The Jordan Harbinger Show - 602: Tom Wright | Billion Dollar Whale

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

Tom Wright (@tomwrightasia) is an award-winning journalist, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World, co-founder of journalism studio and production company Project Brazen, and host of the Fat Leonard podcast. What We Discuss with Tom Wright: A deep dive into the shadowy world of corruption, money laundering, and embezzling by the shadiest shysters among the elite. How does an investigative journalist uncover misdeeds by the rich and powerful without winding up on someone's hit list? How did Jho Low, a charisma-free, second-generation fraudster, siphon billions of dollars from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund -- with the aid of Goldman Sachs -- right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs? How many ways are there to launder this kind of money without being detected by the authorities? Where is Jho Low today? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/602 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss the show we did with Shark Tank heavyweight Mark Cuban? Catch up with episode 362: Mark Cuban | Tales from the Shark Side here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jolo, like we said, he just took all the money out of a sovereign wealth fund overnight. And then, you know, when he wanted to amp it up a bit more, he forged links with this Goldman banker, a Goldman Sachs banker called Timothy Leisner. This is a few years after the original fraud. Goldman Sachs helped this fund that Jolo's running from behind the scenes to raise, you know, billions and billions of dollars. And Jolo just steals half of it.

And so he's hardly even bothering to think about what are the actual businesses we're going to be doing that's going to be making this a sustainable fraud. And that arrogance comes from the fact that this was sovereign money. He had the Prime Minister of Malaysia in his back pocket. And then he also had officials from the United Arab Emirates and a Saudi prince all on the other side. So that these transactions they were doing looked like they were government to government. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people.

We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional war correspondent, arms dealer, or tech mogul. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about it, we have episode starter packs. These are collections of favorite episodes organized by popular topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started, and of course, I always appreciate it when you do that. Today, one of the largest financial crimes ever, billions of dollars plundered not from wealthy investors, but from everyday citizens, this time of Malaysia, stolen by cronies of their own prime minister. And today on the show, my friend and gutsy investigative journalist Tom Wright, Tom spends his time investigating frauds and corruption, pissing off autocrats, oligarchs, and authoritarian governments all over the world, and, fortunately for us, spilling their dirty money secrets into the pages of his books and into his podcasts and other work. On this episode, we'll dive into the shadowy world of

government and corporate corruption, money laundering, embezzled funds, and will even get an inside look at the people that steal, move, and hide money all over the world, sometimes and especially in our own backyard. Also, what it's like to be an investigative journalist on the forefront of investigations that, frankly, agitate some of the most powerful and dangerous people in the world. If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week. It's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. Most of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Tom

Wright. One thing I don't understand is, okay, what you do is so dangerous. You're exposing corruption at the top levels of the U.S. Navy. You're doing exposés on investors, if you can call that that are stealing billions of dollars and getting happy birthday videos from fricking Vladimir Putin. So either you are fearless or you're just not properly appraising the level of danger that you're putting yourself in. So what do you think it is? Which one is it? I think it's neither of those. I don't think we're not properly appraising it. I don't think I'm foolhardy either. I mean. Well, I said fearless, not foolhardy. Fearless. Yeah. I'm not fearless either, know. I think what it is, Bradley Hope and I, you know, we're co-creators of this company,

Project Brayson. And I think we went into that building this company without like the protection of a big organization. Before we could always count on the Wall Street Journal where we worked for years to help us, right, with lawyers and all this. Now we're, you know, lawyering ourselves. You know, we have to hire lawyers ourselves. We approach every project in that we're going to be fair. And I think that's really crucial. We wrote billion dollar whale. We wrote about corruption at Goldman Sachs. This guy, Joe Lowe, who we think orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds ever. But we never, ever, ever threaten anybody.

And I think that's crucial. And I think all good journalists will follow this. That you're seen as having a slightly higher purpose. You've never take anything to a personal level on social media. That's very important. And that you sort of, I mean, people are going to get annoyed with you. If you're uncovering corruption that they're involved in, for sure. But I feel like if you do it in a way that people believe that you're really dotting all the eyes

and crossing all the T's, they're going to be less angry with you than they are, you know, if you're seen as somebody with even a small agenda or, you know, trying to play any angle, I think that's really the crucial element to staying safe in this job. That's the card people play when they go after journalists, right? They always say, you're biased, you have an agenda, you're working for the CIA or whatever. I mean, it depends on sort of Cold War, it was you're working for the imperialist, the CIA. Now it's kind of you're working for the United States. If you're talking about China, it's always you're a puppet of,

the United States. If you're talking about Iran or something like that, you're going to get that label. I suppose it just sort of depends. But what you're saying must be correct, because otherwise, all these despots and all these thieves wouldn't play that card the second they get criticism or exposed by you, right? They're kind of like going straight for the jugular, which is, oh, well, you have an agenda. You're biased. Actually, I'm quite lucky. I've never been called a CIA spy by anybody. You're right. That's a very typical way to discredit. Could be the English accent. Maybe you're MI6. Yeah. I'd be very deep cover if I was a CIA spy, but I've never been called an MI6 spy either. If you're a reporter, if you're a figure in Pussy Riot, for example, you've had on your show,

they're likely to get tarnished with that you're a stooge of a Western government. I never had that from Nacha Brazac, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, who, you know, we wrote about his deep, deep corruption and involvement with Jolo, who, of course, went on to make the film The Wolf of Wall Street with the money that he stole. You know, he never called us a foreign agent, But he did, you know, he went after us. He said he was going to sue us. He never did it because he didn't have a leg to stand on with that. He couldn't have pushed that through. My point has always been, I think that if you're a journalist in, say, Bihar in India or some province of Pakistan or something like that, if you look at the list of journalists who die every year from the Committee to Protect Journalists, it's not the

likes of myself, the foreign correspondents. And it's the local journalists who find corruption in their local area and killing them will stop the story coming out and allow that local politician or whoever it is to continue to do the corruption. And that's why, you know, this journalist, the American journalist just got jailed in Myanmar and has just been released. Yes. You know, I think he'd written some stories like that and that got him to trouble. You know, it's extremely important that we don't sort of overstate the danger that some of the foreign correspondents are under versus people who are really, like, rooted in their local communities and get killed. Now, the statistics show that. Yeah, that's true. You can always, well, maybe not always, but usually you can book the next flight out,

go back to your hotel, pack your stuff, or just go straight to the airport, these people are already home, right? And everyone knows where they live and where their kids live. You can kind of be like, hey, Hong Kong's not safe anymore. We're going to move to Singapore. And in fact, you did that, and we'll get to that in a little bit. But you're right. These local journalists are the ones taking even bigger risks because their back is already against the wall, so to speak. That's exactly right. So let's talk about Joe Lowe. So hundreds of millions slash billions of are misappropriated slash stolen by this 27-year-old businessman, and I'm putting that in air quotes because he's like, when I was 27, I was like a child. You know, I was a kid. I just graduated from law

school. I didn't know anything. I just moved out to New York to try and sort of make it in the city, got my first real job. This guy is, he's got billions of dollars at his disposal. He's hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Fox. This book is jammed with celebrity names. You can't really get more kind of ridiculous than this kid. And he's 27. What's going on here? So Jolo was a kid from an island called Penang, just off the northwest of Malaysia. So it's really like a place, you know, it was important in colonial times.

Ships would have to go down the Straits of Malacca to get to China, a big port on the opium roots back in the 19th century. So he grew up on this island, which is, I guess, it's become known for trading. And it's in Malaysia, but it's got a big Chinese population, ethnically Chinese. Malaysians. And Jolo comes from that ethnically Chinese group. So he had family links back to China, into the Chinese in Thailand. So he grew up with a very international sort of globalist perspective. He could pull on contacts all over the world. And then in 98, when he was a teenager for the last two years of high school, so I guess what you call junior and senior years, he was sent by his father to Harrow in the UK, which is one of the sort of most expensive boarding schools in England.

And, you know, we see his family as very much a, it was almost like a family con that was going on here. From a very young age, they wanted their son to get in with, you know, the Sultan of Brunei, who was one of the world's richest monarchs, with his children who were at that school. And then he went to Wharton in America and continues to network, very, very, very skilled networker, always figuring out who's going to benefit him. He's sort of overweight, not very good looking, not particularly charming, actually, not a, you know, catch me if you can. type figure, but still able to give things to people that they wanted. So for example, at Wharton, he would go off to Atlantic City and pay for everyone's gambling and all of this, had family money

by that point. And then he takes a semester off at Wharton to go to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi and tour around and meet all the sort of bigwigs that he can find there that he's gotten to know through his school networks. So he's drawing on those networks. And he sees in the Middle East how there's so much money and the difference between sort of sovereign well. and personal wealth is blurred. And he loves that idea. That's the seed that sowed in his mind at a very young age. You know, this idea that that's hard to see the difference between that private and public wealth.

Meaning that a lot of these Middle Eastern sort of sheiks and princelings, they just take the wealth of the country and use it for their own gain. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Yeah. He gets to know a guy called Yusuf Al-Taiber, who is still the UAE's ambassador in Washington. He's one of the sort of movers and shakers in Washington. And Othiber introduces him around, and Othiber would become very important in Jolo's story

because he helped to introduce him to various different people. You know, Tiber's close to Kushner, close to Tom Barrett Jr. Jolo gets in with certain people that are very useful to him. And what he does is after he graduates from Wharton, his childhood friend is a son of this character called Najib Razzak, or a stepson of Najib Razzak. And Najib Razzak becomes Prime Minister of Malaysia in 2008, and Jolo sort of knows. him via his children. And Jolo persuades Najib. He says, look, I can help transform your country by bringing all this Middle Eastern wealth in to the country. At the time, you know, all prices were high.

We're talking about mid-aughts, I guess, right? This is pretty common in Asia and in the emerging markets. There are these brokers who take a percentage of deals that happen. You know, it's very common in China as well. I mean, Jolo sets himself up as a sort of a broker between this Middle Eastern investment that would come in, in this case, a big infrastructure project, property project in Malaysia, and, you know, he makes a little bit of money on that. And it sets him up with Najib as this sort of,

I guess you could call him like an Eminence Gris or a Svengali-type figure behind the Prime Minister. And like you said, it's incredible because he's only 27 at the time. Right. And he sort of persuades the Prime Minister set up this sovereign wealth fund, a bit like the ones he's seen in the Middle East,

and they call it 1MDB. This to be, it's so bizarre how this all happens right under our noses. Like, I went to a pretty, good law school, but it's just nothing compared to a school like, or I wasn't in these circles, which I'm fully aware is probably the case. But like, when you look at Wharton and you go, oh, the prime minister's kids from Malaysia stepkids, whatever, are going to Wharton. And then this guy'd come from this London school that probably had a ton of Saudi royalty or just Middle Eastern royalty going there and old money, but like generationally old money from

monarchs and things like that. The rest of the world doesn't really, know about this guy I don't know about you I didn't grow up around this you know I don't know where you went to school but I assume you weren't sort of hanging out going to the birthday parties of literal or figurative metaphorical whatever royalty in whatever country you know you were in or they were in no I went to a public school in Birmingham which you know is an industrial city in the center of the UK I mean we wouldn't call it a public school in England a public school means a private school right in the very confusing British way yeah I went to a state school what we would call a grammar school no I didn't grow up with this at all through

my workers, a journalist, I've grown to know, and you do this so well in your podcast, you know, how the world really works. You know, there are these figures who know how the world works. And, you know, Bradley and I call them golden sources. We have these people that sort of know everything. If you want to find out something, you talk to them. And they, it's like, you know, in the global world of, you know, seven billion people, the people who are actually in the, in that sort of masterclass, if you could call them that, the 0.01% are actually very small. Yeah. Yeah. And they're all intertwined. And we saw that during the Trump presidency. the same kinds of figures coming back and around. Jolo was a master of figuring that out, I think,

figuring out who those people were, like Yusuf al-a-Tiber being one of them, and getting to know them, and that those people helped to grease his entry into that world, and, you know, he repaid them, which we can talk about. Yeah, it's surprising that he wasn't charming. I mean, when you see sort of photos and you look at, read the book and you see his antics, it's obvious that he's not charming. Not that you can tell much from a picture, but a photograph plus the book gives you a pretty good picture of who this guy is. When I think of somebody who can con people out of billions of dollars, you know, I'm thinking Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos. I'm not thinking this schlep, right? Like, it was shocking, almost to hear and see what this guy was able to do. Yeah, well, I mean,

I've got this podcast that's just come out called Fat Leonard, which is about this guy, Leonard Francis, who corrupted, created a mafia organization inside the U.S. Navy. Now, I was charmed by him during the making of the podcast, which was a COVID project, you know, 25 hours of talking to this guy. And then I find out all these dark secrets about him. And I'm like, like the listeners who've been listening to this Fat Leonard podcast, they're like, well, why did I like that guy at the beginning? I know. Well, that is a con artist.

Yeah, you've listened. You had the same reaction, I'm sure, right? Yeah. I listened to all the episodes, some of the ones you gave me before they came out, right? And I'm blowing through him, but it's like before lunch, I'm like, this guy is really smart. Like, this guy totally gets it. And then after lunch, I'm like, this is a scumbag.

I can't stand this guy. And by the end of it, you're just like, die already, you son of a bitch. You know, like, he's really a bad guy. Terrible. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I felt Leonard, for the people listening, was a contractor who made hundreds of millions of dollars out of the U.S. Navy and corrupted, you know, admirals and with sex and videotaped it and all this crazy stuff. But you can see why he was likable and why the con worked because he was able to make people feel a certain way. Now, Jolo, you know, one problem we had with writing billion dollar whale was every time we asked a model, we should say, Jolo stole all this money from the sovereign wealth fund that Najib allowed him to set up. Right. So Najib sets up the sovereign wealth fund and says, hey, 28-year-old Jolo, you, you run this from behind the scenes. But we know it's dodgy. So never take up an official position. And they just steal, you know, they steal, you know, hundreds of millions just like that overnight. I think they have about a billion in the first. This is 2009. You know, this is coinciding with the financial crisis. So Jolo's got all this money. He enters the nightclub world with it. One of the first things he wants to do with the money, it isn't to create a sustainable fraud like Fat Leonard, who's got this Navy contracting business, but just to spend money. in nightclubs in New York City. You know, he goes to Avenue. He goes to Marquis in New York.

And he becomes very important because at that time, the bottle service was sort of picking up and the financial crisis had meant the bankers didn't have the same kind of money to spend. But you talked to all those people who knew him from that period, and they just kept saying things like, well, you know, it wasn't really that interesting. Yeah. You know, he didn't really have anything to say. Yeah.

That was a challenge in the book, you know? There's a near certainty that I've met or run into Joe at some point. Because I used to go to Marquis like every single weekend. I had a friend that was a promoted there. It was like 2008, 2009, or whatever, 2007. And we used to go there every single weekend. And you would meet the weirdest characters, and you would hear, oh, yeah, this person is a royalty from some country or like, oh, his father owns oil stuff or he owns oil stuff. And I distinctly remember talking with one of my friends and saying, man, this guys won the birth lottery because they were younger than us or they were at the same age as us.

And it was just like, these guys have so much money. and they would say, oh, hey, after party on my friend's boat, it's in the harbor, or after party at this giant penthouse that's, I think, you know, even in 2007 was probably $20, $25,000 a month. And you would just sort of run across these people and they'd have a bartender there. And it's just, it was a totally different life. And you think, wow, they do this every single weekend. It must cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But if you're stealing a billion dollars from a wealth fund, it doesn't really matter.

I'd love for you to describe this birthday party that he has. you sort of talk about in the book, just to give us a rough idea of the extravagance of this sort of weird character. I mean, he's got Britney Spears singing him happy birthday, among other things. It's just loony. Yeah, this is his, I forgot what birthday it was. It's 2012, anyway. We call it, in the book, we call it peak jolo, and it's a prologue of billion dollar whale, because it was described as the most expensive private party ever thrown by the host of the lifestyle of the rich and famous, right? So who was there? Robin Leach, right? So this guy is proficient.

filing like Malibu mansions cut into the hills and saying, this is a ridiculous party. I've never seen anything like this. And that guy's like 80 now, right? I mean, or more. I mean, I don't even know. He actually passed away last year, this year or last year. But yeah, he went to that party in 2012 and said, you know, this is the biggest party I've ever seen. It's privately thrown. Wow. There was like a ferris wheel inside there. It was a whole, it was on a vacant lot just off the Vegas strip. People had to sign NDAs. They were bust in or brought in, you know, secret manner. There was trapeze artists up above and, you know, in the rafters. A circus tent.

It was like people who went to it said it was like going, you know, you'd only see this constellation of stars if you went to the Oscars or the Golden Globes or something like that. There was DiCaprio at one point gets on stage and is rapping drunk with Q-tip. And somebody commented it. He was the second best rapper up there after, I guess, Kanye West was there. And Kanye West was the best. Leo Leonardo DiCaprio was the second best. You know, just everybody was there, including big directors, actors.

at one point, a fake birthday cake is pushed onto the stage and Britney Spears burst out of the birthday cake and start singing him happy birthday. And this is just a, and we start the book with the scene because it's really unbelievable that Joe will get to this point. We were talking about, like, okay, he's not charming. Right. But what he did do is he changed people's lives overnight. You know, this is the world we're living in where there is so much money sloshing around. You know, he would drop $50,000 chips on the floor, drunk and other people could pick them up and cash them in. and that changes your life, you know? Yeah.

More than the average income in America, right? He would, you know, there was one Asian American model we talked to who said, look, it was her birthday and he just pulled her into a Chanel store and bought her some, you know, $60,000 piece of jewelry. And he would do that over and over and over again. And then there were other people who had just changed their lives as a character called Joey McFarland, who was sort of like a talent booker for Paris Hilton, who Jolo got to know because when he stole the money, he wanted to meet Paris Hilton and hang out with her because he was a fan of her. Actually, he liked House of Wax. That was one of the things he used to watch as a student at Wharton. It's so ridiculous. Ridiculous.

And he gets to know this character, Joey McFarland, who's this talent booker for Paris Hulton at the time. And he turns Joey McFarland into a bona fide, a Hollywood producer. You know, Joey McFarland becomes the producer of the Wolf of Wall Street sitting next to Martin Scorsese. So that's what Jolo did. He's got this, like, Midas touch, not through luck, but through stolen funds. and it does make you think about money in a different way, and you think, well, okay, it's generous but also not because it's not his money, right?

And I think throughout the book, there were points at which somebody would say, and you noted this, somebody would say, he's spending this money like it's not his, and how right they were, you know, when you're dropping $2 million in one night of bad gambling and you're not even seemingly having that much fun doing it, like the only other times you hear gambling described like that

is when North Koreans are, laundering money at a casino in Macau and they're gambling. Have you heard about this where they'll like stay up for 12 hours at a time, placing max bets and just winning half of them and laundering the money through the casino and they're so bored and they're having like food brought in and they're not enjoying themselves at all. This is the only other time you see somebody who's bored as hell gambling and then losing like two million dollars and just you know is killing time waiting for his friends or something like that. It's just unbelievable. What does two million matter if you've stolen, you know, billions of dollars. Yeah. It's inconsequential. You know, going back to being

able to tell it was a fraudster, how culpable were people who, you know, they're the inner circle of Jolo's fraud, and we can talk about Goldman Sachs later in their role. There were people involved that knew all that was going on and were fraudsters. And then there were people who, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio took some Picasso painting from Jolo. Miranda Kerr, who we also need to talk about who was Jolo's girlfriend for a while, the Australian supermodel, she took jewelry. You know, all those people, you know, there's no evidence. They knew anything was wrong that Jolo was a fraudster. And they gave back all the, you know, DiCaprio gave and Kerr gave back all their gifts to the Department of Justice after all this came out in the watch. But, you know, Jordan Belford, who of course

was the original Wolf of Wall Street on whom, you know, the film is based, he went to at the the premiere of the Wolf of Wall Street at the Cannes Film Festival that Jolo and his crew had put on. And they had spent a million dollars on the launch of the Wolf of Wall Street at the Cannes Film Festival. It was like Kanye West singing on stage, you know, Bradley, Bradley, Cooper in the audience. And this is a film company at that point hadn't made any films. And Jordan Belford's in the audience himself. And he says, this is a effing fraud. You know, he tells his girlfriend, I know this is a fraud. And so that's the interesting thing to me. It's like, what's turning a blind eye and what do people know at the time? And it's very

hard for us to disaggregate all of that and know what people knew at the time, you know. Why did Jordan think it was a fraud? Did you have you talked with him about this? Like, what was the giveaway where he was like, okay, what the hell? This is bullshit. Well, we haven't talk to him. He talked to a Swiss journalist called Katerina Bart about it and said this. I don't know. I mean, Jordan Belfort definitely can be self-serving. So I don't know if he, you know, really thought that at exactly that moment. He didn't go on any of these paid trips that Jolo would put on to like take people gambling for, you know, two days straight in Vegas and this kind of stuff. And he said, you know, well, I know that he's spending money like it's not his. And I guess

Belford had first-hand experience of that, right? Yeah. He knew what that was. And so, So, and a lot of people at the time, it goes back something you were saying earlier. I think at that point, and even today, there are a lot of people with money around and people don't know where it's from. And it's very easy just to say, well, you know, that's money from the far east. And I don't understand that. And that's, but there was rumors at the time. This is he a drug dealer.

Is he a guy? What is he? Is he some kind of prints from, he would self-style himself, by the way, as a prince from Malaysia as a way of explaining his wealth at one point, which makes no sense because he's Chinese and a Chinese and not the ethnic royalty of Malaysia, those are the Malays, right? That was strange. And then at one point, he made up the story about how his grandfather was a billionaire when things were getting dicey for him, you know, so.

Jolo's entire family history is almost fake somehow, right? Like early on, his father, it looks like, got wealthy from insider trading, and Joe sort of saw this coming up. I don't want to, well, I guess technically that's criminal, right? So he saw criminal behavior early on from even his own family. And they did a lot to launder their reputation. I don't remember specific examples from the book, but I have a note here that says that they literally went to quite a length to whitewash

and launder their family reputation, probably through philanthropy, I would imagine, right? Well, yeah, so you're right, Jolo's father ripped off a business partner with an offshore fraud. So Jolo grew up knowing all about, again, we were talking earlier about, like, who are these people that really run the world and understand the world? I don't know where you grew up, but I didn't grow up knowing anything about offshore finance. No. and the Payman Islands and the Seychelles and all of this. Jolo did.

You know, his father had used offshore companies to rip off a business partner back in the 90s. The father threw parties on a yachts with Swedish models in Malaysia at that time period. So why do so many children of actors and directors become actors and directors just because, you know, you grow up in a world that's difficult to access and you have a foot in the door, right? I grew up in a middle class academic family and so I learned to write and read and I became a journalist. We're all given great step-ups in life from the lottery of where we're born, right? Jolo's lottery was he was born into a fraudster family, you know, with a father who did a fraud, which is a similar acronym of what he did. So we still have a question which we weren't able to answer in the book, which is, is it a full family affair?

Was Jolo just a sort of a front for what was going on? Because, you know, his father's now on the run with Jolo. We get to where Jolo is now later. And when Jolo first does this fraud and steals the money from the Malaysian Sock and Welf Fund, he writes an email to his family saying, we've hit a gold mine. We've hit a gold mine. It's definitely a way to see it as a sort of a family enterprise.

Yeah, that is suspicious, I suppose. And also it makes more sense that somebody who's been in the game for decades at a time doing financial fraud would be at least mentoring him in this kind of thing, and he's not just figuring this out as he goes because there's too many mistakes I would imagine you could make, although you can afford to hire plenty of help when you've stolen that much money, I suppose, as well.

Well, for example, you know, when he steals the money, he decides to send it, the first trancheon money he steals. He sends into this Seychelles company. Now, the Seychelles back then was extremely good place to do that because you could have what was called a bearer share, which is if I physically hold the one share of that company, I'm the owner. And then, Jordan, I can give it to you over dinner with no, no corresponding records or anything. And now you're the holder of that share. That's a bearer share. And that was incredibly good way for money to be laundered in the way that probably crypto is today a very good way for money to be laundered.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Tom Wright. We'll be right back. Thank you for listening to and supporting this show. I really appreciate it. The sponsors help make this possible, so please do consider supporting those who support us. And I know that there's a lot of links and codes to remember. We put them all in one place, easy to remember, easy to use on your phone. Jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

We recently redid that page. Please let me know if anything doesn't look right or is broken. Jordanharbinger.com slash deals is where you can find it. Now, back to Tom Wright. It's sort of the opposite, though, right? Because crypto, everything's on the blockchain and very traceable. Barrow shares, I can slip it to you in an envelope. And now you're the owner of this company that has bank accounts that have $15 million in it, right?

Or property. Correct. Although there's many other ways in which crypto can be used to, yeah. It's possible. It's doable. So I've heard. Anyway, I don't want a crypto expert. But I tell you what's for sure.

I bet you for anything, Jolo is deep, deep into crypto right now. You know, sitting in China, you know, he's been indicted in the U.S. and in Malaysia, his home country. sitting in China, and I bet you for anything, he's deeply into crypto. That's what I'd be doing if I was in. Yeah, I was going to say, if I'm him and I've got hundreds of millions of dollars, the first thing I'm doing is putting as much as I can into coins like USD tether and Bitcoin. It doesn't even need to appreciate. In fact, it can go down. I just need to be able to move it around and take it out and give it to other people and spend it. Because right now, I mean, this guy's just dodging sanctions and he's one bank account shut down away or whatever from losing

that money and you can't do that with blockchain. The amount of celebrities in this book, I know we just talked about this a little bit, but I just, I want to go back and count how many times the names Jamie Fox and Swizby show up in the book. I mean, these guys were tight from the look of it. And like you said, he had more liquid cash than maybe anyone at the time when people really needed cash and possibly more liquid cash than anyone really in history, any one person was controlling. Think about this. Possibly more liquid cash than anyone in history. That's a bold statement, Tom, but that says a lot about the power this guy wields if he's the one person that has the most cash in theory at his disposal at any time ever.

Yeah, well, we should say we wrote this book before Bitcoin billionaires blew up. Fair. We should probably annotate that to say fiat currency, right? Because I'm sure there are people with more digital currency than he had. You know, we think he stole at least $6 billion. But it was the fact that it wasn't a pyramid scheme. You know, most frauds are the pyramid schemes, right? Bernie Madoff's scheme, for example, was a pyramid scheme. Investors invest, and the last one in the door gets ripped off and the like, to pay the earlier investors. And it takes many years. Bernie Madoff's scheme went on for many, many years, right? Jolo, like we said, he just took all the money out of a sovereign wealth fund overnight. And then, you know, when he wanted to amp it up a bit more, he forged links with this Goldman banker, Goldman Sachs banker called Timothy Leisner. This is a few years after the original fraud. Goldman Sachs helped this fund that Jolo is running from behind the scenes to raise, you know,

billions and billions of dollars, and Jolo just steals half of it. And so he's hardly even bothering to think about what are the actual businesses we're going to be doing that's going to be making this a sustainable fraud. And that arrogance comes from the fact that this was sovereign money. He had the Prime Minister of Malaysia in his back pocket. And then he also had officials from the United Arab Emirates and then a Saudi prince all on the other side. So these transactions they were doing look like they were government to government, right? So to get back to the celebrities, So he's got more money than anyone else. And he sort of, at the beginning, all he wants to do is just throw it around Hollywood.

Which is what's so surprising about this fraud. Like I said, he was not this little thought about building a sustainable fraud. And he's spending, you know, crazy amount of money. You mentioned Jamie Fox. Jamie Fox would emcee his events and get paid for that, you know, like, and he did that many, many times. Swiss Beats is really one of the celebrities that was probably closest to Jolo. This is Alicia Keys' husband and obviously massive producer of music. Swiss Beets would go to many events.

with Jolo, including when Jolo, when the stories about Jolo had come out and Jolo was sort of, you know, sort of on the run, Swiss Beats was still turning up at a hotel in Bangkok and hanging out with Jolo. So those connections were quite deep and ran for many, many years. These celebrities were all paid to do that, right? Nicole Scherzinger also, you know, the whole roster of them were on call, you know. You'd estimated that he spent something like $85 million on partying jets, yachts, and paying celebrities to hang out. This isn't the amount of money he stole, to be clear. This This is just the amount of money that he spent on parties. No, that's just the first 18 months, I think, that number.

Oh, just the first 18 months. Okay, there you go. Wow. I think so. I think that's the number, that number you referred to as in the Department of Justice. Wow. Lawsuits, yeah. Sorry, civil asset forfeiture suits.

They state that number, just 18 months, yeah. 85 million and 18 months. At the time, I think he had a $40,000 a month apartment in New York City. And I assume he had a lot of American Express points if he's running $85 million bucks on partying yachts and paying celebs to hang out. That's a lot of miles. He's living next to Daniel Craig, you know, when he's filming. This is at the beginning of the fraud before he gets even bigger and builds his, yeah, he ends up buying Beyonce and Jay-Z's old apartment in the Time Warner Center. This is the kind of place he's living in the lives. Unreal. So he's spending all

this money, but he's actually supposed to be investing it in this fund, investing it on behalf of what, the people of Malaysia, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's supposed to be to improve the livelihoods of a quite, you know, medium income country, you know, building, they're supposed to be doing green energy, and but they actually end up buying coal-fired power plants. So it's all nonsense what they do, you know. It's not material to the story. What they actually do was what they do with the money. Yeah, it doesn't even sort of mean anything. What was the plan, though? Was he supposed to make investments later that would hide his diversion of funds? Or was he just like, screw it. I'm young, I'm living, Yolo. What was this plan? I think it's really Yolo. Okay. It coincides with that

whole period of music with Pitbull, you know, and LM-F-A-O, you know, what's that song called? Party Rock, Party Rock, something. Party Rock, yeah. I feel that music that really encapsulates Jolo, it's sort of like, you know, at one point he actually makes a song with, with a bunch of those artists, I think Little John and others. He pays Farrell a bunch of money for Farrell to help his Taiwanese girlfriend, who's a pop star to make money. So he's doing all the stuff which is not, you know, no one's expecting to make money back off of it. And then, you know, he does this crazy thing. when the noose is tightening around him, you know, when there's newspaper articles starting to come out in the Malaysian press about him, which eventually lead to his downfall and some sort of people have leaked computer servers with information about him. He goes and buys a $250 million yacht, you know, called the equanimity, which, by the way, it's changed name and is now Kylie Jenner.

I see partying on it all the time. Really? Yeah, it's out there now. I think it's called the Tranquility. It used to be called the equanimity when Jolo had it. It was like one of the most expensive boats out there. $250 million. And he bought that when, you know, he should have been trying to fill the holes from earlier

parts of the fraud. Oh, so did he sell the yacht or did he just like give it a makeup? No, he got captured. It got seized by the Indonesian authorities on a request from the FBI. Wow. Sold. And now is, now if you look at the Kylie, I'm not up with the Kardashians, Kylie Jenner's the makeup. You're asking the wrong guy.

But yeah, she's one of them. Anyway, she's partying on that boat now. And I see photos occasionally on Instagram of that boat, which is ironic because Kim Kardashian and she got a, when she got married, her first marriage to Chris Humphreys, the sportsman, she got given a sports car by a Malaysian businessman. That's always been suspected. That was Jolo. Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that car then became a point of contention between her and Chris Humphreys when they divorced, which was a few days or weeks after they got married. And so, yeah, the New York Post had a story about that. So anyway, no, so it's just a whole level of spending. It's just insane. He was a scammer from the jump. Like, we talked about his family life, right?

But when he was young, he was doing social engineering, right? Like scamming his way into fancy nightclubs using, I think it was embassy letterhead from Brunei, which is balzy because that's really, you're not just sort of forging, I'm from Time Magazine. I have this laminated pass. Let me in. I mean, you're saying I am a diplomat or affiliated with Brunei, you know, sovereign nation. Let me into this fancy nightclub.

And then he's collecting money from rich people to pay the bill to make it look like he's the one paying the bill. So it's like quietly collect money, loudly pay it yourself so that everyone's going, wow, that guy just paid this $30,000 nightclub bill for all of us. He must be a baller. So he realized early on that proximity to money and fame got you similar effects to that same money and fame. And he'd seen his dad do it, but, you know, Swedish models on your boat is totally different than it's just a complete Bush League compared to what he's doing here with celebrities.

And he sets up all these funds that sound impressive but have nothing to do. with the name. I can't remember, but they are kind of like Middle East sovereign wealth fund incorporated, right? But it's really just him and his buddies grabbing cash from investors in putting him in shell companies. He even rips off the names of big American financial institutions like Blackstone. I think he transfers money into something called Blackstone real estate at one point, but he puts like an Asia limited on the end and it has nothing to do with Blackstone, right? So, okay, one of the big questions here is how did this all happen, given that Western financial institutions are supposed to have these know-your-customer rules, and they're supposed to stop this happening.

All these institutions, Golden Sachs had helped raise money and, you know, all the auditors who audited the fund in Malaysia, the big four auditors from the West that did that, you know, the law firms like Sherman and Sterling, who, Joe Lo actually, when he spent that $85 million on partying, he mentioned, he funneled it all through a white shoe law firm on Park Avenue, you know. It's because, you know, he wanted everything to look bona fide. Yeah. So a combination of the tricks using these fake company names, plus having the primary

Minister of Malaysia and all these Saudi royalty behind him, he was able to get through. But to be honest, I think there was also a lot of greed in the Western institutions that allowed it to happen. This partner at Goldman Sachs called Tim Leicester, I mean, he's pleaded guilty to helping Jolo funnel $200 million via various companies and bank accounts that he controlled. And so he's still awaiting sentencing because there's another Goldman Sachs employee, a managing director who pleaded not guilty. So that stuff's still all playing out. We haven't even seen the end of it. But if Leisner goes to jail, he'll be, you know, probably the first ever Goldman partner to go to jail. I don't think the Goldman partner's ever been to jail.

So this is all still to watch, you know, this story years later. So somehow these guys transfer hundreds of millions of dollars through shell companies disguising it as investments in a sovereign wealth fund. And I would say how, but I feel like we'll get into the weeds. But the real answer is you can't do that without help from banks and law firms. It was actually, it was quite interesting to hear all these names of firms that were recruiting students out of Michigan law school. White in case, Paul Hastings, link leaders where I worked, Sherman and Sterling, where I also ended up doing something. I almost wish that I stayed. I just would love to see the insides of some of these shady deals. I got to ask some of my classmates who ended up at these places long term, but it was

just a who's who of white shoe firms and law firms and auditors and things like that where I have plenty of friends that I graduated with. It was like, these folks know at some level what's going on. You have to because you have to figure out where the freaking money comes from, right? Well, I don't know about the law firms. And I should just say some of those firms, the names you said, I don't recognize. But the difficulty with law firms is they can say, look, we have lawyer client privilege. I mean, you know better than I do. You're a former lawyer, right? Lawyer client privilege. And so lawyers are still bound not to accept the proceeds of crime, right? They can't just take dirty money and use it. But after he was indicted in America and in

Malaysia, and then he went on the run, he was able to continue. to access the service of law firms, even though he couldn't access the U.S. banking system. And I find out fascinating. So he can't access to the U.S. banking system because no one's going to take a Jolo account these days, right, from his hideouts in China. Right. But he was able to use what we call cutouts, which are, you know, his friends who are able to move money for him and go pay law firms. Now, that's fine if it's to defend Jolo in a criminal proceeding. Everybody deserves a fair trial, right, and counsel. But oftentimes, oftentimes, these law firms are doing lobbying for him, including, you know, trying to stop the publication of our book Billing

in Dollar Well when it came out a few years ago. You know, bookshops around the world received letters from a firm called shillings in the UK, threatening them that they could be the target of a defamation lawsuit if they took our book. I have questions about how can shillings get paid. Who's paying them all this money? And it's, you know, they'll say, well, didn't come from Jolo because we couldn't do our know your customer on Jolo. It came from some other way.

Right. But it's extremely dangerous area, if you ask me. for law firms to be getting involved in. It is. I mean, using a cutout is relatively simple, right? Like, if I'm an attorney and I know he used Sherman and Sterling, which is, like I said, another firm I almost ended up working for, there's these accounts. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but essentially that they're supposed to be sort of like temporary interest-bearing accounts. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, we should say Sherman and Sterling, there's no evidence that they got involved with Jolo after he was on the run.

Sherman and Sterling's involvement goes back to when Jolo first stole the money. And again, no evidence they knew he was stealing money, but he uses these things called IOLTA accounts, which were accounts set up in the Carter administration. You're meant to park money there and earn interest and use the interest to pay for lawfare, basically, for people who can't afford legal representation. And instead, Jolo used these IOLTA accounts just to funnel money to nightclubs and to fund that $85 million you referred to that partying that went on in the early days. So it definitely doesn't work. And there's some problem with knowing your customer rules and due diligence and the legal profession for sure. Well, I think, and this, I may get corrected on this by

somebody in the audience here, but lawyers really don't have the same, I won't say they don't need to do any due diligence on clients, but you kind of, there's a wide berth in what you can do and what you have to do, I should say, in terms of due diligence on your client. So if I'm a banker, and you come to me and you say, hey, I've got $10 million, I want to start investing, I have to do all kinds of things to make sure I know where those funds came from and who you are. But if you show up to my law office and you say, I need your help as an attorney, I don't have to do nearly as much investigation to figure out who you are and where the money came from because I'm helping you as an attorney. A banker has a totally different standard. So these IOLTAs, these accounts, it's almost like a loophole or an end

run around know your KYC, know your customer regulations because lawyers are unregulated and firms are really hard to penetrate because of attorney-client privilege, which is, for those of you who don't know what this is, essentially, I as an attorney can be made to say, I'm not telling you anything, I'm not showing you any correspondence, I'm not telling you how much money this client has deposited with me. It's privileged information. Even if the FBI subpoenas me, I can claim that, and the judge has to make an examination as to whether or not I have to disclose that. Whereas if it's a bank, they just go, here's all the records. It's really clever and dastardly to use law firms to launder money, hide money, because it's so much more impenetrable. So this probably should

be remediated by U.S. law, but I don't know how many people are in a hurry to do that. And how did Jolo learn how to do that? You know, that's also interesting. His sister, we talked about the family enterprise earlier. She's a lawyer with a specialization in the British Virgin Islands, right? So there's no evidence that his sister was involved in the fraud, but he definitely grew up knowing about all the ways that, you know, law firms and offshore interact and all of that. And then, you know, the book gets into all these other ways of money can be laundered. It can be laundered through real estate. It can be laundered through jewelry, art.

You know, Jolo becomes one of the biggest art purchases on the planet. You know, he becomes a very important client for Christie's. He pays a record amount of money for a basquette, a Chomschampi painting, $40 million, I think it was. Wow. With DiCaprio in the auction room where they're bidding, you know. You know, he becomes one of the biggest jewelry purchases from Lorraine Schwartz in New York City, you know, buys jewelry from Randarkech, from Lorraine Schwartz. You know, massive purchaser of real.

estate. We mentioned Jayze and Beyonce's apartment in the Time Warner Center on Central Park. He buys mansions on Beverly Hills. You know, all of that stuff is very difficult. You know, the U.S. government's trying to, and governments in other places like, you know, UK, trying to get a handle on how do you stop all cash purchases of stuff like real estate because it's just a good way to launder your money, right, in Western countries. So all of that stuff, and it's not just law firms. It's a wide variety of industries that help you. And why come to the U.S.? You know, that's the other question. If you've stolen this money in Malaysia, why come to the U.S.? Well, the reason is that's a fun place still, you know, LA at Las Vegas and if you were a

baller like Jolo, that's where you want to go. The other is that apartments cost a lot of money there. Jolo was building a billionaire tower on Central Park South, the old Park Lane Hotel. If you're in Central Park and you look south, you'll see that very thin tower that's gone up. It's not nothing to do with him anymore. It was seized by the FBI, but he was doing that. And that's a great way to launder money too, because you're talking about a billion-dollar, I think at those times they were a billion-dollar apartments or hundreds of millions of

other apartments. Unbelievable. I'd love to see the inside of an apartment that costs a hundred million plus dollars in New York. I mean, it's just got to be something spectacular. Beyond the shell companies, there's some clever stuff going on here, right? There's these mutual funds that essentially have one investor and a client. These kind of wash the funds too, right? So if normally mutual fund has thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people paying into it, but you can create a mutual, I didn't know that you can just create a mutual fund and fund it yourself. And then it's not Jordan Harbinger the crook investing in your real estate or your assets or making acquisitions. It's Harbinger holding company incorporated mutual fund, whatever it is, making all these acquisitions.

So it looks much more normal for something, for an entity like that to throw around $200 million, $300 million, because it's a mutual fund. Of course it's going to make giant acquisitions. It looks much stranger if I'm just cutting a check for that amount, walking into your office one day. That doesn't make sense. That raises red flags. Mutual funds do not. Yeah, you're right. I mean, it was actually even worse than that. There were these mutual funds that Jolo used where there were other investors in the mutual funds. But then Jolo had his own portion of the fund, which makes no sense. Right. It's not legal in America that they could push money into and out

of. And it was never mixed with other people's money. But the money coming out the other side, as far as compliance people were aware, looks like it's coming from a disbursement from a mutual fund. I don't remember which jurisdiction that was done on. Was that Corosal? or somewhere, one of these Caribbean offshore places. And so it's a massive, massive problem. And one thing we were very happy about with Billion Dollar Well was that you read all these stuff, you know, your listeners will have read the Panama Papers and all these, the law firm exposés and all of this stuff. We really kind of tried to put a human story on the bones of all of that stuff. Because sometimes it can be a bit dry when you read about offshore.

And you said, oh, okay, somebody else has got an offshore account. We really show here how it's used to fuel this fraud, you know, and without it, the fraud could not have occurred. Have you seen The Laundromat on Netflix? I haven't yet, actually. No, no. Oh, it's really good. I've read the book, yeah. It's the Jake Bernstein book, right?

Yeah, it's about Mossick Fonseca in the Panama Papers and offshore accounts and things like that. Yeah. I heard the movie's great, and it does a good job of trying to make us understand why these things are so, so important. And also, the pessimistic case here is that it'll never change because it's bound up with how does the world really work? And the world's 0.1%. Right? Because without these structures to move money and to incorporate companies and all the different. this, that power will sort of crumble. Exactly. Yeah, 100% with you on that. I don't see,

I mean, you have to re, it's not just reforming one nation. I mean, you really have to get everyone together and say, hey, stop doing these really crooked things, even though it's definitely in your best interest as a small island nation to keep allowing this practice. And in return will give you, what, something that's going to make up for those lost revenues? I mean, unlikely. You said that he had bought art and was one of the largest art buyers in the world. I think I think the tally is 137 million in art. And you said he stored it in the Geneva Freeport. What are Freeports?

I've heard this before, and it's an unusual, just never really looked into what these are. It's kind of interesting. Well, they have their roots, I think, in like the 1800s, or maybe even the 1700s, where in Geneva, they wanted to be able to deposit trading goods for a while without getting taxed. So it would be like a free trade,

like, you know, it was never going to be sold in Switzerland or Geneva, so it wouldn't be taxed. And these things then grew and grew up into these tax-free zones where you can hold very valuable assets. I think the New York Times referred to them as the Cayman Islands of the art world. The one in Geneva, the Geneva Free Port is estimated to have, you know, art that would rival the Prado Museum in Madrid, you know. Wow. It's incredible. And Jolo stored a lot of his art there. If you think about it, it's pretty immoral because art's meant to be seen by people, right? and the fact that it's also sitting there and just being used as a repository. And it's a very good way to launder money, right?

Because, again, I think now the changes have been put in place, right? So, so Christie's, which Jolo used, I think now they don't allow anonymous companies to buy art and this kind of thing. So there are changes taking place in our world now in all kinds of areas, like, you know, real estate, art, where they're trying to know who the real buyer is. Because if you can know who the real buyer is, it's harder for fraud to happen, you know. I just signed up for a Binance account in Singapore, and I had to post a picture myself with my identity card by my face and all that kind of stuff, right, crypto account. So, you know,

governments are trying to tackle this, right-minded companies are trying to do things the right way, but it's always going to be loopholes. That's the problem. There's always going to be a way to have another shell company or another cutout that's going to do it for you. The art world and these Geneva Freeport was a really important way for Joe to move his money and store his value. I'm imagining that Geneva Freeport looks like that warehouse, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Is that the movie where at the end they're just shoveling, like there's boxes everywhere as far as you can say?

I imagine it looks something like that, and it's just full of gold bullion and art and things that people have put away to never be discovered again and are just sort of quietly paying the monthly fee out of a Cayman Islands bank account. We should say without the Nazi office. Without, yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know, man.

I don't know. We don't know what's in there, you know? Unless I'm misremembering that film. I've got a bad memory for films. Yeah. But yeah, no, there's actually a genius. of Freeport in Singapore, where I live here, out by Changi Airport. So, you know, it's a very good way to store wealth in a way that's more liquid for you,

art and jewelry and all this kind of stuff. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Tom Wright. We'll be right back. Now for the rest of my conversation with Tom Wright. Western banks like Goldman, you mentioned earlier, would allow the fund, 1MD, Jolo's fund, to grossly overpay for assets in order to generate fees. So Joe would set up these sound-alike companies with his cronies to make a company sound like a subsidiary or management arm of something legit to cover for sketchy off the book behavior. You kind of talked about

this a little bit earlier, but there's a funny example in the book about GE. Can you tell us about this? This is like so stupid, but also stupid that it worked, clever that it worked, but also just ridiculous that it worked. You know what? I've got no idea what you're talking about. That's a G.E. example. Shit, I hoped you would remember because I wrote Discuss GE example from the book. So I'm going to let's just get rid of that. No, it's totally possible. It's totally possible that there is a G. example in the book. I've got to say, you know, this is a 380 page book and there's so many.

It is a bit. It is a long book. Actually, you don't cut this out because, you know, this gets to the point of like, how did Jolo keep all of this in his head? Yeah. That's a good point. You know, we got hold at one point of his Blackberry messages, you know, back there. Oh, wow. This is a Blackberry, black time of Blackberry. And it's an Excel spreadsheet of all of his message.

and he's talking about getting noodles with his friends, and you have to go through all this kind of chit-chat to get to the meat of the, this is part of the investigative journalism, the TDM of it, actually. You get to, hey, I am not kidding you, he had a company called Acme Time Limited, you know, like I think it's from like Roadrunner.

Yeah, it's from like Looney Tunes. What happened to Acme Time Limited? Do we close that down? He's like just trying to keep it all in his head. Like these are unbelievable. Like he's round-tripping money, sending it to his dad back to himself, back to some other company.

Very likely there was a general, or electric lookalike company, you know, like he used so many different kinds of lookalike companies. And how did he keep it all straight in his head? I've got no idea. Yeah, who knows? Maybe at some point you're going to find another encrypted something or other with a bunch of flowcharts about all of his companies and where they ended up and what they looked like and he just didn't keep it on his Blackberry because he was smart enough not to. I think the GE example was just a sound-alike company. It's like the example I gave earlier with it would be like Saudi Arabian investment fund limited.

And it's like, well, that's not really the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. It's an entity that's out of Singapore and Malaysia, United States, South Dakota. What do I know? But it's definitely not what it's supposed to sound like. And he's just got dozens of these. And he's moving things around. Joe later ends up on the board of EMI, a music label, all part of his plan to get influence. What's this about him telling Busta Rhymes that you're my bitch now?

I mean, that could not have gone over well at all with a guy like that. So, you know, we're getting to the point where, you know, we said earlier, Joe, didn't, he was just partying and spending money. But at one point, he does actually start to build a business empire. So they make the wolf of Wall Street, right? And that costs $100 million to make. And it's very successful. It makes $400 million. So he's making a bit of money there. And then he buys EMI music publishing just before the streaming revolution. So I think that makes good money. And they appoint him, or because of his investment, he becomes chairman of Asia for EMI music publishing. And then there's a scene in the book where he's sort of in, I think it's like in Soho or

or Tribeca or somewhere at Alicia Keys' and Swiss Beets' recording studio. And I mentioned earlier, it was very close to Swiss Beets. You know, they're drinking whiskeys, I think. And at one point, Buster Rhymes walks in with Ferrell Williams. And I think Buster Rhymes was assigned to EMI music. And so at some point in the evening, Jolo makes this comment to Buster, oh, I own you, you're my bitch. And it's this sort of great scene in the book because he's totally misread the room.

drops like a lead balloon into the room and everyone was embarrassed. Ferell tries to make small talk to sort of cover up the embarrassment. And, you know, it shows that Jola was an imposter. You know, for all his billions, people still questioned who was this guy. Like, where did he come from? Why is he splashing all this money around? And that comment just showed he didn't really fit in. It's so ridiculous how he finances the Wolf of Wall Street, you know, just coincidentally a movie about a financial scammer and a conman. When you hear that he finances the Wolf of Wall Street, the movie. You've got to be thinking he's attracted to the script and the writing and the plot line because he's Jordan Belfort, but much bigger in scale, right? Yeah, he's attracted to it

because it's almost, it's so meta, right? Yeah. The world's biggest fraudster who's pulling off the fraud as we speak uses a big portion of that to fund the making of the Wall Street. It's amazing. And it's even more meta than that because Leonardo DiCaprio is attracted to playing fraudsters. He's done the Great Gatsby. Frank Abagnale. I mean, I'll catch me if you can. I think what was he filming at the time when he met Jolo? I think he was filming Inception. Was he in Inception?

I don't even know. Yeah. Anyway, he's attracted to these kind of characters. And then he's sort of also hanging out with Jolo going on parties with him, sailing around the Mediterranean on Jolo's yacht, all these kinds of things. And so it's incredibly met up because they're doing a fraud, which, you know, we should say again, no evidence that DeCaprio knew a fraud was going on at the time. But, you know, looking back on it, they're using fraud money to make a film about a fraud.

The lead actors sort of involved with a fraudster and then learn. about living on these arts and all this kind of stuff. It's amazing, it's amazing meta situation. What the hell was the point of all this? You know, do you think he eventually wanted to just pivot it all into real investments at some point, or is it just a rationalization for him to waste a ton of money on himself so he could pretend to be significant when really he was just a con man and then nothing more? I mean, we should make the point that some countries are all treated equally under the

United Nations system, right? And we, I think, you know, a lot of us, and we're getting back to how does the world really work, you know, we treat countries sort of, we treat countries sort of, we try to try to think of them as sort of equals, but some countries are run by people like mafia states. Sanya Batcha, the dictator of Nigeria, you know, he would like take trucks up to the central bank and steal money, print money and take it out of the back. And that was his way of stealing money. This is a bit more sophisticated and not much more. And Najib Razak ran his country like that, you know, he gave a 20-something-year-old the right to run a sovereign wealth fund.

You know, in Norway, the sovereign wealth fund is used for the good of the people and the oil wealth of that country is kept there in a safe manner to be reinvested for the future. And that didn't happen in Malaysia. reason, but that's the key to all of this, you know? This is a sovereign state fraud, you know, in this case. So where do we suspect Joe Lowe is now? We know his yacht got taken away. That must have stung. I would imagine he was pretty upset about that. I don't suppose anybody's heard from him, but that couldn't have gone over well. Okay, we should say, how did this all unravel for him? One reason was a Malaysian newspaper called The Edge and a British blogger called Claire Rookasel Brown,

they got hold of the servers of a computer, which sort of showed some of the details of his early fraud. And they reported that. And after these initial stories came out in 2015, Prime Minister of Najib, but still Prime Minister, and he tells Joe to look, sort of keep a low profile get out. So he goes on the equanimity, his yacht, and he's sort of sailing around for a while, still throwing parties and inviting celebrities. You know, the celebrities don't really read the press. They don't really know what's going on, whatever. I don't know. Yeah. You know, they're still getting paid to go to these things on his yacht. And he sails the yacht into Bali. and by that point, the Fed's, the Department of Justice has filed these what are called civil asset forfeiture lawsuits.

It's attempt to get back the assets that was bought with all of this stolen money. You know, the US has obviously has a foreign corrupt practices act, right? If you're a U.S. firm, you're not supposed to engage in corruption overseas. You're supposed to behave like you would do if you were under the purview of the SEC and other agencies. Often American companies don't do that. You know, Goldman Sachs did not do that in this case. And so they're trying to get the assets back. They get the boat back.

They start to seize all the assets they seize. The lawsuit was actually called the U.S. versus the Wolf of Wall Street because they went after the film as well. Oh, wow. They went after all his mansions, the jewelry, DiCaprio gives back his artwork, Miranda Kerr gives back a jewelry, all of that. And Jolo then is sort of like he loses his boat, and then he's stuck in China then. The reasons he's in China are pretty complicated. I don't know if you want to get into them, but we can sort of touch on it, but it depends how in the weeds it really is. it seems obvious that he would be in China if he's trying to, well, this is what your current article

was about, right? So the communist party is sort of offering to shore up some of the debt that it was incurred by this giant fund, one MDB, by saying, well, Malaysia lets us put our one belt, one road railroads and ports and other sort of infrastructure projects in there. Maybe we can toss you a couple billion dollars to stem these losses. Am I close? Yeah. I mean, in a nutshell, Jolo's in trouble, because he's got to kind of fill the... Jolo and Najib are in trouble. Najib is still prime minister. So Jolo goes off to China and they try to cook up a very belt and road of these deals that the Chinese government does in other countries, a bit like the Marshall Plan that the Americans did after

the Second World War. But the Belt and Road deals, they build bridges and stuff in other countries, very corrupt. They agree to do a project like that in Malaysia, and Jolo and this Chinese official cook up to corrupt the whole project so they can steal money from it and fill some of the one MDB holes and then some of the Chinese officials can get rich. So that's why he's in China. Unfortunately for him, that Chinese official. his official has been arrested for corruption by the Xi Jinping government. So Jolo seems to have lost his

protector. So we lost sight of him a little bit, but we believe he's still in China. And then these guys were pretty dumb. They took minutes of these meetings. The Malaysian side took minutes of the meetings saying, you know, this is going to be a slightly corrupt deal. We've got to make it look like it's done by the market. And then Najib loses power in Malaysia in an election because that's, you know, as a democratic country, he lost, he loses power. The new government gets hold of those minutes and they give them to me. And I see in the minutes that it says, Jolo also requested for my family home to be bugged in Hong Kong. Wow. That's when we decided to leave Hong Kong and move to Singapore, or shortly after that, because, you know, it's not a good place for us to live anymore.

But that's why Jolo's in China. And that's why he's, you know, hasn't been brought to justice until today. Wow. So, yeah, they're wanting to find out who the leak is, but it turns out the leak is the government of Malaysia so that that's sort of upsetting for them. So they offered a bug your home. And I've got the quote here. It's Sun Li Jun, the head of China's domestic. security force confirmed that China's government was surveilling the journal, the Wall Street Journal, that's you essentially, in Hong Kong, at Malaysia's request, including, quote, full-scale residence slash office slash device tapping, computer slash phone slash web data retrieval, and full operational surveillance, which sounds a hell of a lot like they're following you

around physically. Yeah, I mean, we never swept for the bugs. One reason was that the firms that do that, they tell you if we find a Chinese surveillance bug in your home, we won't tell you about it. We won't touch it. We won't disturb it and we won't tell you about it because they don't want to get into trouble with the Chinese government. And so the point of having a sweep is sort of undercut by the fact they're not going to tell you about it if they find it, right? So we never did it. But the evidence that we have that my home was bugged is these minutes that the Malaysians took of the meeting with Sun Li Jun where they request him to bug the house and he says he'll do it. Now, Sully Jun's the Chinese Communist Party senior official who's now been arrested for corruption in China.

So that's one I was talking about earlier. Oh, wow. But, you know, the point is, you know, for those of you have followed Hong Kong, you know, it's now effectively part of the Chinese surveillance state and the Communist Party state. And so, you know, before there was this idea that it had a semblance of the rule of law and it was slightly outside of China. And now it's no longer. So it's not a great place for writers or journalists to be based anymore.

It must give you some comfort that Mr. Sona is in jail. but also, I mean, it was scary, right? He says, we'll hand over all the links that Wall Street Journal Hong Kong has with Malaysia-related individuals. I will hand over the wealth of data to Malaysia through back channels once everything is ready, the summary reads.

It is then up to Malaysia to do the necessary. What could they possibly mean here? That is like as explicit as it gets before somebody says, and then you can kill them yourself or throw them in prison for them to rot. I'm not sure. Oh, God, it goes back to your first question in this interview was I didn't read it that way,

maybe I'm foolhardy. But I mean, I read it to mean that they would take legal action against me in some way to make my life very, very difficult to get me to stop writing. If you're lucky, that's what they meant, right? If you're lucky, that's what they meant. Maybe, maybe. But I don't know, by that point, by the point of this whole finding out about the bugging, this was like a couple of years into us reporting about 1MDB.

So we talked earlier about journalists who get killed in places like, you know, rural parts of Asia. Yeah. I mean, they get killed because they're about to report on something and that story's not out yet, right? And so it's effective. Whereas, you know, in these cases, like these stories, we didn't actually break the 1MDD story. It was broken by the Malaysian newspaper The Edge, right? And Clareuxel Brown.

So I don't think the danger levels by that point that we're talking about now were that high. Are you still worried that they might be bugging you? Like, you know what Pegasus is, right? It sort of lives on your phone and uploads all your data and it gives them a, lets them listen to you, watch you. I know the Wall Street Journal has cybersecurity experts, but we're talking about Chinese internal security service, even if you were still with the journal.

That's like trying to secure yourself against the FBI or the NSA or something like that. You know, it's like impossible. I'm in Singapore now and I feel very protected and safe here. I don't think so. But yeah, no, you have to be careful. You have to, you know, use two-factor encryption and just to be careful. You know, we just had this Fat Leonard podcast go out and I was very worried about the tapes of it. You know, I wanted to make sure that I don't think I'm going to get hacked by the U.S. government.

Don't get me wrong. But, you know, we want to be very careful with tapes, which were, you know, 25 hours of this fraudster, Leonard Francis, who corrupted the U.S. Navy, right, and created this mafia inside the Navy, and he talked to us for 25 hours, even though he's yet to be sentenced, which is an extraordinary circumstance. He admitted guilt, and then he's been waiting around, and the problem is that the Navy doesn't know how to deal with this corruption scandal, so he hasn't been sentenced yet. So I was worried that these 25 hours of tapes we had from him might somehow get, you know, something might happen to them. But, no, I mean, nothing like that happened.

I mean, you could encrypt them and then upload them to hundreds or even thousands of people and then just keep them encrypted. That way, if anything happens to you, you could have like a Dead Man switch. I think WikiLeaks did that, didn't they? Where it was like, hey, everybody, grab a 500-gigabyte file of everything we have. It's encrypted.

You can't decrypt it. But if anything happens to, I don't know, it was like Julian Assange or whatever, or the site, we're going to get the password out to everybody and then all the leaks are everywhere. I mean, that's your sort of best bet, right? Is to just get a copy in as many people's hands as possible, encrypted. Yeah, or just to keep files offline.

Yeah. Very simple way to be safe. Yeah. You know, we had a few things happen. I mean, I got like a face, at one point during Billion Dollar Whale, I got a Facebook alert saying your Facebook has been opened in the United Arab Emirates, which is a big part of the fraud, you know, stuff like that. But in general, like, I think the important thing is not to be seen as partisan, to be seen as incredibly like, all you really want to do is right about what's happening and try to stay. Neutral is the wrong word. You know, I've seen it in your podcast, you talk to all of these.

There's no such, everyone has bias, right, when they come into into store. but just to try to remain as, try to just sort of tell the story and as close to nutrients possible, I guess, yeah, which is not achievable. One coincidence that's interesting to me is that Joe, Lowe, and Fat Leonard are both from Penang, Malaysia. Like, that's not a big place with a ton of people. It's not a small town or anything, to be clear, but either you love investigating people from Penang Malaysia or there's just a culture of maybe aggressive opportunism and corruption

in that area, or it's just a plain old coincidence. What do you think? I don't know. I mean, partly it's because the way that I got to, so, Fat Leonard, Leonard Francis is sitting for waiting for seven years in prison in San Diego and now home arrest and thinks there's been a cover-up in the U.S. Navy and he wants to talk. So he's looking for someone to tell his story and he uses an intermediary to find a reporter, a journalist, a writer to tell his story from home detention. And the person, the intermediary turns out that it's someone with a connection to the one MDV story, to the Jolo story. So that's how I'm the one that's doing both stories, both the one MDB story and the There's a thing in journalism where once you get a bit better known and have a bit of success, it's a bit easier to break news because people start to come to you with their stories rather than when you're younger, you're starting out in the field, you have to, it's really hard. You have to sort of persuade people to talk to you, right?

You don't have a name. Working for the Wall Street Journal always helped because you were able to, people took you seriously. But that's why I got on to Leonard. If you listen to the podcast, you'll see that our relationship totally blows up and he ends up hating me because it doesn't go the way he expected it to go. he wanted to tell his whole story about how he did this great job for the Navy after September the 11th, that he protected aircraft carriers from al-Qaeda attacks, and it was a great service to the U.S. Navy, and we end up showing, you know, that actually he was running this terrible scam involving recording orgies,

that the sexual compromise ends up in the hands of China. I mean, it's just an incredible story and his own personal cruelties to women as well. So those relationships are very hard as a journalist because you have to sort of navigate them, you know, with the source. And very different to 1MDB and Billion Dollar Well, where we only spoke to Jolo a little bit, right? Jolo was not a big participant in our book, whereas Leonard Francis is a big, huge participant in the podcast. I don't know if Jolo would want to answer your email at this point. What do you think? Well, no, I think Bradley emailed him at one point and got an email back from Schillings,

the law firm in London that I said is, you know, terrorized bookshops not to carry our book with no success back in 2018 and 2019. So no, I don't think so. I don't think he would respond these days. Was the email something like don't contact our client? We have no comment on this matter. What does a law firm send? Yeah, okay, that makes sense. Something like that, don't contact our client. You know, you got the right email address then.

At least you know that. Well, yeah, this is a bit a while ago, too, so I don't think anyone's written to Jolo anytime recently. So yeah, we don't know where he is. I mean, the last thing I heard was there was a corporate intelligence firm was hired to find him. They did that, and he was in Macau, which is obviously an enclave of China like Hong Kong is. And that was probably about 18 months ago, maybe two years ago now.

So we're assuming he's in China, but we don't know for sure. It's going to be fascinating. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Well, great job, aside from some people sometimes maybe wanting you dead. You know, you're a really brave man. I really applaud your work. Hats off to you guys.

You and Bradley both were exposing this stuff, and I appreciate you coming on the show as well. I think what you're doing is extremely important, definitely not safe or convenient for you all the time. But just without folks like you doing this kind of work, these guys run roughshunds. over democracy over our financial system and they run unchecked and it's bad for everyone. What do you think the total cost is to the Malaysian taxpayer or citizen who lost billions of dollars? And this is not a wealthy nation, generally speaking, right? They can't really afford to lose all that money. No, they can't. You know, white-collar crime is very unsexy, right?

The reason that this book works is because it's Hollywood, there's all this. When you try to show the victim of a white-collar crime, it's a bit hard for anyone to care about, right? Like, you know, the people of Malaysia didn't get infrastructure that they would have gotten. They didn't get jobs that that they would have gotten. You know, that's the tragedy of all of this. Very hard to sum it up in a person. And, you know, the whole global inequality that is a big issue these days is, you know, it's exacerbated by this kind of fraud and this, you know, offshoring of wealth and money. A lot of it's coming from emerging markets, right? And that's terrible for those places. But there is some justice in this case. Goldman Sachs was hit with the biggest ever fine in America under the

Frontocrat Practices Act, the FCPA, and some of that found its way back to Malaysia. So, you know, I think ultimately Malaysia may end up getting made whole on all of this, or at least not, you know, having to pay back this debt for years to come. And so, you know, in this case, it did work because of the work of journalists, activists, and frankly, you know, the American system, not perfect, but they do seize assets and send the proceeds back to the governments of the places where it was stolen from in the first place. Not everybody does that. So there's a case for sort of a little bit of optimism, but overall, these frauds are happening all the time. Wirecard, credit service is involved in a tuna bonds fraud in Africa. These things won't end. We'll keep on

reporting them. Yeah, you'll never run out of work. No. That's for sure. I should say we don't do this for, we're not altruistic, you know. Bradley and I, we do it because it's an interesting job and the stories are fascinating. We like telling stories. I don't think you go into it thinking you want an end goal. I think once you start doing that, that gets into the, well, then it's more dangerous for you. You've asked me a few questions about danger. Well, if you have an end goal in mind, people see you as having a mission, and I think that's dangerous. We don't have that. We're just telling good stories where we find them, and there are a lot of them to tell. Tom Wright, thank you very much. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that,

I wanted to give you a quick bite of the episode I did with Mark Cuban of Shark Tank and Dallas Mavericks fame. Mark gives advice to entrepreneurs and founders in these uncertain times, tells us how he stays on top of trends in technology and how the U.S. can compete with China. When everybody's afraid, the best way to deal with it is by coming together. It certainly seems a lot bigger than anything we've seen, you know, in my lifetime. And the combination of the protests and looting and the pandemic, all these things combined together to make it for really uncertain times.

And when people are uncertain about their future, that's why people rebel. Martin Luther King said, Riding is the voice of the unheard. The only surprise is that it's taken this long. Capradic did even bring the focus to himself. You know, he just happened to be taking a knee and somebody caught him with a phone camera. What would you have done in that moment,

if that time, if he were your player, would you, how would you've handled that? I'd hug him. Yeah? Yeah, absolutely. If you were president, how would you improve race relations? I'd hug a few people.

Yeah. You know, I'd walk out there and listen. You know, I'd take advice. I wouldn't think I had all the, answers. This piece you wrote, dear white people, we're the ones that need to change. This is probably controversial. I would imagine you get some blowback from something like that. A lot of people felt I was calling them out as racist, which I wasn't doing. In order for things to change, then people need to take measures and understand, be very self-aware about what's going on

with them and how people are living their lives. A lot of people don't seem to have much to look forward to right now. What do you think we should be looking forward to as a nation? I mean, look, There's no better time ever to start a business than right now because all businesses are effectively going through a reset. And so there's a lot of advantages. And with the protests and the riots, it gives us just one inkling a hope that maybe we'll make progress. Maybe this time we'll listen.

For more with Mark Cuban, including the future of the technology economy, check out episode 362 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Always a fascinating conversation. Man, the greed in some people is just unbelievable. and the total cost to everyday Malaysians and others is really it's incalculable, unfortunately. These guys, you just got to think, what kind of person wakes up and does this? You know, this has to be a slow burn. You just don't decide to do this overnight.

There's a slow sort of rotting moral decay here that just has to happen and has to be in part environment, part enabling, and part, you know, just getting away with this for so long. Of course, this whole ordeal really soured the relationship that Malaysia had with the West, and rightfully so, but what this did was then push Malaysia further into China's orbit. And that means rough seas ahead for the U.S. and Malaysia especially, but most importantly, for everyday Malaysians, you know, that's really going to be the biggest problem here. They lost their money and now they're going to potentially lose access to some of the South China Sea and the freedoms that go along with having an open and free economy. And I need to mention here, we are sort of complicit in this here in the

United States, right? These aren't just plundered funds. This is money raised in the markets with the help of Goldman Sachs. These are shell companies that are in South Dakota. You know, it's not just Marshall Islands or the Seychelles or something like that with a bunch of Russian oligarchs. You know, us as a country, not as citizens, of course, but we allow these laws to be on the books and we allow this corporate nonsense to continue to happen. This is happening right in our own backyard. What does this say about the markets and the banking system? What is this say about greed? What is say about laissez-faire economics? Look, I am all for an open and free market, but at some point, you know, why do we help other people evade taxes in their own country and then think that people

aren't doing it here? Big thank you to Tom, right? The book title is Billion Dollar Whale. Of course, he's got a lot on the plate, including Fat Leonard, which will link in the show notes. Links to all things, Tom, will be on our website in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Please use our website links if you buy books from any guest on the show. It does help support the show. Audiobooks work as well, and the links work in other countries, so please do use those links. Transcripts in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and you're also welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great

people and manage relationships using the same system, software, and tiny habits that I use over on our six-minute networking course. That course is free. I don't need your credit card. I don't even want your credit card. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty, and most of the guests on the show, subscribe to the course, and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Once again, that's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. This show is created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie O'Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or

interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in Wall Street stuff, financial crime, money laundering, Please share this episode with them. I hope they find it interesting, and I hope you find something great in every episode of this show. Please do share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen,

and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter

in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same.

Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.