He's changing for lunch.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
I kind of stopped wearing ties, but I think I
put a tie on for that occasion.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Paul is in his mid fifties. He's got a slightly
grizzled look about him. You wouldn't pick him out in
a crowd, but that's an advantage in his line of work.
In his hands, Paul is holding a small silver disc
about the size of a penny. He takes his shirt off,
grabs a piece of medical tape and fixes this disc
(24:49):
onto his shoulder because this disc is a tiny microphone.
He slips his white shirt back on, puts a jacket
on top, and with one last glance in the mirror,
he's ready for lunch. Paul is the head of investigations
at the Financial Times in London. He takes a cab
(25:10):
across Town to Mayfair, to a venue called forty five
Park Lane.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
It's it's you know, it's one of those places that
is priced to keep out to ordinary people. You know.
It's all glass windows and bling and mirrored interiors and
very few customers, very few. It's Dubai style essentially. As
Paul walks in, he tries to keep his cool. Despite
(25:38):
four decades in journalism, this is a first for him.
He's never actually worn a wire himself. It's very, very
nerve wrecking. You know, I've got a bug on me.
You know, I didn't want our undercover team to get discovered.
That would be hugely embarrassing, so I was, you know,
it's nervous.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
The Maitre d Escot's Paul across the room, and there,
rising from his chair, smiling courteously and greeting Paul with
a handshake, is the man he's come to meet, jan Marcelek.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Very slim, athletic, razor, sharp blue suit.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Paul came here to set a trap to get this
successful businessman on tape, But by the time they finished
their meal, he wonders if he's the one who has
walked into a trap.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
If I'm honest, I felt a bit amateurish. You know,
we were out of our depth. This guy was very
very slick, controlled, careful, polished, and you know I'm not.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
My name is Sam Jones, and I'm a journalist with
the Financial Times. I'm a foreign correspondent based in Central Europe.
This lunch you've just heard about. It's the unexpected beginning
of an investigation that has, in one way or another,
preoccupied me for the past five years. But at the
center of it is the man in the sharp blue suit,
(27:13):
Yan Marceilek, a man who I discovered is so fascinated
by risk and deceit that one identity, one life wasn't
enough for him. I find it's often people like this,
the most unusual people who reveal universal truths, the fact
(27:33):
that we're all inventors of our own personal narratives, how
fictions can be stitched together to create realities. This tale
begins in London and Munich, but leaps across the globe,
from Libya to Austria, from Bulgaria to Afghanistan, from the
Courdazure to Moscow. Yan Marcelex's life is a window into
(27:58):
a hidden world of geopolitical power games, games which in
ways big and small govern our lives, games which have
never felt more relevant or the players of them harder
to fathom. This is a story about espionage, about Europe,
about Russia, and ultimately America. From the Financial Times and
(28:23):
Pushkin Industries. This is Hot Money, Season three, Agent of Chaos,
Episode one, The Bride. Paul Murphy hired me to work
(28:46):
for the Ft seventeen years ago. It's been a long
time since Paul's my actual boss, but he was and
still is a mentor to me. All of my best
habits in journalism and some of my worst ones I've
picked up from Paul pretty much since starting my career.
Every couple of months or so I end up at
(29:06):
lunch with him in Sweetings. It's a noisy, crowded fish
restaurant deep in the city, London's Financial district. It's distinctly
old school. Even a bowler hat wouldn't look out of place,
and coming here it underscores less than number one in
the Paul Murphy school of journalism.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
You have to get out of the bloody office. Get
out of the bloody office. Young reporters in particular think
that you can do everything digitally, but actually you get
a lot more information of somebody. Face to face, you
have to win people's trust, and one way of doing
that is have lunch with people. It's a great social
setting to develop a relationship with somebody.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Who you need them to trust you. I want to
paint a bit of a picture for you about Paul,
because it pays in this story to try and get
the measure of people's character, or at least to try
and understand the version of themselves people present to the world,
and why although Paul spends a lot of time at lunch,
he's definitely not just another city soak. Most people tend
(30:12):
to miss the little silver ring he's wearing, a skull
designed by his daughter. People miss a lot about Paul,
but that's part of the trick. He's very good at
being underestimated, and because of that, he's also very good
at getting people to trust him, to talk to him,
and to give him information. To understand why I was
(30:35):
drawn into this story, you need to know a bit
about the reporting that was dominating Paul's life. Back in
twenty eighteen, he and his star reporter Dan McCrumb were
neck deep investigating a German company called Wirecard, a company
that was run by the man in the razor sharp
blue suit, the man whom Paul would eventually meet for
lunch in Mayfair, jan Marcelek Wacard ran the financial plumbing
(31:00):
behind billions of online transactions. It was so successful at
that point it was even secretly plotting a takeover of
Germany's biggest bank. So to the world, Warkard was a
booming digital payments company. To Paul and his reporter Dan,
Warkard was a huge fraud, and they were well on
the way to proving it. But it was no normal
(31:23):
fraud because for months Paul and Dan they suspected they'd
been under intense surveillance, all directed by someone at Warkard
from its base in southern Germany.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
I mean, it's kind of like, almost sounds silly to
recount it, but you know, we were paranoid about being
followed around London. We would get on and off tube
trains quickly, just in case somebody was getting on the
same tube trainer as us. We would turn off our
phones so that a location couldn't be tracked.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Dan had already had his emails hacked and some of
them leaked online. It was an attempt to embarrass and
discredit him. There had been a mounting and seemingly coordinated
attack on his reputation on social media. When Paul told
me all of this over a series of lunches at Sweetings,
I guess he was doing so because he wanted to
know if I had any contact in private intelligence or
(32:19):
even in the actual intelligence services people who might be
able to help, because the subject I really write about,
the subject that has become my specialism at the FT
is spying. Paul was probably also telling me out of
frustration because back then he and Dan had hit a
bit of a wall in their reporting. They'd published all
(32:41):
they could about Warkard based on the evidence they had
gathered so far, but they still didn't have a smoking gun,
and Wakard's aggressive lawyer's shillings had meanwhile come down hard
on them. Dan had only just avoided a ruinous lawsuit.
It wasn't a great time. It was this sense that
what have we got ourselves into? That was like a
(33:03):
real low moment. Maybe I've got myself into a bit
too much hot water here.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
You do start to worry what you've sort of brought
down on your family. It was quite oppressive. There was
this turning point for Dan. One of his sources rang
him up to tell him he'd been roughed up on
the street by two thugs right outside his children's school.
They demanded to know if this source had passed on
confidential information about Wirecard. Hearing this sent Dan into a
(33:32):
bit of a tailspin, because suddenly he was worrying about
the safety of his own family. My first thing was
I sort of go home and obsessively change every single
one of my passwords, start checking all the security on
my house. I mean, the worst moment is we had
just moved into this rented house and I suddenly realized
(33:54):
I haven't checked the lock on this patio door at
the back of the house, which we'd never used, and
it just slides straight open, like our house had essentially
been unlocked for the last couple of months. And at
that point I really did start freeing out about security
who might be after us, and I basically became really paranoid.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
It was right at the peak of this paranoia that
something even stranger happened, something that led to that lunch
at forty five Park Lane, Paul was talking to one
of his oldest sources.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
And we got onto the subject of wire Card. Just
a completely you know, innocent, relaxed conversation, and this guy
just suddenly said, you know that they'll pay you a
lot of money to stop writing about them. And I
kind of laughed, and he stopped me and said, no,
(34:49):
they will pay you ten million dollars to stop writing
about them.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
I don't know if you work in the kind of
job or live the kind of life where you've ever
been bribed, but even as a journalist for the ft,
this doesn't really happen, let alone for such a ridiculous
sum of money. I mean, for ten million dollars, what
would you do? And as such, it takes Paul a
while to realize that this is a serious offer. How
(35:16):
do you know this? He asks? Through my son, his
source tells him he's got to know someone at Warkard
pretty well. They've been out together a few times carousing.
He's called Jan Marceilek, and then Paul's source he says
something which makes Paul clock that this offer is real.
Marcilek is paying this guy more than two hundred thousand
dollars just to convey the message. You should meet him
(35:40):
for lunch, he suggests. So what does Paul say, Tell
me when? And tell me where Paul has no intention
of taking the bribe, but this back channel offer it
seems to confirm everything they suspect about Warcard. Absolutely confirmed
all our suspicions, such word that the company is a
(36:01):
criminal enterprise.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Absolutely, this was kind of tangible evidence.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
All they need now is for mar Select to offer
the bribe himself and to get that on tape. It's
time for the FT to mount its own surveillance operation.
So that day at forty five Park Lane, the formal
introduction's over, it's time to order stakes, the overpriced speciality
(36:26):
of this place around one hundred and seventy pounds for
a six ounce filet mignon. Right from the start, though,
Paul begins to feel that Marcelek isn't quite what he
was expecting. Paul is on edge, but he's not alone.
To his relief, it's not long before he spots his
undercover support team, three FT colleagues who pose as wealthy ladies,
(36:48):
catching up over lunch. They snag a table just next
to him, and they look pretty convincing. One of the
reporters places her handbag on the back of a chair.
Hidden inside, a camera films the lunch at an angle
catching Yan Marcelek. In profile, you can hear the tenor
(37:10):
of his voice, but the background noise means it's impossible
to make out his words. To me. Watching this footage back,
it's striking how animated he is. He turns from side
to side, addressing everyone at the table. As he talks.
His face lights up. He's sort of holding court, emphasizing
(37:30):
his words with expansive hand gestures. He almost looks like
a politician. The longer the conversation goes on like this,
the more clear it becomes to Paul that Marcelek is
the one in control. This guy is expansive and engaging, charming,
but not at all defensive. There's no trace of anger
(37:52):
or guilt or care. He gently protests about the FT's
unfair coverage of Wakade, as if it's been an inconvenience,
but his whole tone seems to be saying, let's put
this behind us. As they settle into the meal, Paul
nudges the conversation into more dubious terrain. You get to
(38:13):
get something incriminating, even if it's just a hint of
something on tape and on camera.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
I certainly talked about the kind of the aggression that
the business had shown us. And we also talked about
where the journalists were corrupt, and he absolutely assured me
that he knew that journalists could be bought. I remember saying,
we don't take bribes. And I remember him very specifically saying,
(38:40):
I know.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
That, Paul.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
I know you don't have seen evidence that you don't
take bribes. And I thought, Hugh, you've seen my bank account.
I remember the kind of jolting that he was kind
of like stating this so openly.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
But the conversation continues in this vein nothing concrete. The
killer offer of a bribe Paul had been hoping for, Well,
it's clear that marthill K is far too savvy an
operator to make it. Here and now at their first meeting.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Pretty quickly, you know, came to the conclusion that I
wasn't going to be offered a bribe in front of
these people.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
A bit of a damp squip in a way, yes,
it was. So Paul is now left wondering, what does
Marcelek want from him? Why has this meeting happened if
he's not actually going to make him some kind of offer.
The lunch lasted about ninety minutes, and at the end,
Marcelek insisted on paying and.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Pulled out a gold credit card, a novelty credit card
of solid gold.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Was he a bit of a show off?
Speaker 3 (39:48):
Well? Yes, you know, we're in one of the most
expensive restaurants in London eating kind of two hundred quid
steak and he was paying for the bill with a
gold credit card. So yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
As Paul leaves the restaurant, he almost laughs at himself,
having thought he'd be heading back with something explosive. He
also realizes that this experience actually hasn't been a busted flush.
Far from it. Meeting Yan mars Lek has only intrigued
Paul Moore. It's put him into three D. There's something
about mass Lec he can't quite put his finger on.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
I felt, admit, somebody who was very controlled and confident,
who was almost certainly corrupt. I basically said, can we
do that again?
Speaker 2 (40:37):
And indeed Paul does meet with him again. That's coming
up after the break. When Paul first started telling me
about Wacard, I think I treated it all as entertaining
(40:59):
table talk. Paul is a great teller of stories and
I always enjoyed hearing the gossip about what his investigations
team was up to. After he told me about meeting Martlek, though,
something began to needle at me, just a feeling about
what kind of person Marslek was, A feeling I couldn't
pin down until I heard about the second lunch. One
(41:22):
month after that lunch at Park Lane, Paul met Marcelek again,
this time without undercover colleagues or secret cameras. It was
just the two of them. They met at the Lanesborough,
another high end hotel in London.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
We talked about geopolitics, We talked about technology, we talked
about finance, you know, we talked about the state of
the world. He had interesting opinions and information on all
these things. If I'm honest, at this stage, I I'd
become fascinated by this character because he seemed to know
(41:58):
so many people, and I kind of I was thinking, well,
you know, he's probably not going to offer me a bribe.
We're not going to just catch him. He's not that stupid.
This guy is smart and he knows people and he
has information.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
At this point, did it occur to you that he'd
charmed you in any way?
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yes, it did, But he was a charming man.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Did you like him?
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Yeah, yes, I liked him.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
If Wire Card, if you hadn't have known it to
be a fraud, do you think you would have sought
to stay in touch with him?
Speaker 3 (42:35):
I absolutely absolutely. I mean, in actual fact, you know
my thinking after that second lunch I did. I actually thought,
I'm going to, you know, develop this guy as a source.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
What did you think he was hoping to get out
of a relationship with you?
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Actually, it was very clear we posed an existential risk
to wire Card. He knew that by you know, building
a relationship directly with me, that he could potentially stop
as writing about them, or at least did get the
(43:14):
kind of intel in advance about what we were thinking.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
So, as Paul tells me about all of this, the
feeling I get most is that a game is afoot,
and both Paul and Marcelek are enjoying playing it. They've
both established rapport, they're both working to build trust, but
they also test each other, push try to implicate each
(43:42):
other in this polite conversation. And all of this grips
me because in it I see so much of the
kind of psychology that I've spotted, glimpses of covering intelligence
and espionage. I recognize the shape of this kind of interaction,
a certain amused, matter of fact detachment from things despite
the stakes. Think about it. Marcelek is launching happily with
(44:04):
a man who is trying to destroy the company he
works for and put him in jail. And Paul, well,
in a funny way, Paul is being encouraged into a
minor transgression, something that almost felt to me like a
textbook trick from an intelligence recruitment manual, an indiscretion that
might later make you vulnerable. Because Paul does all of
(44:26):
this works marcilect behind the back of the lead reporter
on the Wirecard Project, Dan McCrum. Why were you dealing
with Marcilec and not Dan.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Dan and I are different characters. Dan is a guy.
You know, he's tall, and he has all his features
in the right place, and if your daughter brought him
home as a boyfriend, he'd be really happy. He's a
good guy. He's intelligence, he's articulate, he's well educated. But
actually actually, but actually, Dan is lethal. Dan's like kind
(44:58):
of smiling axe man. He's dangerous.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
He's friends.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
Yes, he's absolute forensic and he won't let it lie.
And you know, I have a different style, all right.
I'm much after and you know, chat people up, and
you know, I present myself as being very kind of clubbable.
Do you know all journalists have different styles.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
I mean, I think you're probably more comfortable playing a
role as well. No, possibly, yes, reading between the lines,
I think probably. A doubting part of him was also
wondering whether the Waquard investigation was at a dead end.
The threat of a lawsuit from Shillings meant their reporting
had stalled, and if that was the case, it might
(45:39):
be worth Paul pursuing Marcelek as a source of his own,
someone who could help him with other stories. Then, around
six months after that second meeting, Paul gets a call
from an intermediary. Marcelect conveys that he has something very
interesting to offer documents. He hints at what they're about,
(46:00):
and it sounds outlandish, but it's enough of a hint
that Paul agrees to Marcelect's suggestion that he fly out
to Munich, where my select lives, in order to get them.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
I kept it completely private. Only just the managing editor
that THEFT knew what I was doing.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
They meet at the Kiefer Schenka it's a Munich institution,
patrician reassuringly expensive white tablecloths, paneled rooms, but warm and
efficient service, and it's practically marce Lek's house. Restaurant.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
Yan was waiting for me outside. We went in. We
had a little private room. I remember having salmon with Caviat.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
And as they talked, marce Lek pushed a brown folder
full of papers across the table towards Paul.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
Because it's in the restaurants, I couldn't pull them out
and start reading through them. I just had to kind
of politely say, thank you very much, I'll have a
read of those. And then we just had a kind
of stilted, awkward lunch conversation. We talked about his bad back.
If I'm honest, I was trying to get out of
the lunch as quickly as possible because I wanted to
see what was in the folder.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
They finished lunch, marcele X said he had to go
back to the office.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
The restaurant has lots of kind of separate bars and rooms,
and so I literally went down some stairs and found
myself a little corner and sat down and opened the folder.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
These documents they related to something that happened in the
UK that spring, something awful which had shocked the whole country.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
Yesterday afternoon, passers by noticed two people apparently unconscious on
a bench in Salisbury, the area of the Salisbury poisonings.
As a police presence remains here in the city whilst
they investigate. Residents and visitors to the city have been
reacting to the news.
Speaker 5 (47:53):
Yeah, just completely surprised and shocked that something can happen
like this in Salisbury.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
An assassination attempt against a former spy using one of
the deadliest nerve agents ever created a chemical that only
a hand full of government specialists knew about, Novichok two
thirty four. The spy was found half dead alongside his
unconscious daughter, but thanks to some remarkable medical work, they
both survived. Another local resident, a mother of three, did not.
(48:26):
She died after coming into contact with the novichok. It
had been hidden by the assassins in a perfume bottle.
The intended target was soon identified as a Russian intelligence
officer who had fled to Britain. In twenty ten, Prime
Minister Theresa May announced to a shocked parliament that Moscow
was to blame.
Speaker 5 (48:48):
The government has concluded that the two individuals named by
the police and CPS are officers from the Russian Military
Intelligence Service, also known as the GRU.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
The GRU the main directorate Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency,
an organization with goals that should have consigned it to
Cold War history misinformation, civil disorder, violence, assassinations. Under Vladimir
Putin's long watch, the GIU has quietly grown in power
(49:24):
and influence. In the weeks that followed the poisoning, Russia
aggressively denied its involvement. The Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons meanwhile launched its own investigation, sending its experts
to Salisbury to pour over the evidence. They produced a
highly classified dossier based on shared intelligence and chemical analysis
(49:47):
from the site. The dossier also included Russia's own version
of events. These were the documents Paul now had in
his hands.
Speaker 3 (49:57):
It was fascinating to read all this kind of close detail,
you know, the Russian version of the story. And then
the other very interesting part of the documents was the
actual formula for Novi.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
Chok, the chemical diagram for the poison, a technical outline
for something that had been kept hidden from the world
for decades. A weapon of mass destruction. So what have
(50:38):
we got Part one, two, three for five sort of
staple chiefs of paper. Those documents that Marcelett handed over
that day at the Kiefashenka. Paul showed them to me
and well, they're internal documents from the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And these have been sort of
illegally photocopied, right also, I think their photocopies anyway.
Speaker 3 (50:59):
Yeah, they're all photocopies, except that one is a PowerPoint presentation.
They've all got barcodes on them.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
And this sort of big stamped watermark which.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
This print out may contain OPCW confidential information warning. Yeah,
they're all different copy numbers though as well, aren't they.
That's one of serious deine. This one's twenty one.
Speaker 2 (51:23):
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is an
international body based in the Hague. Almost all of the
world's big military powers are signatories. Its job is to
police and monitor weapons like nove chok, to ensure they
are never ever used. What was going through your head
when you kind of first pulled this out of the
(51:43):
manila envelope that they were all in.
Speaker 3 (51:47):
Well, I was looking for a story you know, the
Salisbury poisoning had been headline news for weeks on end.
Suddenly I had, you know, what clearly were kind of
classified documents pertaining specifically to that event. There had to
be a story in it, you know, That's what I
(52:07):
was after, And I was struck at how detailed and
careful and yet completely fanciful the Russian version of events was.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
In the documents. The Russians made the case that the
British had manufactured novichok because Solibury is just down the
road from Port and down a highly secure military research base,
and the Russians, they argued that the British government had
somehow leaked the navichoc from its own chemical research lab.
Speaker 3 (52:41):
You know, I asked him, you know, point blank, where
did he get this information?
Speaker 2 (52:45):
What did he say?
Speaker 3 (52:46):
He said he got it from a friend. And he
did actually say that, you know, if I wanted further information,
I should try him in future, that I'd be quite
surprised at the sort of information he could access.
Speaker 2 (53:00):
So this was sort of like a little bit of
an opening, kind of showing his wares, you know that
if you wanted to keep him on side, and he
could push other material your way.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
Yeah, absolutely that He was basically saying, look, I have
friends in interesting places. I can help you in the future.
We were building a relationship on both sides.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
While all of this unfolded. Dan McCrumb, the lead reporter
on the Warcard investigation, hadn't been sitting still. In fact,
he'd just found his very own treasure trove of documents,
and these documents they would change everything because they finally
gave Dan the ammunition he needed to prove that Wirecard
was a fraud and that Marcelek was at the center
(53:49):
of it. So when Paul got back to London and
Dan told him all of this, Paul knew it was
time to go back on the offensive against Wacard directly,
and also therefore that it was time to fess up
to Dan and to tell him he'd been secretly lunching
with Marcelek over the past few months. All you know,
(54:10):
he'd gone to meet Marcelect for lunch and he was
kind of cultivating this parallel kind of you know, relationship
with Marcelek. When did you find out about that and
what was your first thought?
Speaker 4 (54:22):
Oh man, there are moments in life when you were
taken by surprise. I basically think he hadn't wanted to
like blow my mind whilst I was focused on getting
the story, because the important thing was to get the
story out. But it had reached the point where it
(54:42):
was sort of becoming embarrassing that he hadn't mentioned that
he had quietly been dining with Yan Marslek. I'm like, sorry, what,
But then he goes he's been flashing around top secret
documents with a recipe for Navichok on them. I think
my reaction was if he had just tried to tell
(55:03):
me that Marcelek had faked the moon landings. It was
so completely out of left field that you're like, sorry,
what did you just say?
Speaker 2 (55:24):
To be clear, we had no evidence that Marcelect actually
had anything to do with carrying out the poisonings, but
the fact that he even had these documents was a bombshell,
not only because the documents made it clear that Marcelek
was entangled with something besides just a huge corporate fraud,
but also because Marcelect had effectively chosen to disclose this.
(55:47):
Marcelek pulled the spotlight onto himself, and it made us
realize how little we knew about him at all at
that point.
Speaker 3 (55:55):
We just kind of had this sense that marcell it
was this kind of man of action and was mixed
up somehow in Viennese politics.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
Wikard's aggressive surveillance of Paul and Dan intensified, and they
managed to trace it back to a private security company
in Vienna, the capital of Austria and Marcelec's home city.
Paul and Dan were now going to spend the next
few months battling to prove the fraud with the new
documents Dan had received for me, I was about to
(56:27):
start a foreign posting in Switzerland and in Austria. If
I was going to be on the ground, Paul thought,
then I could surely make some inquiries.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
We already knew that there was a big Vienna angle
to all this. We just didn't know what the angle was.
We just didn't know which doors you had to not gone.
We didn't know who you needed to get to.
Speaker 2 (56:52):
Yeah, well it worked. I remember thinking you were mad.
I just thought, okay, all right, I'm just going to
go to Austria and start talking to people about Mars
slect But you know, you were right. Sometimes it's the smallest,
most unpromising, unexpected little thread that you pull on that
suddenly unravels something. Sometimes that thread is just an intuition,
(57:16):
a feeling about someone, a sense that there's definitely something
more here I don't know about, but that I recognized
the shadow of. As it turned out, this particular trace, well,
it would slowly unravel into a story that wasn't just
the sordid tale of one well connected fraudster, but instead
the tale of one of the biggest spice scandals to
(57:37):
have hit Europe since the Cold War.
Speaker 3 (57:41):
To this day, I remember that first note coming back
from you, just saying that you needed a secure channel
to communicate. The detail you put in that first note
was just mind boggling, absolutely shocking. It was like a
whole world just opened up. You know, this was no
longer just about some weird German corporate There was this
(58:05):
kind of huge, geopolitical kind of side to the story
that was only just coming into view.
Speaker 2 (58:14):
Maybe you've felt in recent years that the world is
a less certain place, that from the background there are
threats or worries you'd never had to think about before
that are suddenly present, Wars that look like they might
tip out of control, radical politicians tearing at the threads
of civil society, lies turned into truth by money. Well,
(58:35):
this story is, in some senses an accounting of that,
a story that can sometimes make you realize how tissue
thin the idea of a stable, law abiding society can
be one that's governed by economic, political, and moral rules
we've all agreed on. It's a story about what kind
of people get drawn into the world on the other
side of that, and what kind of world that is
(58:56):
a space carved out by crime and corruption, where money
and power are unchecked by laws or borders or markets.
That kind of world might sound terrifying, but to some
people it's irresistible. To some people. It's not an alternative
world at all. It's the real world coming up this
(59:21):
season on Hot Money.
Speaker 4 (59:23):
I know politics is corrupt, I know everything and all
that and all that I believe to know that.
Speaker 3 (59:27):
But this is too much, I thought. I hope that
he will talk to you and you will be able
to investigate on it, and perhaps misdeeds and misbehavior stopped
very fast. Actually started then talking about his experience in Syria.
Speaker 2 (59:44):
He definitely has a view that he's operating with complete
freedom to do whatever he likes.
Speaker 1 (59:50):
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
Speaker 2 (59:54):
The decision was very simple.
Speaker 5 (59:55):
It was a choice between being killed or in prison,
and the other option was just to try to get
real freedom.
Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
How much of it was an act? How much was genius,
how much was learned, how much was instinctive?
Speaker 3 (01:00:10):
I often ask myself now, did I know the true
jan at all?
Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Hot Money is a production of The Financial Times and
Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me Sam Jones.
The senior producer and co writer is Peggy Sutton. Our
producer is Izzy Carter. Our researcher is Marine Saint. Our
show is edited by Karen Shakergi, fact checking by Kira Levigne.
(01:00:43):
Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de Olivia,
with additional sound design by Izzy Carter. Original music from
Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet. Our show
art is by Sean Carney. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley,
Amy Gains McQuaid and Matthew Garahan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy.
(01:01:09):
Special thanks to Ruler Klaffe, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey,
Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hanson, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner,
Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohane. I'm
Sam Jones.
Pushkin. Audiences have always loved a spy story, be it
The Third Man, the Bourne Identity, or of course, James Bond.
Espionage is a recipe for a box office hit, and
I've recently been enjoying an excellent spy thriller. But unlike
(00:36):
those examples, this one is completely true and the spy
at the center of the story is certainly known James Bond.
My Financial Times colleague Sam Jones, has been on the
trail of an Austrian financial fraudster who ran intelligence networks
across Europe for Russia. The result is the fantastic podcast
(00:59):
Hot Money, Agent of Chaos. I have loved listening to it.
I think you will too. But before we play you
the very first episode on the Cautionary Tales feed, I've
got Sam Jones himself with me to whet your appetite.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Sam, Hey, Tim, nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
It's great to have you, and we should start by
covering your role at the Financial Times. I can't remember
the actual job title, and basically the spy correspondent on you.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I mean that's a fair description. Let's say the cover
description is European security correspondent. But yeah, ah, yes, covering
intelligence and espionage.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
I on any spy stories you can briefly share that
did not involve the subject of agents of chaos.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, a few. I mean I properly used to cover
security and defense for the ft sort of two thousand
and thirteen to eighteen, which was an interesting period. Obviously,
that's when Russia first invaded Ukraine and also when the
crisis in the Middle East with the civil war in
Syria blew up. So there was a lot going on,
(02:00):
especially with Ukraine that felt like the moment where, you know,
the whole kind of geopolitical saga we're now right in
the kind of center of began to first play out,
began to first unschool.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I suppose this this idea of mentioning James Bond or
the old James Bond stories often involved the Soviet Union
and watching some of the films and the sixties, the seventies,
the eighties, you think, oh, well, you know, it's not
like that now, and then you think, well, actually, maybe
it is like that now because Russia is the adversary,
and I guess that's back.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, there was a sort of return to history and
suddenly that's when I think the beginning of the interest
in kind of spying and espionage began to tick up,
and of course there were the Scripple poisonings in the UK,
for the attempted assassination of and Sogo Scripple by the
Russian state, and so suddenly there was this oh my gosh,
what is going on in the shadows. And one of
the striking things was just discovering the extent to which
(02:53):
actually Russian intelligence, aggressive Russian intelligence operations in Europe had
never ended. They were ongoing, and really they were only
just coming to the kind of four in terms of
the headlines, because they'd got so so kind of you know,
far down a road that they got to a point
where they were very happy for are these kind of
aggressive actions to come into the open. So there was,
for example, an ammunition factory in the Czech Republic blown up.
(03:17):
The Russians were willing to do that in Europe, you know.
In Danger Lives, one story we did, which will harken
back to a very classic English spy tale, was we
uncovered an attempt by Russian intelligence to kind of infiltrate
something called the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, which was basically an
academic group in Cambridge staffed largely by ex spies, but
(03:40):
also students have postgrads mostly who were studying you know,
intelligence or security study, and the Russians had sort of
very subtly worked out that this might be a good
recruiting ground, you know, that they could possibly infiltrate this
find people who are interested in intelligence and possibly may
go on to work for Western intelligence, and so they
could potentially find recruits there. So it really sort of
(04:01):
harked back to this kim Philby kind of idea of
agent recruitment going on on the kind of college lawns
of Cambridge University in the UK. Kim philb of course
being the most notorious British traitor of the twentieth century,
who worked his way right to the top of the
secret intelligence service in Britain and who all the while
(04:22):
was a Russian mole. It was a sort of really
striking a rhyme, a historical rhyme if you like. But yes,
being a real kind of rollercoaster in the last ten
years of working out that Russians really, whatever you think
they might be doing, they quite possibly are.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Speaking of roller coasters, we should talk about the series
Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, But first the cautionary Tales theme.
(05:12):
Sam at the center of your series Hot Money, Agent
of Chaos is a character called jan Marcelek, who, on
the face of it seems like a conventional subject for
an FT story. So tell us how you first encountered him.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, that's that's right. So Yan Marsilek was the COO
this big German fintech called Wirecard German financial technology company,
a sort of up and coming web based digital payments company,
but big, you know, really processing millions and millions and
millions of transactions online every day, and so big in
fact that it was actually considering at one point a
(05:47):
takeover of Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest bank. So this really
was an up and coming company. And my colleague Dan
McCrumb here at the FT had essentially discovered or worked
out this company was a huge fraud and he had
spent months years digging into them, trying to work out
(06:08):
what the nature the fraud was. I think he had
a very strong intuition that something was up, and so
he was investigating them for that, and he sort of
came to this conclusion that really the spider in the
center of the web, if you like, was the chief
operating officer was this guy Jan Marcelett, who was very
young relative to other kind of chief operating officers, but
(06:28):
supremely confident and so on.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And we should say this is a this is a
huge story for the Financial Times. It was an amazing,
epic piece of investigative reporting. It absolutely, you know, the
Ft kind of went toe to toe with the German
regulators who who were basically trying to shut the investigation
down because I felt it was a British newspaper trying
to do Germany down and this was kind of the
(06:51):
enron of the day. It was enormous, Absolutely, but it
turns out there's more to it than even than met
the eye.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yes, that's ultimately really how I kind of got entangled
in it was because Dan and his editor Paul Murphy,
the FT's head of investigations, they were reporting this story,
but they also then found themselves essentially under attack. They
were under surveillance, they were being hacked, they were under
constant physical surveillance, and they were the subject of a
very widespread, very expensive dirty tricks campaign. So it stank.
(07:22):
Everything about the company's stank that it made Paul in particular,
I think, begin to wonder whether this was more than
just a fraud. There was something here that was peculiar
and the real You know, the best example of that
was Marcelec himself basically coming to Paul Murphy and offering
him a huge bribe, which is sort of insane because
(07:42):
it's a gamble on Marcelec's part because if Paul says no,
then you've effectively confirmed that the company you're running is
a criminal enterprise. Yeah, and you know, why take that
risk kind of thing? And Paul came to me and
told me about that, And I was working covering intelligence
at the time, and he said, look, I know they
work with a lot of former intelligence people. Maybe you
(08:04):
can ask around, maybe you can work out what's going
on here. Who are the people Marcelect No, what do
we at the FT need to be doing to protect
our own security? So that was the start of it. Yeah,
and it then kind of went in an insane direction
and just continue to get weirder and more surreal.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Yeah, it's an enormous risk that Marcelect took in offering
that bribe, but he was very much a risk taker,
and that's something that your series covers over and over again.
I don't want to reveal too much of the series,
but I wanted to ask you about something that you
say which made me think. You say at one point
that spies tell us a lot about our own societies.
(08:43):
So tell us a bit more about that thought.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, I very strongly feel that that spies stories, good
spies stories, good spy fiction, is successful and enduring, kind
of in the same way that good crime fiction might be.
I think, not because there is obviously the palpable interest
and excitement in the adventure, but also because I think
it tells us about flaws in our own societies, or
(09:07):
gaps or weaknesses, vulnerability, and really, you know, spy's stories
are about Okay, yes, they're about betrayal, and they're about
those intense kind of personal relationships, but they also show
how we are vulnerable, how we are exploitable, how people
in our society can undermine us through their own betrayals,
(09:28):
and why they do that. You know, And someone like
Jan Marselex, somebody who was able to reach the kind
of pinnacle of the German corporate world, who developed this
fantastic network of contact all across Europe and beyond, in
government and elsewhere, how is he able to do that,
particularly as somebody who was pretty volatile and risk taking figure.
(09:50):
But that I think illustrates something about our society. You
could look at this and say, look how kind of
aggressive and pernicious Russian influence and agent recruitment activities are.
Or you could say, oh, my gosh, look how vulnerable
we are and how easily people in positions of authority
in our society are swayed by money or the promise
(10:11):
of power, or you know, I'll scratch your about you
scratch mind. Really. I think a lot of modern spying
as well is often a story about corruption, particularly where
it comes to Russia, and that I think is something
that you know, we don't need to blame on Russia.
That's something that's our own to.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Tackle reporting on Russian intelligence. I mean, these guys don't
mess around. Actually that's not quite true. They love to
mess around. They mess around in all kinds of ways.
But the dangerous people and they're unpredictable people. So I'm
just curious about what precautions you have to take as
a reporter traveling around and covering these kinds of stories.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Certainly one is careful online digital security. I suppose where
it spills over is when you become aware that you know, okay,
there's there maybe a physical surveillance element to this too,
So it does affect you personally in that regard. You know,
we know that Marcelek has his agent networks in Europe
have deliberately targeted journalists who have reported on him or
(11:09):
or negatively on the Kremlin. I mean, the most prominent
examples being Christo Grozev and Roman Debrokotov, two journalists who
formerly worked for Belencat and an outpit called The Insider
and reported actually on the Salisbury poisonings and exposed the
Russian agents responsible for those attempted poisoning, and as a result,
Marcelek was one of the people tasked with potentially finding
(11:32):
ways to kill them and kill them quite horrifically as well.
And Marcelek and his network they had these people under
close surveillance, and they were talking about doing quite nasty
things to them, like cutting their heads off in the street,
burning them alive, quite grotesque things as a sort of
sign of retribution. Those elements of it do give one
pause for thought. At the same time, Russian intelligence agencies
(11:55):
and their proxies are prone to misreporting, if you like.
And that's one of the features of authoritarian regimes on
authoritarian intelligence agencies everywhere, is you kind of want to
tell the boss what he wants to hear. And so
there is a natural tendency in Russian intelligence agencies where
I think they overstate their capabilities and ambitions. And with
(12:19):
Marcelek as well, there's this weird element of game playing
and risk taking and venture. And he's a sort of
schroding as spy. You know, he's a very good spy
and he's also simultaneously a terrible spy.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
In what way is he a terrible spy?
Speaker 2 (12:33):
You know, who goes around trying to bribe journalists? Really,
I think if you're successful, you don't exist right, No
one will ever know who you are, and so on
and so forth. Whereas I think Marcelek was driven by
psychology that made him fascinated with spying and willing to
do the bidding of people, you know, in the Kremlin
and elsewhere, and conscious of things like security and surveillance
(12:55):
and stuff like that. But at the same time flamboyant.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
He really liked to live the high life, couldn't they.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Absolutely, he'd fly down to Monaco and Nie all along
the code as who can on team for the week,
n get a little private jet, you know, sometimes take
his girlfriend from Munich there. Sometimes go and meet his
other girlfriend from Russia down there, a woman called Natalia's Labina,
who was actually a former sort of softcore porn actress
(13:24):
who now it is believed as close connections to Russian intelligence.
And you know, he'd just be partying down there on yachts.
There's videos of him sabering champagne in restaurants. He really
loved the kind of ostentation and the glamour of that
kind of lifestyle, which made him all the more peculiar.
I suppose as a.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Spy, champagne saboring should be done in the privacy of
one's own home. But there Ago and he lived across
the road from the Russian consequent which feels like a
bit of a hint.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Right in Munich and sort of you know, make had
people you know, invited into his kind of palatial villa
in Munich and there was like, you know, an air
gapped room and stuff like that. He almost had a
compulsion that people should know. He was entangled with odd things,
you know, in his office in in Munich, for example,
did anyone stop to ask why he had a row
of Russian officers caps on his mantle piece. You know,
(14:17):
it's sort of odd things like that that I think
he wanted the world to know in a way, which
of course is terrible to be a spy.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Well, that feels more like a sort of Hollywood version
of a spy. I mean, James Bond. He'll walk into
some luxury hotel in Monte Carlo and he'll say, the
name's Bond, James Bond. I think, do not maybe use
an alias. I mean, this is extraordinary behavior, but mars
Lek sometimes seemed more like that than a real spy.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yeah, And I think that's this due to observation, because
I think Marslek was kind of cost playing being a
spy in some way and borrowing from the conventions of
spy fiction as much as reality. Not to downplay what
he was doing, because I think this is the important
thing to understand, is that you know, Russia has basically
three spy agencies, and the one that Marslek was most
(15:03):
closely associated with, the gru They don't seek to stay secret.
In fact, a lot of their operation. It's quite good
if they become semi public and listeners might recall, certainly
in the UK with the Salisbury poisonings, when the two
GRU agents who had undertaken that were exposed, you know,
the Russians put them on TV back in Russia saying
they were going to go and look at the cathedral
(15:24):
spire in Salisbury. So they were sort of deliberately taking
the mickey, and they don't mind that. That's okay. They're
kind of active measures, and a proxy like Marslek was
kind of an ideal for them in that regard. He
was arm's length enough but also willing.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yes, and extremely effective in some ways. But another aspect
of his personality that I wanted to ask you about
was his likability. So quite a lot of the people
that you interview, even people who who basically lost everything,
lost all their life savings as a result of trusting Marslek,
they still liked him. I was curious as to whether
(16:02):
you liked him.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yes, definitely. The moral ambiguities are kind of what attracts
me to it. Marcelect has done some terrible things. You know,
he was fascinating as somebody that was so charismatic, so charming,
so to many people, likable and dynamic. How did he
end up going down this path when a large number
of people in Europe were beginning to see Russia as
(16:26):
this kind of destabilizing, aggressive, dangerous threat on their doorstep,
murderous country that Marcelect, highly educated, charismatic Austrian man, went
entirely the other way and decided to kind of essentially
stake everything on Russia. That's fascinating, and I think his
charisma and his dynamism the world were very compelling because
(16:49):
there was that mystery, but also because it wasn't like
you were spending time in the company of a monster.
And you know my colleague Paul, who met him three
or four times, even knowing him to be a fraudster
responsible for the wild card fraud. Assuming that they couldn't
get that story off the ground, Paul would have stayed
in touch with Marcelect because he found him compelling and
interesting more than James Bonds. There's a sort of something
(17:11):
of the Lacare about that perfect spy. You know, characters
like Magnus Pim who are these kind of a moral criminal.
It's a kind of roguishness that's not entirely unlikable. There's
a sort of intro an element of it that's gripping,
an element of that personality that's intriguing and feels kind
of quite human.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Listening to it. One of the things that I learned
was just Wow, the Russians are kind of they'll go
anywhere and they'll try anything. It may or may not work.
I'm wondering what other lessons I should be drawing about Russia.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
They gather information through reconnaissance more than they do through
strict intelligence. Don't get me wrong. They do have the SVR,
a Foreign Intelligence Services, you know, sleeper agents who are
down behind enemy lines for ten twenty years kind of thing.
But the intelligence through reconnaissance is more about pushing, pushing,
and wherever you go, wherever you break through, wherever you
(18:08):
find an advantage, just pouring resources there, Keep pushing, keep pushing,
keep pushing. You need to sort of be testing all
the time, seeing what works, seeing what fails. That's the
sort of reconnaissance element of it, and is much more
about engaging with your objective. You know, things like the
troll farms and all of their online campaigning. You know,
initially I think that was just a sort of let's
(18:29):
see what we can do here, and then it worked,
and then they kept you know, more resources went into it.
And I think that that's the kind of thing that
they do. And I also think that some you know,
another lesson is that we tend to have discrete outcomes
in intelligence operations. Here's what we want to achieve. Is
it achieved, tick, let's do it. Whereas the Russians, by virtue,
(18:51):
I think quite a lot of Soviet thinking. But even
before that, I think it's deeply ingrained just in the
whole strategic thinking of the country. Being a country that's
so big and dominated by such a tiny ruling cast,
they don't think of conflict, for example, as something that
is on or off. We are at war, we are
at peace. They think of everything more as a sort
(19:14):
of constant competition. People that worked in Russian intelligence services,
that was the sort of milk that they imbibed when
they were younger, and that's exemplified in Putin. You know,
his entire kind of intellectual worldview was honed within the KGB.
So yeah, I think that's the other key thing to
think about the Russians is they will never go away.
(19:35):
For example, if we have cease far in Ukraine. That
is not the end of the conflict with the West.
You know, it's not just a small localized issue for Putin.
It's about a whole broader range of issues to do
with NATO, to do with Russia's role in Europe, to
do with his belief that you know, there's him, there's China,
and there's America, and everyone else is just zones of
(19:57):
influence for those three. So I think you know that
he won't. You know, we should definitely have in mind
that the Russians won't be seeing a cease far as
the end of anything. It will be the beginning of
a new phase of conflict with Europe, which might move
back towards you know, other other kind of non violent means.
(20:17):
It might be economic, it might be political pressure, it
might be more espionage, more online misinformation, that kind of thing.
But it will not stop. There will be no kind
of enduring, you know, period of concord between Europe and Russia.
I don't think, which is a pretty bleak outlook, but
that would definitely be my my perspective.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Sam, I'm curious, is there anything that you couldn't quite
squeeze into the podcast that you wished you could.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
I think what we reported on with Marcelek and what
he is up to, we covered, you know, the tip
of the iceberg. There was some fantastic little anecdotes that
I was sad didn't get in. I mean, one of
my favorite moments really was this point where Paul Murphy,
the FT's investigation editor, discovered that there was this huge
physical surveillance operation against him and Dan McCrumb in London,
(21:06):
that they were being tailed, and that also a lot
of his contacts, a lot of his sources were being
tailed by people in London. Anyway, one of the kind
of more more roguish sort, shall we say, of these
sources confronted one of his trails and basically pushed this
guy up against the wall and said, you know, tell
me who you're working for kind of thing. And found
out that this guy was working for the former head
(21:29):
of Libyan intelligence, who was this chap called Ramiella Baby.
So Paul thought, okay, well I'll just get in contact
with mister Obaby, and he did and discovered that this
guy was quite the sort of playboy really and often
to be found in Mayfair hotels. So the next thing
(21:49):
Paul knows is that he sat at his desk in
the ft and he gets a call from reception saying,
mister Murphy, we've got a huge bunch of flowers down
here for you. And Paul's Baffle doesn't know what on
earth this is to do with. And he comes down
to reception and he finds dozens and dozens of red
roses and a little note and it says, dear mister Murphy,
(22:11):
I'm so sorry for the inconvenience we've caused you. I'm
a big fan of your work. Your sincerely, Rammy Elbaedy.
And it kind of illustrates this weird, kind of semi
playful world in which everything's taken a little bit lightly.
You know, yeah, we spied on you, but you know,
here have some red roses. Yea.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
So it's the head of Libyan intelligence, just to be clear.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Yeah, yeah, And by these roses came along with a
card for like a gift voucher at the Dorchester Spa
and for like hundreds hundreds of pounds.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Were they sort of a playful apology or a kind
of reveiled.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Threat, Well exactly so. And this is the best bit, right,
So these roses and the spa voucher had actually been
sent from the Dorchester's concierge service because mister Obedy likes
to stay there, and inadvertently or maybe not, they had included,
by accident as well, the sort of the email, the
original email from mister Baedy to the Dorchester concierge team
(23:06):
with the instructions, you know, please send to the Financial
Times six dozen red roses. And in this email, which
has sort of scrumpled up in the bottom of the package,
it also said please make sure that they are extra
thorny roses, which I thought was like a particularly piquant
little touch. I mean, it is a bit of a
(23:26):
veiled threat. But I think the kind of game playing
element to it, that sort of that sense in which
everything is a bit of a game and everything's up
for grabs and who cares about, you know, the seriousness
of things. That's definitely a thread that kind of runs
all the way through. And it was true of Marcelek
as well. I think he loved to play games.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Well, there you go. If that story wasn't even good
enough to make it into the podcast, you know how
good the podcast must be. It's called Hot Money, Agent
of Chaos, and you can find it wherever you get
your podcasts. I've been talking to Sam Jones. Thank you Sam,
Thank you sim And you don't need to go anywhere
to hear the first episode, because we are going to
(24:06):
play it for you after this break.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
It's a winter's day in twenty eighteen. Paul Murphy is
standing in front of the mirror of the gents lavatory
at work. He's changing for lunch.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
I kind of stopped wearing ties, but I think I
put a tie on for that occasion.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Paul is in his mid fifties. He's got a slightly
grizzled look about him. You wouldn't pick him out in
a crowd, but that's an advantage in his line of work.
In his hands, Paul is holding a small silver disc
about the size of a penny. He takes his shirt off,
grabs a piece of medical tape and fixes this disc
(24:49):
onto his shoulder because this disc is a tiny microphone.
He slips his white shirt back on, puts a jacket
on top, and with one last glance in the mirror,
he's ready for lunch. Paul is the head of investigations
at the Financial Times in London. He takes a cab
(25:10):
across Town to Mayfair, to a venue called forty five
Park Lane.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
It's it's you know, it's one of those places that
is priced to keep out to ordinary people. You know.
It's all glass windows and bling and mirrored interiors and
very few customers, very few. It's Dubai style essentially. As
Paul walks in, he tries to keep his cool. Despite
(25:38):
four decades in journalism, this is a first for him.
He's never actually worn a wire himself. It's very, very
nerve wrecking. You know, I've got a bug on me.
You know, I didn't want our undercover team to get discovered.
That would be hugely embarrassing, so I was, you know,
it's nervous.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
The Maitre d Escot's Paul across the room, and there,
rising from his chair, smiling courteously and greeting Paul with
a handshake, is the man he's come to meet, jan Marcelek.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Very slim, athletic, razor, sharp blue suit.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
Paul came here to set a trap to get this
successful businessman on tape, But by the time they finished
their meal, he wonders if he's the one who has
walked into a trap.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
If I'm honest, I felt a bit amateurish. You know,
we were out of our depth. This guy was very
very slick, controlled, careful, polished, and you know I'm not.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
My name is Sam Jones, and I'm a journalist with
the Financial Times. I'm a foreign correspondent based in Central Europe.
This lunch you've just heard about. It's the unexpected beginning
of an investigation that has, in one way or another,
preoccupied me for the past five years. But at the
center of it is the man in the sharp blue suit,
(27:13):
Yan Marceilek, a man who I discovered is so fascinated
by risk and deceit that one identity, one life wasn't
enough for him. I find it's often people like this,
the most unusual people who reveal universal truths, the fact
(27:33):
that we're all inventors of our own personal narratives, how
fictions can be stitched together to create realities. This tale
begins in London and Munich, but leaps across the globe,
from Libya to Austria, from Bulgaria to Afghanistan, from the
Courdazure to Moscow. Yan Marcelex's life is a window into
(27:58):
a hidden world of geopolitical power games, games which in
ways big and small govern our lives, games which have
never felt more relevant or the players of them harder
to fathom. This is a story about espionage, about Europe,
about Russia, and ultimately America. From the Financial Times and
(28:23):
Pushkin Industries. This is Hot Money, Season three, Agent of Chaos,
Episode one, The Bride. Paul Murphy hired me to work
(28:46):
for the Ft seventeen years ago. It's been a long
time since Paul's my actual boss, but he was and
still is a mentor to me. All of my best
habits in journalism and some of my worst ones I've
picked up from Paul pretty much since starting my career.
Every couple of months or so I end up at
(29:06):
lunch with him in Sweetings. It's a noisy, crowded fish
restaurant deep in the city, London's Financial district. It's distinctly
old school. Even a bowler hat wouldn't look out of place,
and coming here it underscores less than number one in
the Paul Murphy school of journalism.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
You have to get out of the bloody office. Get
out of the bloody office. Young reporters in particular think
that you can do everything digitally, but actually you get
a lot more information of somebody. Face to face, you
have to win people's trust, and one way of doing
that is have lunch with people. It's a great social
setting to develop a relationship with somebody.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Who you need them to trust you. I want to
paint a bit of a picture for you about Paul,
because it pays in this story to try and get
the measure of people's character, or at least to try
and understand the version of themselves people present to the world,
and why although Paul spends a lot of time at lunch,
he's definitely not just another city soak. Most people tend
(30:12):
to miss the little silver ring he's wearing, a skull
designed by his daughter. People miss a lot about Paul,
but that's part of the trick. He's very good at
being underestimated, and because of that, he's also very good
at getting people to trust him, to talk to him,
and to give him information. To understand why I was
(30:35):
drawn into this story, you need to know a bit
about the reporting that was dominating Paul's life. Back in
twenty eighteen, he and his star reporter Dan McCrumb were
neck deep investigating a German company called Wirecard, a company
that was run by the man in the razor sharp
blue suit, the man whom Paul would eventually meet for
lunch in Mayfair, jan Marcelek Wacard ran the financial plumbing
(31:00):
behind billions of online transactions. It was so successful at
that point it was even secretly plotting a takeover of
Germany's biggest bank. So to the world, Warkard was a
booming digital payments company. To Paul and his reporter Dan,
Warkard was a huge fraud, and they were well on
the way to proving it. But it was no normal
(31:23):
fraud because for months Paul and Dan they suspected they'd
been under intense surveillance, all directed by someone at Warkard
from its base in southern Germany.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
I mean, it's kind of like, almost sounds silly to
recount it, but you know, we were paranoid about being
followed around London. We would get on and off tube
trains quickly, just in case somebody was getting on the
same tube trainer as us. We would turn off our
phones so that a location couldn't be tracked.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Dan had already had his emails hacked and some of
them leaked online. It was an attempt to embarrass and
discredit him. There had been a mounting and seemingly coordinated
attack on his reputation on social media. When Paul told
me all of this over a series of lunches at Sweetings,
I guess he was doing so because he wanted to
know if I had any contact in private intelligence or
(32:19):
even in the actual intelligence services people who might be
able to help, because the subject I really write about,
the subject that has become my specialism at the FT
is spying. Paul was probably also telling me out of
frustration because back then he and Dan had hit a
bit of a wall in their reporting. They'd published all
(32:41):
they could about Warkard based on the evidence they had
gathered so far, but they still didn't have a smoking gun,
and Wakard's aggressive lawyer's shillings had meanwhile come down hard
on them. Dan had only just avoided a ruinous lawsuit.
It wasn't a great time. It was this sense that
what have we got ourselves into? That was like a
(33:03):
real low moment. Maybe I've got myself into a bit
too much hot water here.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
You do start to worry what you've sort of brought
down on your family. It was quite oppressive. There was
this turning point for Dan. One of his sources rang
him up to tell him he'd been roughed up on
the street by two thugs right outside his children's school.
They demanded to know if this source had passed on
confidential information about Wirecard. Hearing this sent Dan into a
(33:32):
bit of a tailspin, because suddenly he was worrying about
the safety of his own family. My first thing was
I sort of go home and obsessively change every single
one of my passwords, start checking all the security on
my house. I mean, the worst moment is we had
just moved into this rented house and I suddenly realized
(33:54):
I haven't checked the lock on this patio door at
the back of the house, which we'd never used, and
it just slides straight open, like our house had essentially
been unlocked for the last couple of months. And at
that point I really did start freeing out about security
who might be after us, and I basically became really paranoid.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
It was right at the peak of this paranoia that
something even stranger happened, something that led to that lunch
at forty five Park Lane, Paul was talking to one
of his oldest sources.
Speaker 3 (34:28):
And we got onto the subject of wire Card. Just
a completely you know, innocent, relaxed conversation, and this guy
just suddenly said, you know that they'll pay you a
lot of money to stop writing about them. And I
kind of laughed, and he stopped me and said, no,
(34:49):
they will pay you ten million dollars to stop writing
about them.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
I don't know if you work in the kind of
job or live the kind of life where you've ever
been bribed, but even as a journalist for the ft,
this doesn't really happen, let alone for such a ridiculous
sum of money. I mean, for ten million dollars, what
would you do? And as such, it takes Paul a
while to realize that this is a serious offer. How
(35:16):
do you know this? He asks? Through my son, his
source tells him he's got to know someone at Warkard
pretty well. They've been out together a few times carousing.
He's called Jan Marceilek, and then Paul's source he says
something which makes Paul clock that this offer is real.
Marcilek is paying this guy more than two hundred thousand
dollars just to convey the message. You should meet him
(35:40):
for lunch, he suggests. So what does Paul say, Tell
me when? And tell me where Paul has no intention
of taking the bribe, but this back channel offer it
seems to confirm everything they suspect about Warcard. Absolutely confirmed
all our suspicions, such word that the company is a
(36:01):
criminal enterprise.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Absolutely, this was kind of tangible evidence.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
All they need now is for mar Select to offer
the bribe himself and to get that on tape. It's
time for the FT to mount its own surveillance operation.
So that day at forty five Park Lane, the formal
introduction's over, it's time to order stakes, the overpriced speciality
(36:26):
of this place around one hundred and seventy pounds for
a six ounce filet mignon. Right from the start, though,
Paul begins to feel that Marcelek isn't quite what he
was expecting. Paul is on edge, but he's not alone.
To his relief, it's not long before he spots his
undercover support team, three FT colleagues who pose as wealthy ladies,
(36:48):
catching up over lunch. They snag a table just next
to him, and they look pretty convincing. One of the
reporters places her handbag on the back of a chair.
Hidden inside, a camera films the lunch at an angle
catching Yan Marcelek. In profile, you can hear the tenor
(37:10):
of his voice, but the background noise means it's impossible
to make out his words. To me. Watching this footage back,
it's striking how animated he is. He turns from side
to side, addressing everyone at the table. As he talks.
His face lights up. He's sort of holding court, emphasizing
(37:30):
his words with expansive hand gestures. He almost looks like
a politician. The longer the conversation goes on like this,
the more clear it becomes to Paul that Marcelek is
the one in control. This guy is expansive and engaging, charming,
but not at all defensive. There's no trace of anger
(37:52):
or guilt or care. He gently protests about the FT's
unfair coverage of Wakade, as if it's been an inconvenience,
but his whole tone seems to be saying, let's put
this behind us. As they settle into the meal, Paul
nudges the conversation into more dubious terrain. You get to
(38:13):
get something incriminating, even if it's just a hint of
something on tape and on camera.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
I certainly talked about the kind of the aggression that
the business had shown us. And we also talked about
where the journalists were corrupt, and he absolutely assured me
that he knew that journalists could be bought. I remember saying,
we don't take bribes. And I remember him very specifically saying,
(38:40):
I know.
Speaker 2 (38:41):
That, Paul.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
I know you don't have seen evidence that you don't
take bribes. And I thought, Hugh, you've seen my bank account.
I remember the kind of jolting that he was kind
of like stating this so openly.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
But the conversation continues in this vein nothing concrete. The
killer offer of a bribe Paul had been hoping for, Well,
it's clear that marthill K is far too savvy an
operator to make it. Here and now at their first meeting.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
Pretty quickly, you know, came to the conclusion that I
wasn't going to be offered a bribe in front of
these people.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
A bit of a damp squip in a way, yes,
it was. So Paul is now left wondering, what does
Marcelek want from him? Why has this meeting happened if
he's not actually going to make him some kind of offer.
The lunch lasted about ninety minutes, and at the end,
Marcelek insisted on paying and.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
Pulled out a gold credit card, a novelty credit card
of solid gold.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Was he a bit of a show off?
Speaker 3 (39:48):
Well? Yes, you know, we're in one of the most
expensive restaurants in London eating kind of two hundred quid
steak and he was paying for the bill with a
gold credit card. So yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
As Paul leaves the restaurant, he almost laughs at himself,
having thought he'd be heading back with something explosive. He
also realizes that this experience actually hasn't been a busted flush.
Far from it. Meeting Yan mars Lek has only intrigued
Paul Moore. It's put him into three D. There's something
about mass Lec he can't quite put his finger on.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
I felt, admit, somebody who was very controlled and confident,
who was almost certainly corrupt. I basically said, can we
do that again?
Speaker 2 (40:37):
And indeed Paul does meet with him again. That's coming
up after the break. When Paul first started telling me
about Wacard, I think I treated it all as entertaining
(40:59):
table talk. Paul is a great teller of stories and
I always enjoyed hearing the gossip about what his investigations
team was up to. After he told me about meeting Martlek, though,
something began to needle at me, just a feeling about
what kind of person Marslek was, A feeling I couldn't
pin down until I heard about the second lunch. One
(41:22):
month after that lunch at Park Lane, Paul met Marcelek again,
this time without undercover colleagues or secret cameras. It was
just the two of them. They met at the Lanesborough,
another high end hotel in London.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
We talked about geopolitics, We talked about technology, we talked
about finance, you know, we talked about the state of
the world. He had interesting opinions and information on all
these things. If I'm honest, at this stage, I I'd
become fascinated by this character because he seemed to know
(41:58):
so many people, and I kind of I was thinking, well,
you know, he's probably not going to offer me a bribe.
We're not going to just catch him. He's not that stupid.
This guy is smart and he knows people and he
has information.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
At this point, did it occur to you that he'd
charmed you in any way?
Speaker 3 (42:20):
Yes, it did, But he was a charming man.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Did you like him?
Speaker 3 (42:26):
Yeah, yes, I liked him.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
If Wire Card, if you hadn't have known it to
be a fraud, do you think you would have sought
to stay in touch with him?
Speaker 3 (42:35):
I absolutely absolutely. I mean, in actual fact, you know
my thinking after that second lunch I did. I actually thought,
I'm going to, you know, develop this guy as a source.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
What did you think he was hoping to get out
of a relationship with you?
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Actually, it was very clear we posed an existential risk
to wire Card. He knew that by you know, building
a relationship directly with me, that he could potentially stop
as writing about them, or at least did get the
(43:14):
kind of intel in advance about what we were thinking.
Speaker 2 (43:21):
So, as Paul tells me about all of this, the
feeling I get most is that a game is afoot,
and both Paul and Marcelek are enjoying playing it. They've
both established rapport, they're both working to build trust, but
they also test each other, push try to implicate each
(43:42):
other in this polite conversation. And all of this grips
me because in it I see so much of the
kind of psychology that I've spotted, glimpses of covering intelligence
and espionage. I recognize the shape of this kind of interaction,
a certain amused, matter of fact detachment from things despite
the stakes. Think about it. Marcelek is launching happily with
(44:04):
a man who is trying to destroy the company he
works for and put him in jail. And Paul, well,
in a funny way, Paul is being encouraged into a
minor transgression, something that almost felt to me like a
textbook trick from an intelligence recruitment manual, an indiscretion that
might later make you vulnerable. Because Paul does all of
(44:26):
this works marcilect behind the back of the lead reporter
on the Wirecard Project, Dan McCrum. Why were you dealing
with Marcilec and not Dan.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Dan and I are different characters. Dan is a guy.
You know, he's tall, and he has all his features
in the right place, and if your daughter brought him
home as a boyfriend, he'd be really happy. He's a
good guy. He's intelligence, he's articulate, he's well educated. But
actually actually, but actually, Dan is lethal. Dan's like kind
(44:58):
of smiling axe man. He's dangerous.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
He's friends.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
Yes, he's absolute forensic and he won't let it lie.
And you know, I have a different style, all right.
I'm much after and you know, chat people up, and
you know, I present myself as being very kind of clubbable.
Do you know all journalists have different styles.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
I mean, I think you're probably more comfortable playing a
role as well. No, possibly, yes, reading between the lines,
I think probably. A doubting part of him was also
wondering whether the Waquard investigation was at a dead end.
The threat of a lawsuit from Shillings meant their reporting
had stalled, and if that was the case, it might
(45:39):
be worth Paul pursuing Marcelek as a source of his own,
someone who could help him with other stories. Then, around
six months after that second meeting, Paul gets a call
from an intermediary. Marcelect conveys that he has something very
interesting to offer documents. He hints at what they're about,
(46:00):
and it sounds outlandish, but it's enough of a hint
that Paul agrees to Marcelect's suggestion that he fly out
to Munich, where my select lives, in order to get them.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
I kept it completely private. Only just the managing editor
that THEFT knew what I was doing.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
They meet at the Kiefer Schenka it's a Munich institution,
patrician reassuringly expensive white tablecloths, paneled rooms, but warm and
efficient service, and it's practically marce Lek's house. Restaurant.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
Yan was waiting for me outside. We went in. We
had a little private room. I remember having salmon with Caviat.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
And as they talked, marce Lek pushed a brown folder
full of papers across the table towards Paul.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
Because it's in the restaurants, I couldn't pull them out
and start reading through them. I just had to kind
of politely say, thank you very much, I'll have a
read of those. And then we just had a kind
of stilted, awkward lunch conversation. We talked about his bad back.
If I'm honest, I was trying to get out of
the lunch as quickly as possible because I wanted to
see what was in the folder.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
They finished lunch, marcele X said he had to go
back to the office.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
The restaurant has lots of kind of separate bars and rooms,
and so I literally went down some stairs and found
myself a little corner and sat down and opened the folder.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
These documents they related to something that happened in the
UK that spring, something awful which had shocked the whole country.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
Yesterday afternoon, passers by noticed two people apparently unconscious on
a bench in Salisbury, the area of the Salisbury poisonings.
As a police presence remains here in the city whilst
they investigate. Residents and visitors to the city have been
reacting to the news.
Speaker 5 (47:53):
Yeah, just completely surprised and shocked that something can happen
like this in Salisbury.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
An assassination attempt against a former spy using one of
the deadliest nerve agents ever created a chemical that only
a hand full of government specialists knew about, Novichok two
thirty four. The spy was found half dead alongside his
unconscious daughter, but thanks to some remarkable medical work, they
both survived. Another local resident, a mother of three, did not.
(48:26):
She died after coming into contact with the novichok. It
had been hidden by the assassins in a perfume bottle.
The intended target was soon identified as a Russian intelligence
officer who had fled to Britain. In twenty ten, Prime
Minister Theresa May announced to a shocked parliament that Moscow
was to blame.
Speaker 5 (48:48):
The government has concluded that the two individuals named by
the police and CPS are officers from the Russian Military
Intelligence Service, also known as the GRU.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
The GRU the main directorate Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency,
an organization with goals that should have consigned it to
Cold War history misinformation, civil disorder, violence, assassinations. Under Vladimir
Putin's long watch, the GIU has quietly grown in power
(49:24):
and influence. In the weeks that followed the poisoning, Russia
aggressively denied its involvement. The Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons meanwhile launched its own investigation, sending its experts
to Salisbury to pour over the evidence. They produced a
highly classified dossier based on shared intelligence and chemical analysis
(49:47):
from the site. The dossier also included Russia's own version
of events. These were the documents Paul now had in
his hands.
Speaker 3 (49:57):
It was fascinating to read all this kind of close detail,
you know, the Russian version of the story. And then
the other very interesting part of the documents was the
actual formula for Novi.
Speaker 2 (50:11):
Chok, the chemical diagram for the poison, a technical outline
for something that had been kept hidden from the world
for decades. A weapon of mass destruction. So what have
(50:38):
we got Part one, two, three for five sort of
staple chiefs of paper. Those documents that Marcelett handed over
that day at the Kiefashenka. Paul showed them to me
and well, they're internal documents from the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And these have been sort of
illegally photocopied, right also, I think their photocopies anyway.
Speaker 3 (50:59):
Yeah, they're all photocopies, except that one is a PowerPoint presentation.
They've all got barcodes on them.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
And this sort of big stamped watermark which.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
This print out may contain OPCW confidential information warning. Yeah,
they're all different copy numbers though as well, aren't they.
That's one of serious deine. This one's twenty one.
Speaker 2 (51:23):
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is an
international body based in the Hague. Almost all of the
world's big military powers are signatories. Its job is to
police and monitor weapons like nove chok, to ensure they
are never ever used. What was going through your head
when you kind of first pulled this out of the
(51:43):
manila envelope that they were all in.
Speaker 3 (51:47):
Well, I was looking for a story you know, the
Salisbury poisoning had been headline news for weeks on end.
Suddenly I had, you know, what clearly were kind of
classified documents pertaining specifically to that event. There had to
be a story in it, you know, That's what I
(52:07):
was after, And I was struck at how detailed and
careful and yet completely fanciful the Russian version of events was.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
In the documents. The Russians made the case that the
British had manufactured novichok because Solibury is just down the
road from Port and down a highly secure military research base,
and the Russians, they argued that the British government had
somehow leaked the navichoc from its own chemical research lab.
Speaker 3 (52:41):
You know, I asked him, you know, point blank, where
did he get this information?
Speaker 2 (52:45):
What did he say?
Speaker 3 (52:46):
He said he got it from a friend. And he
did actually say that, you know, if I wanted further information,
I should try him in future, that I'd be quite
surprised at the sort of information he could access.
Speaker 2 (53:00):
So this was sort of like a little bit of
an opening, kind of showing his wares, you know that
if you wanted to keep him on side, and he
could push other material your way.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
Yeah, absolutely that He was basically saying, look, I have
friends in interesting places. I can help you in the future.
We were building a relationship on both sides.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
While all of this unfolded. Dan McCrumb, the lead reporter
on the Warcard investigation, hadn't been sitting still. In fact,
he'd just found his very own treasure trove of documents,
and these documents they would change everything because they finally
gave Dan the ammunition he needed to prove that Wirecard
was a fraud and that Marcelek was at the center
(53:49):
of it. So when Paul got back to London and
Dan told him all of this, Paul knew it was
time to go back on the offensive against Wacard directly,
and also therefore that it was time to fess up
to Dan and to tell him he'd been secretly lunching
with Marcelek over the past few months. All you know,
(54:10):
he'd gone to meet Marcelect for lunch and he was
kind of cultivating this parallel kind of you know, relationship
with Marcelek. When did you find out about that and
what was your first thought?
Speaker 4 (54:22):
Oh man, there are moments in life when you were
taken by surprise. I basically think he hadn't wanted to
like blow my mind whilst I was focused on getting
the story, because the important thing was to get the
story out. But it had reached the point where it
(54:42):
was sort of becoming embarrassing that he hadn't mentioned that
he had quietly been dining with Yan Marslek. I'm like, sorry, what,
But then he goes he's been flashing around top secret
documents with a recipe for Navichok on them. I think
my reaction was if he had just tried to tell
(55:03):
me that Marcelek had faked the moon landings. It was
so completely out of left field that you're like, sorry,
what did you just say?
Speaker 2 (55:24):
To be clear, we had no evidence that Marcelect actually
had anything to do with carrying out the poisonings, but
the fact that he even had these documents was a bombshell,
not only because the documents made it clear that Marcelek
was entangled with something besides just a huge corporate fraud,
but also because Marcelect had effectively chosen to disclose this.
(55:47):
Marcelek pulled the spotlight onto himself, and it made us
realize how little we knew about him at all at
that point.
Speaker 3 (55:55):
We just kind of had this sense that marcell it
was this kind of man of action and was mixed
up somehow in Viennese politics.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
Wikard's aggressive surveillance of Paul and Dan intensified, and they
managed to trace it back to a private security company
in Vienna, the capital of Austria and Marcelec's home city.
Paul and Dan were now going to spend the next
few months battling to prove the fraud with the new
documents Dan had received for me, I was about to
(56:27):
start a foreign posting in Switzerland and in Austria. If
I was going to be on the ground, Paul thought,
then I could surely make some inquiries.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
We already knew that there was a big Vienna angle
to all this. We just didn't know what the angle was.
We just didn't know which doors you had to not gone.
We didn't know who you needed to get to.
Speaker 2 (56:52):
Yeah, well it worked. I remember thinking you were mad.
I just thought, okay, all right, I'm just going to
go to Austria and start talking to people about Mars
slect But you know, you were right. Sometimes it's the smallest,
most unpromising, unexpected little thread that you pull on that
suddenly unravels something. Sometimes that thread is just an intuition,
(57:16):
a feeling about someone, a sense that there's definitely something
more here I don't know about, but that I recognized
the shadow of. As it turned out, this particular trace, well,
it would slowly unravel into a story that wasn't just
the sordid tale of one well connected fraudster, but instead
the tale of one of the biggest spice scandals to
(57:37):
have hit Europe since the Cold War.
Speaker 3 (57:41):
To this day, I remember that first note coming back
from you, just saying that you needed a secure channel
to communicate. The detail you put in that first note
was just mind boggling, absolutely shocking. It was like a
whole world just opened up. You know, this was no
longer just about some weird German corporate There was this
(58:05):
kind of huge, geopolitical kind of side to the story
that was only just coming into view.
Speaker 2 (58:14):
Maybe you've felt in recent years that the world is
a less certain place, that from the background there are
threats or worries you'd never had to think about before
that are suddenly present, Wars that look like they might
tip out of control, radical politicians tearing at the threads
of civil society, lies turned into truth by money. Well,
(58:35):
this story is, in some senses an accounting of that,
a story that can sometimes make you realize how tissue
thin the idea of a stable, law abiding society can
be one that's governed by economic, political, and moral rules
we've all agreed on. It's a story about what kind
of people get drawn into the world on the other
side of that, and what kind of world that is
(58:56):
a space carved out by crime and corruption, where money
and power are unchecked by laws or borders or markets.
That kind of world might sound terrifying, but to some
people it's irresistible. To some people. It's not an alternative
world at all. It's the real world coming up this
(59:21):
season on Hot Money.
Speaker 4 (59:23):
I know politics is corrupt, I know everything and all
that and all that I believe to know that.
Speaker 3 (59:27):
But this is too much, I thought. I hope that
he will talk to you and you will be able
to investigate on it, and perhaps misdeeds and misbehavior stopped
very fast. Actually started then talking about his experience in Syria.
Speaker 2 (59:44):
He definitely has a view that he's operating with complete
freedom to do whatever he likes.
Speaker 1 (59:50):
I don't know if they followed me to my home.
Speaker 2 (59:54):
The decision was very simple.
Speaker 5 (59:55):
It was a choice between being killed or in prison,
and the other option was just to try to get
real freedom.
Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
How much of it was an act? How much was genius,
how much was learned, how much was instinctive?
Speaker 3 (01:00:10):
I often ask myself now, did I know the true
jan at all?
Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
Hot Money is a production of The Financial Times and
Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me Sam Jones.
The senior producer and co writer is Peggy Sutton. Our
producer is Izzy Carter. Our researcher is Marine Saint. Our
show is edited by Karen Shakergi, fact checking by Kira Levigne.
(01:00:43):
Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de Olivia,
with additional sound design by Izzy Carter. Original music from
Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet. Our show
art is by Sean Carney. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley,
Amy Gains McQuaid and Matthew Garahan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy.
(01:01:09):
Special thanks to Ruler Klaffe, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey,
Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hanson, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner,
Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohane. I'm
Sam Jones.
Host
Tim Harford
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Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.