March 26, 2025 • 44 mins
When the Kuwaiti government wanted to track down Saddam Hussein’s stolen assets, in 2003, who did they call? Or the public funds amassed by kleptocrats like Ferdinand Marcos and “Baby Doc” Duvalier? Negotiating kidnapping cases in Brazil and exposing digital criminals in Japan? Corporate malfeasance? Info Leaks? Workplace investigations? You get the idea. His name is Jules Kroll, and his name is synonymous with the private investigative industry.
Coercive Capital host, Elaine Dezenski recently spoke with Jules about how it all started, some of his well-known cases, and how he sees the role of corporate intelligence and private investigation in today’s geopolitical moment.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
I'm Elaine Dozinski, and this is coercive capital on the
illicit edge network. When the Kuwaiti government wanted to track
down Saddam Hussein's stolen assets, who did they call or
when help was needed to locate the public funds amassed
by kleptocrats like Ferdinand Marcos and baby Doc d Vallier.
Or negotiating high profile kidnapping cases in Brazil and exposing
(00:35):
digital criminals in Japan, corporate malfeasance, info leaks, workplace investigations.
You get the idea. His name is Jules Kroll, and
his name is synonymous with the corporate investigations industry, an
industry that he, more than anyone, has helped to define
over the last fifty years. In nineteen seventy two, Kroll
(00:55):
founded Kroll Inc. Turning it into the global leader in
modern investigations, intelligence, and corporate security. Of course, it's not
an industry without criticism. The nature of the work means
Kroll and his firm have, on occasion then at the
center of conversations about privacy, surveillance, and the ethics of
corporate intelligence. After leaving his eponymous firm, he became the
(01:19):
co founder and executive chair of K two Intelligence and
now K two Integrity, a financial crime's risk, compliance and
advisory services firm. I recently spoke with Jewels about how
it all started, some of his well known cases, and
how he sees the role of corporate intelligence and private
investigation in today's geopolitical moment. You're regarded as the godfather
(01:42):
or some have called you the Johnny Appleseed of the
private investigation industry, and if you look at the number
of private investigators who've come through the doors of Kroll,
you've trained so many. I wanted to start the conversation
by going back to when you started your work in
a private investigation field around nineteen seventy two. Why did
(02:05):
you start the firm? Why did you get into the
private investigative world in the first place.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well, we didn't start as investigators. I had I had
been an assistant DA in Manhattan and we had a small,
struggling family printing business which we ended up disposing of.
But that gave me the idea for a consulting business,
(02:33):
not an investigations business, which focused for several years on
how to make the purchasing or the procurement process more
honest because there was quite a bit of commercial bribery.
So I would say for the first four or five years,
that's primarily what we did was consulting on how to
improve and how to provide special audits. We didn't call
(02:56):
ourselves investigators until the early eighties, after seven eight years
in business.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
That's fascinating. I also think it's interesting that your own
experience with dealing with corruption and what your father, as
I was reading what your father went through in terms
of trying to protect his own business from corruption, was
the impetus behind your work. And I know that for
(03:26):
a period of time you were interested in going into
public service and you ran a campaign. How did that
influence where you ended up going.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Well, it was a profound influence because I was as
a kid, I was raised in Queen's I actually ran
in an insurgent campaign against the established democratic machine which
was corrupt from top to bottom. It was an anti
corruption campaign circa nineteen seventy one, and it was very
(04:00):
clear that it was a corrupt system. And in fact,
out of the during the period of seventies and early eighties,
twenty six of the public officials in Queens ended up
going to jail on various forms of corruption or bribery cases,
including the fellow who was the organization's candidate who I
(04:26):
ran against and lost to. He went away on subsequently
on federal charges felony charges twice, but he was only
one of twenty six that was caught up in the
corruption of the day. So that experience had a profound
effect on my thinking and my goals and on the
(04:49):
creation of the business.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So over the years, you've had a lot of high
profile cases in a lot of cases that were very
much under the radar. One thing that struck me about
the kinds of work that you've taken on is that
you've been going after kleptocrats before the term kleptocrat was
even in use. When we think about Saddam Hussein tracking
(05:14):
his stolen assets, Ferdinand Marcos, Hades, Baby, doctor Valier, and others,
I'm curious about how you how do you think about
kleptocrats today? You know, we talk about Putin as a kleptocrat,
We talk about other current leaders in authoritarian regimes as
(05:35):
driving kleptocracies. Has anything really changed.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
No. We ended up doing this kind of work originally
as part of the business in nineteen eighty five, when
we did a pro bono assignment for the US Congress.
The late congressman, the Stephen Solars, who was a friend,
called me and said, I've been railing against fernand Marcos
(06:03):
for years with all the money US money he steals
for himself and his family and his cronies. And there's
been some excellent work done by the Sacramento on the
Sacramento b by some expats from the Philippines. And he said,
I can't evaluate it. It looks real when you help
(06:27):
me evaluate it, and when you help me perfect the investigation,
because I've never done an investigation before. He said, I
also can't pay you. So that was the beginning, and
it turned out that the expats had done really good work.
Our work was really in support of their original work,
(06:50):
and so I was very proud to help. And that
became the first case of kleptopocrisy that we were involved in,
and it was the first of maybe sixty At this point,
it's sixty five sixty six of those between my original
business and my subsequent my current business.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
So I'm curious to ask you at this stage, having
worked on thousands of cases across public officials, private corporations,
and others. Who's better at hiding wealth? Road nations, oligarchs,
fortune five hundred executives. And is there a distinction in
terms of how you think about asset recovery?
Speaker 2 (07:34):
There are many permutations of stealing in that setting, depending
on the circumstances of a country and the circumstances of
the times. You know, the Foreign CRPT Practices Act was
(07:54):
only only went into law in the late seventies seventy
eight or seventy nine. Came came out of a circumstance
involving Lockheed Uh in Japan, and they were they were
paying off to get to get contracts in in Japan,
(08:17):
And that only came out as indirectly the the work
that was done in in the campaign finance area during
the Nickson period, So it first came to formal public
attention during that time. And each each of these circumstances
is somewhat different. So so for example, the work the
(08:44):
work we did with Marcos Uh, there had been there
had been outstanding there had been outstanding work that had
already been done by these Filipino expects. But you know,
we had we put lawyers on it, we put fensic
accountants on it, and of course we had the power
(09:05):
of the congressional subpoena at that point. When we did
when we when we did the work in Haiti going
after baby Baby Doc, who was the son of the
prior ruler of Haiti, that was just a crude taking.
(09:28):
It wasn't very sophisticated. You know, he would Baby Doc
would go into the into the into the treasury of
Haiti and he would write a check. And this was
literally the case, four million dollars to buy a to
buy an apartment at Trump Tower. This was back in
(09:50):
the back in the late eighties. So it was very crude,
very unsophisticated. When you go to the period in the
in the early the early nineties, we had worked we
had worked for the yeltsin regime and we were hired
to track the money that the KGB had taken out
(10:13):
of the country and used offshore, and that was much
more sophisticated with cutouts and cover stories and you know,
something you can imagine was done on a reasonably sophisticated basis.
The problem was when we turned the information over to
(10:34):
members of the elsin regime, that money didn't always make
it back to the state. When you had the takeover
of many assets in Russia. Some of the early oligarchs
were people who knew how to get a hold of
those assets, and many of them became billionaires as a
(10:54):
result of it. In the case of Fujimori, which was
another case we had done, who had been the president
of Peru, we had a contract from the UN and
we were able to uncover all the monies that he
was funneling to his relatives back in Japan. So each
(11:19):
one of these cases is different, and so I'm avoiding
generalizing because they are different. In the case of a
Color de Mello in Brazil, he was taking bribes even
(11:40):
before he took office through his campaign manager, and we
were hired by the Brazilian Congress in the context of
an impeachment proceeding. So it depends on who's hired us.
Is it somebody like the UN, Is it a congress,
Is is it a corporation? You know, who is it
(12:04):
and what do they know at the point in time.
They almost always know something before we're hired, which is
the reason we're hired. This is in the public sector
as opposed to the corporate sector, and sometimes there's a
fine line between steel outright stealing and conflicts of interest.
(12:29):
You know, we see that playing out today in different
parts of the world, including our own. What's a conflict
of interest and what is outright stealing? What is permissible
under the law, and what is you know, what is
the law, what are the rulings of the courts, what
are the attitudes of the country. All these things come
(12:51):
into play. So I know I'm going on a bit
a bit longer, but the answer is it depends.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
I want to pick up on the FCPA conversation because
it's such a critical time right now in terms of,
you know, how we're thinking about countering corruption. And there
was a recent move by the Trump administration to move
(13:19):
resources away from enforcing the FCPA on US companies towards
going after cartels, money laundering organizations, criminal networks. It's really
early to understand how this is going to play out,
but you know, one of the things that struck me
is how over the last fifty or so years, the
(13:41):
FCPA has become such a foundational element, not only for
the US but for many countries who've emulated that legislation.
And I think it's also been a huge component that
has driven investigative work in the industry around that. How
do you see this evolution of FCPA enforcement over the
(14:04):
last five decades and where we are now, I mean,
do you have thoughts about where anti corruption enforcement needs
to go in the future.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Well, first, the little history. After the laws were passed
in the late in the late seventies, there was very
little pickup on the part of other countries, and in fact,
there were almost no FCPA prosecutions as you went into
the eighties. So something like the FCPA and some and
(14:39):
something like different forms of bribery are affected by the
the political priorities of the time. Certain administrations have it
as a high priority, other administrations have it as a
low priority. Not just not just in this country. Most
(15:00):
of our investigations for f c p A did not
first and foremost begin at the at the initiation of
American institutions. Uh. I'll give you a couple of examples,
but the theme of my comment is that it is
(15:24):
the priority of the political class that is determining what
will be emphasized and what will be de emphasized. So,
for example, we we had a we had a case
where we work for the the the investment the Investment
(15:47):
Fund of Bahrain back in the back in the early
in the early two thousands, and they had a they
had an aluminum, a National Aluminum Company, and their belief
was that there were people in Bahrain being bribed by
(16:08):
some of the vendors. And sure enough, when we did
the work, there were all sorts of vendors that were
bribing people in Bahrain. Now, we were hired by the
person who was then the Crown Prince, son of the king.
(16:29):
He's now he's now the Prime Minister, and he made
it a priority to say this is this is what
I suspect and it's got to stop. At the end
of the day, we caught a half a dozen companies, American,
European and Japanese companies that were bribing to get business
(16:49):
in the National Aluminum Company, the most prominent of which
was al Koa, an American company, and we literally went
to them and we said, listen, this is what we
think is going on. We're not looking to our client
is not looking to have scalps up on the wall.
(17:09):
They just want the economic recompense for what you've taken
from them, and they refuse. They hired an outside law
firm who frankly whitewashed the whole thing. But ultimately within
a couple of years we recovered four hundred and fifty
million for the National Aluminum Company and Alcohol had to
(17:34):
pay a four hundred and fifty million dollar FCPA fine.
That is unusual. It was unusual initiated by the country
where this was happening, and the perpetrators were in a
macro American company. There is much less rigorous enforcement in
(17:54):
countries outside the United States, and so one of the
arguments that is made by people, and you see it
being made now, that enforcement of the f CPA makes
American companies less competitive. And so people say, people say, well,
(18:15):
how can you do that because a Chinese company is
gonna and this is literally the case, they'll pay whatever
it takes to get the business. And I could name
other countries as well. Chinese are not the only ones
that are doing it. So the political agendas of ruling
(18:38):
ruling parties in different countries set the policy, and that
policy waxes and wanes depending on depending on what the
priorities are, and it's waxed and waned in this country
as well as as something like places like Latin America.
(18:58):
Latin America at one point was an absolute sewer of corruption,
and then it went through a period of time when
it began to get cleaned up, as in Brazil, as
in Argentina, as in Pedo and some other places where
(19:19):
we did work. But then it regresses unless it's you know,
unless it's it's continues to be enforced and paid attention to.
There's a there's a backsliding that takes place, including in
this country. No one's no one's holy when it comes
to this stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, and you know, the digital asset question is is
something we've talked about on the show in different episodes
and different contexts. But the idea that a technology foundational
technology light the blockchain and how bitcoin was original envisioned
(20:00):
has become something different, Something that was meant to be auditible, traceable,
transparent is really none of those things. And it's been
I think very difficult to get that toe hold in
terms of a regulatory structure to really address the threats.
(20:23):
And I think for the public sector it means that
you know, they're I mean, if they're normally two steps
behind the threat, they may be ten steps behind. Do
you think there's a greater role for private investigators to
help fill that gap?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Well, I think the investigative industry consists of many components.
When I started out in this field, which is a
long time ago, there really weren't that many people doing
investigations in the private sector. They might do it in
(21:03):
the context of a piece of litigation or something like that,
or law enforcement might do it in in in the
context of their of their work. But it was a
relatively new field when I began this in the in
the seventies. That changed over over time. I mean, when
(21:27):
we began to work in this area, it was doing
preventative work. So for example, for the for the the
banks and the investment banks, we were we were doing
something back in the day which was really due diligence,
but we were we were doing research and investigations into
(21:49):
people they were either lending money to or or or
raising money for. But they we avoided using the word investigations.
We called the due diligence and we had something called
in the late seventies that began to become known as
the as the Crawl Report. So we didn't we didn't
(22:11):
we wanted to make it benign. We didn't want to
use the word investigations. In fact, we didn't have our
first investigative license until we were in business for I
don't know, eight nine years, we were consultants. But I
(22:31):
think what's happened today is there are many, many people
conducting investigations. So for example, search firms they conduct they
call it due diligence. They avoid the word using the
word investigations. Law firms don't call it investigations. In many circumstances,
(22:54):
they call it research. It's the same thing, It really
is the same thing. Now, there are people who are
outliers that go about doing work that is either unethical
or illegal, but that's not limited to investigators. That can
(23:15):
be any anybody doing that. So it's always a challenge
because regardless of who the news media is, if it's
an investigator, you're spine. You're spine digging for dirt. It's
really no different than these other disciplines. But you know,
(23:37):
I've somewhat given up that fight because the media loves
to refer to it that way.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
So I want to pick Yeah, thanks, I actually want
to pick up on that because there has been plenty
of criticism of the let's call it the private investigation world, right,
both in terms of the tactics that are used as
well as the clients that are served. And you know,
you haven't been immune to that criticism. Most people in
(24:07):
the industry, if they've been in the business for a while,
probably are not immune to that criticism. But how do
you respond to this idea that the industry should operate
within a certain set of boundaries or should potentially be
more closely regulated.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, what's interesting is the search firms are not regulated,
the consulting firms are not regulated, the law firms are regulated.
Investigators are regulated, not just in the United States. It's
usually regulated under state law, but they're regulated in most
(24:47):
parts of the world. So regulation exists. Now there are people.
Since you're asking about investigators, I won't talk about the
other areas and frank there's not that much of a
difference in terms of how they conduct themselves. But let's
stay with the investigators because that's what this focuses on.
(25:12):
There are certain things that it's very clear, there's a
there's a very very clear line that doing accessing certain
seeking to access certain information is illegal, that it's a
violation of some regulations that that that exists. Uh, And
(25:34):
then there are other there are other situations that may
look like they're not proper, but they are permissible. So,
for example, setting up an undercover operation that is legal.
There is no place in the United States where setting
(25:54):
up an undercover cover operation is illegal, depending on who's
hiring you. So an employer can hire you to work
independently within your own company. Now can you work in
somebody else's company undercover? Different story, and that will depend
(26:20):
on these circumstances. Are you allowed to There's there's an
expression called dumpster diving. That is where you're looking into
people's trash. Uh. It's that is viewed as being legal
in most most places where the parties disposing of their
(26:43):
materials in their trash have have indicated that they have
no continuing interest in what they've disposed of. So I
can think of cases that we had. It was a
pretty well known case back in the day where a
(27:06):
company was dumping all kinds of printouts and documents to
avoid having to turn them over in discovery, in a
in a in a lawsuit, in a takeover case. And
so what we did was we we actually we suspected
(27:28):
this was going on because they were turning over almost nothing,
but to be safe, we checked the law in that state.
It happened to be Texas, and we also filmed our
behavior so you could we're not only seeing what they
had dumped into into these big bins, but we we
(27:54):
filmed ourselves so that when when an if because we
were going to have to we're going to have to
tell the court how did we come up with this material.
So the point of all this is you should do it.
You should do it in conjunction with the laws of
that jurisdiction. Number one and number two. You should do
(28:17):
it clearly, and you should do it and document it. Now,
there are people who don't do that. They go into
somebody's else's premises and they steal things. That's illegal. That's illegal,
whether you do it as a lawyer, as a consultant,
as a search firm, as an investigator, it's illegal. Wire
(28:41):
Tapping everywhere is illegal. So it depends on what you're doing,
what the rules of the road are, and you need
to be aware of these things.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Do you think it's getting more challenging in terms of
the ethical considerations when you know, when we think about
modern investigative techniques, surveillance, data mining, you know, the techniques
that maybe weren't around it a decade ago, or certainly
two decades ago. Is that shifting the lens on all
(29:14):
of this?
Speaker 2 (29:14):
In any way, it is absolutely shifting because these technologies
didn't exist. I mean, when I began in this work
in the seventies, there was no internet. The Internet didn't
come around until you know, the nineties, and so when
you wanted documents, court documents, you had to go down
(29:36):
to the courthouse and look in the files. You had
to find a way to get access to the newspaper,
newspaper what they used to call newspaper morgues. Well, the
world has come a long way since they primarily because
of the because of the Internet, and so yeah, yes,
(30:00):
there are many things to be done today, and technology
will always be ahead of where the where the law is,
and the crooks will always be ahead of where law
enforcement is uh, and the private sector is. It's always uh,
it's always a question of a catchup.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I want to talk about some of the aspects that
we're dealing with today in terms of great power, competition,
and the role of intelligence and private investigation in particular.
But before we go there, I'm curious if if you
if you can think of a case that still keeps
you up at night, maybe the case that got away,
(30:45):
or something that just feels unresolved.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
How much time do we have?
Speaker 1 (30:52):
We have time?
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Well, you know, we've done thousands. I've been in business
since nineteen seventy two. Now the business has changed over
the over the years. I think the I think the
cases that haunt me are those that you know that
(31:19):
something downright illegal has gone on, but we just couldn't
gain access to the information, or the perpetrators were too clever,
they were able to lie, to lie in a courtroom,
(31:42):
and they got they got away with it. You know,
it's the same in a sense, the same frustration one
would have as a as a prosecutor or as a
defense counsel, because it's not as if law enforcement is
always pure. Sometimes law enforcement, law enforcements behavior is not ethical.
(32:07):
It's also true with defense defense counsel or defendants. So
nobody has nobody owns integrity all by themselves. But your
original question, what what what haunts me? I think it's
(32:31):
I think it's public. Public corruption is the area that
is for me the most vexing. I'll give you an example.
We we had we were hired by the corruption the
anti corruption chief of Kenya years ago, and we got
we got lucky. People work very hard, and we discovered
(32:56):
four billion dollars that the former ruler of the country
are up moy had stolen, but he still had political
power in the country even though he was out of office,
and he got the anti corruption chief fired and in
turn his replacement fired us. Those are the kind of
(33:16):
things that you sort of never forget.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Do you feel like there's a case that you're most
proud of, or one that you think had the most
impact in terms of stopping a corrupt oligarch or having
some you know, some general benefit for the public.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
The one that first comes to mind is the work
we did after the invasion of Kuwait August two of
nineteen ninety in October and October, we were hired by
the government of Kuwait to do two things. One was
(34:00):
to look for assets that he had that he had
taken from his own people and from the Kuwaitis and
number two to try to uncover his source of important
strategic weapons. And this is work we did throughout throughout
(34:28):
nineteen ninety one and continued on even after Kuwait was
liberated in March of ninety one. The most important part
of the work was not finding the money, although we
did find a lot of money. The most important part
of the work was to uncover the way in which
(34:49):
he was acquiring dual use technology for his armaments. And
I think that case is always one that stands out
in my mind as something that was the most impactful.
In fact, there was a sixty minutes piece on it
(35:12):
called Saddam's Billions, and in it there's this really fascinating
moment where was Saddam's half brother, Barzon el Tacridi is
confronted by Steve Croft and this this Barzon was really
(35:35):
a bad guy and it was very violent. It was
a very violent man, and he was really a butcher.
He was he was Saddan Saddam's heavy heavyweight and craft
door stops him in Rome, either Rome or Geneva because
he at the time was the was the the a
(36:00):
rocky representative on the Human Rights Commission. I mean, what
a choice that was, and he can he confronts him
about monies, including some of the vehicles that were sitting
in his driveway that were vehicles that were stolen from Kway.
I mean, it was really quite remarkable, and of course
(36:21):
Barzan goes on camera and he denies everything, and then
he accuses me of making this up. And he said,
but if any of it's true, he's he said, I'll
give mister Kroll ten percent, which of course I accepted.
(36:42):
It's it's a it's a very it was a very
special moment and and my my activities so U but
that that that matter, that matter stands out in my mind.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
There is what seems to be a bit of an
alignment between Trump and Putin. We have a rising China,
which is problematic for a lot of reasons, including operating
as a as a non market player, right, and that
(37:19):
is that is challenging for us from an economic security perspective.
We have a kleptocracy in Venezuela, a kleptocracy in Iran.
It's going to be interesting to see how all this
sorts sorts itself out. But in terms of how you
see the role of private investigators, the ability to use
(37:44):
certain tools in certain ways, do you think the role
of private investigators is shifting in a meaningful way? Is
there is there a space that needs to get filled
When we think about this kind of new economic security,
(38:04):
uh moment that we're living in, we do.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Have to find new tools because there is far less
access today than they used to be so back in
the day, by the late by the late eighties, I
had I had five offices in China, Hong Kong and
then four other offices in China. Today, it is not
(38:30):
safe to be in my business in China because we've
you know, our current business Keito Intelligence, we're not We're
not in China, so we have to we have to
work through through cutouts. It is not safe. The same
is true in Venezuela. I used to have in my
former business an office in Moscow. It's not safe to
(38:55):
do our work in Moscow. So what you have and
we've never been in Tehran because it's been a it's
been an unsafe place since the since the late since
nineteen seventy nine. So these these places are not accessible.
(39:20):
What you the only thing you can do is to work,
work at a distance, or have sources that come in
and out. But you can't you work in these places
at your peril. These are these are these are totalitarian states,
(39:44):
and it is not safe to work in these places.
All you can do is have sources who move in
and out. And then if you have these sources, you
better double or triple check anything you're told, because the
chances are they reported what they're doing to people who
have no interest in seeing you be successful. So I
(40:07):
think it is far more, far more difficult, far more dangerous,
and I think what you're going to see is this
problem becoming even more severe in today's environment.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
So that's a great segue to the next question, which
is really focused on how banking and finance in particular
should be thinking, perhaps a bit differently about dealing with
business risks in the current environment where the geopolitical uncertainty
(40:46):
is just off the charts. You know, it's difficult to
really think about how to quantify geopolitical risk for any
business operating globally, but certainly in the thinking and finance world.
Russia is a great example, right, So you know you
can talk to some private investors now who would say
(41:09):
that market isn't coming back, the risks are too high,
we won't see private capital going back into Russia, and
then others that probably have a different opinion about it.
But how do you think companies should be thinking about
these questions around risk going forward?
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Well, referring to the countries that we've just discussed, China, Iran, Russia.
These are dangerous places to do business, dangerous places to visit,
and dangerous places to invest. And in some cases people
(41:50):
from those countries will reach out and will become active
in other countries other than just their home country. So
to those in business who are thinking about it, is
be very very careful. Any work you do has got
to be from a from a distance. The second aspect
(42:14):
of this is from an economic national security point of view.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
UH.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
The area that I'm most concerned about is is UH
is industrial espionage, because you have these are nation state
actors and they have four years had had people citizens
of these countries working in some of the leading technology
(42:48):
companies in the United in the units I mean in
the United States, but also elsewhere in Germany and Holland
and the UK, in France and and elsewhere. So to me,
to me, the industrial espionage, the threat is paramount, and
(43:11):
so I think one should focus on people who are
working in your companies and in your country. And that
would be one of the first places that I would
that I would look. I don't think I would encourage
people well, I definitely would not encourage people to try
(43:33):
to go into these other countries and operate it. It
is seriously dangerous.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
As globalization, technology, and financial markets have expanded, so have
the risks that businesses and governments face, from the theft
of intellectual property to stolen public assets. Jules Kroll has
trailblazed the pathway of private investigations, defining an industry in
the process. I'm Elaine de Zinski. Thanks for joining me
for this episode of Course of Capital on the Illicit
(44:04):
Edge Network.
I'm Elaine Dozinski, and this is coercive capital on the
illicit edge network. When the Kuwaiti government wanted to track
down Saddam Hussein's stolen assets, who did they call or
when help was needed to locate the public funds amassed
by kleptocrats like Ferdinand Marcos and baby Doc d Vallier.
Or negotiating high profile kidnapping cases in Brazil and exposing
(00:35):
digital criminals in Japan, corporate malfeasance, info leaks, workplace investigations.
You get the idea. His name is Jules Kroll, and
his name is synonymous with the corporate investigations industry, an
industry that he, more than anyone, has helped to define
over the last fifty years. In nineteen seventy two, Kroll
(00:55):
founded Kroll Inc. Turning it into the global leader in
modern investigations, intelligence, and corporate security. Of course, it's not
an industry without criticism. The nature of the work means
Kroll and his firm have, on occasion then at the
center of conversations about privacy, surveillance, and the ethics of
corporate intelligence. After leaving his eponymous firm, he became the
(01:19):
co founder and executive chair of K two Intelligence and
now K two Integrity, a financial crime's risk, compliance and
advisory services firm. I recently spoke with Jewels about how
it all started, some of his well known cases, and
how he sees the role of corporate intelligence and private
investigation in today's geopolitical moment. You're regarded as the godfather
(01:42):
or some have called you the Johnny Appleseed of the
private investigation industry, and if you look at the number
of private investigators who've come through the doors of Kroll,
you've trained so many. I wanted to start the conversation
by going back to when you started your work in
a private investigation field around nineteen seventy two. Why did
(02:05):
you start the firm? Why did you get into the
private investigative world in the first place.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well, we didn't start as investigators. I had I had
been an assistant DA in Manhattan and we had a small,
struggling family printing business which we ended up disposing of.
But that gave me the idea for a consulting business,
(02:33):
not an investigations business, which focused for several years on
how to make the purchasing or the procurement process more
honest because there was quite a bit of commercial bribery.
So I would say for the first four or five years,
that's primarily what we did was consulting on how to
improve and how to provide special audits. We didn't call
(02:56):
ourselves investigators until the early eighties, after seven eight years
in business.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
That's fascinating. I also think it's interesting that your own
experience with dealing with corruption and what your father, as
I was reading what your father went through in terms
of trying to protect his own business from corruption, was
the impetus behind your work. And I know that for
(03:26):
a period of time you were interested in going into
public service and you ran a campaign. How did that
influence where you ended up going.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Well, it was a profound influence because I was as
a kid, I was raised in Queen's I actually ran
in an insurgent campaign against the established democratic machine which
was corrupt from top to bottom. It was an anti
corruption campaign circa nineteen seventy one, and it was very
(04:00):
clear that it was a corrupt system. And in fact,
out of the during the period of seventies and early eighties,
twenty six of the public officials in Queens ended up
going to jail on various forms of corruption or bribery cases,
including the fellow who was the organization's candidate who I
(04:26):
ran against and lost to. He went away on subsequently
on federal charges felony charges twice, but he was only
one of twenty six that was caught up in the
corruption of the day. So that experience had a profound
effect on my thinking and my goals and on the
(04:49):
creation of the business.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
So over the years, you've had a lot of high
profile cases in a lot of cases that were very
much under the radar. One thing that struck me about
the kinds of work that you've taken on is that
you've been going after kleptocrats before the term kleptocrat was
even in use. When we think about Saddam Hussein tracking
(05:14):
his stolen assets, Ferdinand Marcos, Hades, Baby, doctor Valier, and others,
I'm curious about how you how do you think about
kleptocrats today? You know, we talk about Putin as a kleptocrat,
We talk about other current leaders in authoritarian regimes as
(05:35):
driving kleptocracies. Has anything really changed.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
No. We ended up doing this kind of work originally
as part of the business in nineteen eighty five, when
we did a pro bono assignment for the US Congress.
The late congressman, the Stephen Solars, who was a friend,
called me and said, I've been railing against fernand Marcos
(06:03):
for years with all the money US money he steals
for himself and his family and his cronies. And there's
been some excellent work done by the Sacramento on the
Sacramento b by some expats from the Philippines. And he said,
I can't evaluate it. It looks real when you help
(06:27):
me evaluate it, and when you help me perfect the investigation,
because I've never done an investigation before. He said, I
also can't pay you. So that was the beginning, and
it turned out that the expats had done really good work.
Our work was really in support of their original work,
(06:50):
and so I was very proud to help. And that
became the first case of kleptopocrisy that we were involved in,
and it was the first of maybe sixty At this point,
it's sixty five sixty six of those between my original
business and my subsequent my current business.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
So I'm curious to ask you at this stage, having
worked on thousands of cases across public officials, private corporations,
and others. Who's better at hiding wealth? Road nations, oligarchs,
fortune five hundred executives. And is there a distinction in
terms of how you think about asset recovery?
Speaker 2 (07:34):
There are many permutations of stealing in that setting, depending
on the circumstances of a country and the circumstances of
the times. You know, the Foreign CRPT Practices Act was
(07:54):
only only went into law in the late seventies seventy
eight or seventy nine. Came came out of a circumstance
involving Lockheed Uh in Japan, and they were they were
paying off to get to get contracts in in Japan,
(08:17):
And that only came out as indirectly the the work
that was done in in the campaign finance area during
the Nickson period, So it first came to formal public
attention during that time. And each each of these circumstances
is somewhat different. So so for example, the work the
(08:44):
work we did with Marcos Uh, there had been there
had been outstanding there had been outstanding work that had
already been done by these Filipino expects. But you know,
we had we put lawyers on it, we put fensic
accountants on it, and of course we had the power
(09:05):
of the congressional subpoena at that point. When we did
when we when we did the work in Haiti going
after baby Baby Doc, who was the son of the
prior ruler of Haiti, that was just a crude taking.
(09:28):
It wasn't very sophisticated. You know, he would Baby Doc
would go into the into the into the treasury of
Haiti and he would write a check. And this was
literally the case, four million dollars to buy a to
buy an apartment at Trump Tower. This was back in
(09:50):
the back in the late eighties. So it was very crude,
very unsophisticated. When you go to the period in the
in the early the early nineties, we had worked we
had worked for the yeltsin regime and we were hired
to track the money that the KGB had taken out
(10:13):
of the country and used offshore, and that was much
more sophisticated with cutouts and cover stories and you know,
something you can imagine was done on a reasonably sophisticated basis.
The problem was when we turned the information over to
(10:34):
members of the elsin regime, that money didn't always make
it back to the state. When you had the takeover
of many assets in Russia. Some of the early oligarchs
were people who knew how to get a hold of
those assets, and many of them became billionaires as a
(10:54):
result of it. In the case of Fujimori, which was
another case we had done, who had been the president
of Peru, we had a contract from the UN and
we were able to uncover all the monies that he
was funneling to his relatives back in Japan. So each
(11:19):
one of these cases is different, and so I'm avoiding
generalizing because they are different. In the case of a
Color de Mello in Brazil, he was taking bribes even
(11:40):
before he took office through his campaign manager, and we
were hired by the Brazilian Congress in the context of
an impeachment proceeding. So it depends on who's hired us.
Is it somebody like the UN, Is it a congress,
Is is it a corporation? You know, who is it
(12:04):
and what do they know at the point in time.
They almost always know something before we're hired, which is
the reason we're hired. This is in the public sector
as opposed to the corporate sector, and sometimes there's a
fine line between steel outright stealing and conflicts of interest.
(12:29):
You know, we see that playing out today in different
parts of the world, including our own. What's a conflict
of interest and what is outright stealing? What is permissible
under the law, and what is you know, what is
the law, what are the rulings of the courts, what
are the attitudes of the country. All these things come
(12:51):
into play. So I know I'm going on a bit
a bit longer, but the answer is it depends.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
I want to pick up on the FCPA conversation because
it's such a critical time right now in terms of,
you know, how we're thinking about countering corruption. And there
was a recent move by the Trump administration to move
(13:19):
resources away from enforcing the FCPA on US companies towards
going after cartels, money laundering organizations, criminal networks. It's really
early to understand how this is going to play out,
but you know, one of the things that struck me
is how over the last fifty or so years, the
(13:41):
FCPA has become such a foundational element, not only for
the US but for many countries who've emulated that legislation.
And I think it's also been a huge component that
has driven investigative work in the industry around that. How
do you see this evolution of FCPA enforcement over the
(14:04):
last five decades and where we are now, I mean,
do you have thoughts about where anti corruption enforcement needs
to go in the future.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Well, first, the little history. After the laws were passed
in the late in the late seventies, there was very
little pickup on the part of other countries, and in fact,
there were almost no FCPA prosecutions as you went into
the eighties. So something like the FCPA and some and
(14:39):
something like different forms of bribery are affected by the
the political priorities of the time. Certain administrations have it
as a high priority, other administrations have it as a
low priority. Not just not just in this country. Most
(15:00):
of our investigations for f c p A did not
first and foremost begin at the at the initiation of
American institutions. Uh. I'll give you a couple of examples,
but the theme of my comment is that it is
(15:24):
the priority of the political class that is determining what
will be emphasized and what will be de emphasized. So,
for example, we we had a we had a case
where we work for the the the investment the Investment
(15:47):
Fund of Bahrain back in the back in the early
in the early two thousands, and they had a they
had an aluminum, a National Aluminum Company, and their belief
was that there were people in Bahrain being bribed by
(16:08):
some of the vendors. And sure enough, when we did
the work, there were all sorts of vendors that were
bribing people in Bahrain. Now, we were hired by the
person who was then the Crown Prince, son of the king.
(16:29):
He's now he's now the Prime Minister, and he made
it a priority to say this is this is what
I suspect and it's got to stop. At the end
of the day, we caught a half a dozen companies, American,
European and Japanese companies that were bribing to get business
(16:49):
in the National Aluminum Company, the most prominent of which
was al Koa, an American company, and we literally went
to them and we said, listen, this is what we
think is going on. We're not looking to our client
is not looking to have scalps up on the wall.
(17:09):
They just want the economic recompense for what you've taken
from them, and they refuse. They hired an outside law
firm who frankly whitewashed the whole thing. But ultimately within
a couple of years we recovered four hundred and fifty
million for the National Aluminum Company and Alcohol had to
(17:34):
pay a four hundred and fifty million dollar FCPA fine.
That is unusual. It was unusual initiated by the country
where this was happening, and the perpetrators were in a
macro American company. There is much less rigorous enforcement in
(17:54):
countries outside the United States, and so one of the
arguments that is made by people, and you see it
being made now, that enforcement of the f CPA makes
American companies less competitive. And so people say, people say, well,
(18:15):
how can you do that because a Chinese company is
gonna and this is literally the case, they'll pay whatever
it takes to get the business. And I could name
other countries as well. Chinese are not the only ones
that are doing it. So the political agendas of ruling
(18:38):
ruling parties in different countries set the policy, and that
policy waxes and wanes depending on depending on what the
priorities are, and it's waxed and waned in this country
as well as as something like places like Latin America.
(18:58):
Latin America at one point was an absolute sewer of corruption,
and then it went through a period of time when
it began to get cleaned up, as in Brazil, as
in Argentina, as in Pedo and some other places where
(19:19):
we did work. But then it regresses unless it's you know,
unless it's it's continues to be enforced and paid attention to.
There's a there's a backsliding that takes place, including in
this country. No one's no one's holy when it comes
to this stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Yeah, and you know, the digital asset question is is
something we've talked about on the show in different episodes
and different contexts. But the idea that a technology foundational
technology light the blockchain and how bitcoin was original envisioned
(20:00):
has become something different, Something that was meant to be auditible, traceable,
transparent is really none of those things. And it's been
I think very difficult to get that toe hold in
terms of a regulatory structure to really address the threats.
(20:23):
And I think for the public sector it means that
you know, they're I mean, if they're normally two steps
behind the threat, they may be ten steps behind. Do
you think there's a greater role for private investigators to
help fill that gap?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Well, I think the investigative industry consists of many components.
When I started out in this field, which is a
long time ago, there really weren't that many people doing
investigations in the private sector. They might do it in
(21:03):
the context of a piece of litigation or something like that,
or law enforcement might do it in in in the
context of their of their work. But it was a
relatively new field when I began this in the in
the seventies. That changed over over time. I mean, when
(21:27):
we began to work in this area, it was doing
preventative work. So for example, for the for the the
banks and the investment banks, we were we were doing
something back in the day which was really due diligence,
but we were we were doing research and investigations into
(21:49):
people they were either lending money to or or or
raising money for. But they we avoided using the word investigations.
We called the due diligence and we had something called
in the late seventies that began to become known as
the as the Crawl Report. So we didn't we didn't
(22:11):
we wanted to make it benign. We didn't want to
use the word investigations. In fact, we didn't have our
first investigative license until we were in business for I
don't know, eight nine years, we were consultants. But I
(22:31):
think what's happened today is there are many, many people
conducting investigations. So for example, search firms they conduct they
call it due diligence. They avoid the word using the
word investigations. Law firms don't call it investigations. In many circumstances,
(22:54):
they call it research. It's the same thing, It really
is the same thing. Now, there are people who are
outliers that go about doing work that is either unethical
or illegal, but that's not limited to investigators. That can
(23:15):
be any anybody doing that. So it's always a challenge
because regardless of who the news media is, if it's
an investigator, you're spine. You're spine digging for dirt. It's
really no different than these other disciplines. But you know,
(23:37):
I've somewhat given up that fight because the media loves
to refer to it that way.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
So I want to pick Yeah, thanks, I actually want
to pick up on that because there has been plenty
of criticism of the let's call it the private investigation world, right,
both in terms of the tactics that are used as
well as the clients that are served. And you know,
you haven't been immune to that criticism. Most people in
(24:07):
the industry, if they've been in the business for a while,
probably are not immune to that criticism. But how do
you respond to this idea that the industry should operate
within a certain set of boundaries or should potentially be
more closely regulated.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, what's interesting is the search firms are not regulated,
the consulting firms are not regulated, the law firms are regulated.
Investigators are regulated, not just in the United States. It's
usually regulated under state law, but they're regulated in most
(24:47):
parts of the world. So regulation exists. Now there are people.
Since you're asking about investigators, I won't talk about the
other areas and frank there's not that much of a
difference in terms of how they conduct themselves. But let's
stay with the investigators because that's what this focuses on.
(25:12):
There are certain things that it's very clear, there's a
there's a very very clear line that doing accessing certain
seeking to access certain information is illegal, that it's a
violation of some regulations that that that exists. Uh, And
(25:34):
then there are other there are other situations that may
look like they're not proper, but they are permissible. So,
for example, setting up an undercover operation that is legal.
There is no place in the United States where setting
(25:54):
up an undercover cover operation is illegal, depending on who's
hiring you. So an employer can hire you to work
independently within your own company. Now can you work in
somebody else's company undercover? Different story, and that will depend
(26:20):
on these circumstances. Are you allowed to There's there's an
expression called dumpster diving. That is where you're looking into
people's trash. Uh. It's that is viewed as being legal
in most most places where the parties disposing of their
(26:43):
materials in their trash have have indicated that they have
no continuing interest in what they've disposed of. So I
can think of cases that we had. It was a
pretty well known case back in the day where a
(27:06):
company was dumping all kinds of printouts and documents to
avoid having to turn them over in discovery, in a
in a in a lawsuit, in a takeover case. And
so what we did was we we actually we suspected
(27:28):
this was going on because they were turning over almost nothing,
but to be safe, we checked the law in that state.
It happened to be Texas, and we also filmed our
behavior so you could we're not only seeing what they
had dumped into into these big bins, but we we
(27:54):
filmed ourselves so that when when an if because we
were going to have to we're going to have to
tell the court how did we come up with this material.
So the point of all this is you should do it.
You should do it in conjunction with the laws of
that jurisdiction. Number one and number two. You should do
(28:17):
it clearly, and you should do it and document it. Now,
there are people who don't do that. They go into
somebody's else's premises and they steal things. That's illegal. That's illegal,
whether you do it as a lawyer, as a consultant,
as a search firm, as an investigator, it's illegal. Wire
(28:41):
Tapping everywhere is illegal. So it depends on what you're doing,
what the rules of the road are, and you need
to be aware of these things.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Do you think it's getting more challenging in terms of
the ethical considerations when you know, when we think about
modern investigative techniques, surveillance, data mining, you know, the techniques
that maybe weren't around it a decade ago, or certainly
two decades ago. Is that shifting the lens on all
(29:14):
of this?
Speaker 2 (29:14):
In any way, it is absolutely shifting because these technologies
didn't exist. I mean, when I began in this work
in the seventies, there was no internet. The Internet didn't
come around until you know, the nineties, and so when
you wanted documents, court documents, you had to go down
(29:36):
to the courthouse and look in the files. You had
to find a way to get access to the newspaper,
newspaper what they used to call newspaper morgues. Well, the
world has come a long way since they primarily because
of the because of the Internet, and so yeah, yes,
(30:00):
there are many things to be done today, and technology
will always be ahead of where the where the law is,
and the crooks will always be ahead of where law
enforcement is uh, and the private sector is. It's always uh,
it's always a question of a catchup.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I want to talk about some of the aspects that
we're dealing with today in terms of great power, competition,
and the role of intelligence and private investigation in particular.
But before we go there, I'm curious if if you
if you can think of a case that still keeps
you up at night, maybe the case that got away,
(30:45):
or something that just feels unresolved.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
How much time do we have?
Speaker 1 (30:52):
We have time?
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Well, you know, we've done thousands. I've been in business
since nineteen seventy two. Now the business has changed over
the over the years. I think the I think the
cases that haunt me are those that you know that
(31:19):
something downright illegal has gone on, but we just couldn't
gain access to the information, or the perpetrators were too clever,
they were able to lie, to lie in a courtroom,
(31:42):
and they got they got away with it. You know,
it's the same in a sense, the same frustration one
would have as a as a prosecutor or as a
defense counsel, because it's not as if law enforcement is
always pure. Sometimes law enforcement, law enforcements behavior is not ethical.
(32:07):
It's also true with defense defense counsel or defendants. So
nobody has nobody owns integrity all by themselves. But your
original question, what what what haunts me? I think it's
(32:31):
I think it's public. Public corruption is the area that
is for me the most vexing. I'll give you an example.
We we had we were hired by the corruption the
anti corruption chief of Kenya years ago, and we got
we got lucky. People work very hard, and we discovered
(32:56):
four billion dollars that the former ruler of the country
are up moy had stolen, but he still had political
power in the country even though he was out of office,
and he got the anti corruption chief fired and in
turn his replacement fired us. Those are the kind of
(33:16):
things that you sort of never forget.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Do you feel like there's a case that you're most
proud of, or one that you think had the most
impact in terms of stopping a corrupt oligarch or having
some you know, some general benefit for the public.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
The one that first comes to mind is the work
we did after the invasion of Kuwait August two of
nineteen ninety in October and October, we were hired by
the government of Kuwait to do two things. One was
(34:00):
to look for assets that he had that he had
taken from his own people and from the Kuwaitis and
number two to try to uncover his source of important
strategic weapons. And this is work we did throughout throughout
(34:28):
nineteen ninety one and continued on even after Kuwait was
liberated in March of ninety one. The most important part
of the work was not finding the money, although we
did find a lot of money. The most important part
of the work was to uncover the way in which
(34:49):
he was acquiring dual use technology for his armaments. And
I think that case is always one that stands out
in my mind as something that was the most impactful.
In fact, there was a sixty minutes piece on it
(35:12):
called Saddam's Billions, and in it there's this really fascinating
moment where was Saddam's half brother, Barzon el Tacridi is
confronted by Steve Croft and this this Barzon was really
(35:35):
a bad guy and it was very violent. It was
a very violent man, and he was really a butcher.
He was he was Saddan Saddam's heavy heavyweight and craft
door stops him in Rome, either Rome or Geneva because
he at the time was the was the the a
(36:00):
rocky representative on the Human Rights Commission. I mean, what
a choice that was, and he can he confronts him
about monies, including some of the vehicles that were sitting
in his driveway that were vehicles that were stolen from Kway.
I mean, it was really quite remarkable, and of course
(36:21):
Barzan goes on camera and he denies everything, and then
he accuses me of making this up. And he said,
but if any of it's true, he's he said, I'll
give mister Kroll ten percent, which of course I accepted.
(36:42):
It's it's a it's a very it was a very
special moment and and my my activities so U but
that that that matter, that matter stands out in my mind.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
There is what seems to be a bit of an
alignment between Trump and Putin. We have a rising China,
which is problematic for a lot of reasons, including operating
as a as a non market player, right, and that
(37:19):
is that is challenging for us from an economic security perspective.
We have a kleptocracy in Venezuela, a kleptocracy in Iran.
It's going to be interesting to see how all this
sorts sorts itself out. But in terms of how you
see the role of private investigators, the ability to use
(37:44):
certain tools in certain ways, do you think the role
of private investigators is shifting in a meaningful way? Is
there is there a space that needs to get filled
When we think about this kind of new economic security,
(38:04):
uh moment that we're living in, we do.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Have to find new tools because there is far less
access today than they used to be so back in
the day, by the late by the late eighties, I
had I had five offices in China, Hong Kong and
then four other offices in China. Today, it is not
(38:30):
safe to be in my business in China because we've
you know, our current business Keito Intelligence, we're not We're
not in China, so we have to we have to
work through through cutouts. It is not safe. The same
is true in Venezuela. I used to have in my
former business an office in Moscow. It's not safe to
(38:55):
do our work in Moscow. So what you have and
we've never been in Tehran because it's been a it's
been an unsafe place since the since the late since
nineteen seventy nine. So these these places are not accessible.
(39:20):
What you the only thing you can do is to work,
work at a distance, or have sources that come in
and out. But you can't you work in these places
at your peril. These are these are these are totalitarian states,
(39:44):
and it is not safe to work in these places.
All you can do is have sources who move in
and out. And then if you have these sources, you
better double or triple check anything you're told, because the
chances are they reported what they're doing to people who
have no interest in seeing you be successful. So I
(40:07):
think it is far more, far more difficult, far more dangerous,
and I think what you're going to see is this
problem becoming even more severe in today's environment.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
So that's a great segue to the next question, which
is really focused on how banking and finance in particular
should be thinking, perhaps a bit differently about dealing with
business risks in the current environment where the geopolitical uncertainty
(40:46):
is just off the charts. You know, it's difficult to
really think about how to quantify geopolitical risk for any
business operating globally, but certainly in the thinking and finance world.
Russia is a great example, right, So you know you
can talk to some private investors now who would say
(41:09):
that market isn't coming back, the risks are too high,
we won't see private capital going back into Russia, and
then others that probably have a different opinion about it.
But how do you think companies should be thinking about
these questions around risk going forward?
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Well, referring to the countries that we've just discussed, China, Iran, Russia.
These are dangerous places to do business, dangerous places to visit,
and dangerous places to invest. And in some cases people
(41:50):
from those countries will reach out and will become active
in other countries other than just their home country. So
to those in business who are thinking about it, is
be very very careful. Any work you do has got
to be from a from a distance. The second aspect
(42:14):
of this is from an economic national security point of view.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
UH.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
The area that I'm most concerned about is is UH
is industrial espionage, because you have these are nation state
actors and they have four years had had people citizens
of these countries working in some of the leading technology
(42:48):
companies in the United in the units I mean in
the United States, but also elsewhere in Germany and Holland
and the UK, in France and and elsewhere. So to me,
to me, the industrial espionage, the threat is paramount, and
(43:11):
so I think one should focus on people who are
working in your companies and in your country. And that
would be one of the first places that I would
that I would look. I don't think I would encourage
people well, I definitely would not encourage people to try
(43:33):
to go into these other countries and operate it. It
is seriously dangerous.
Speaker 1 (43:39):
As globalization, technology, and financial markets have expanded, so have
the risks that businesses and governments face, from the theft
of intellectual property to stolen public assets. Jules Kroll has
trailblazed the pathway of private investigations, defining an industry in
the process. I'm Elaine de Zinski. Thanks for joining me
for this episode of Course of Capital on the Illicit
(44:04):
Edge Network.
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