Bribe, Swindle or Steal

Oct 30 2024 433 ep. 25 mins 4.5k

Bribe, Swindle or Steal Podcast artwork

Alexandra Wrage, president of TRACE, interviews luminaries in the field of financial crime, including bribery, fraud, money-laundering, insider trading and sanctions. Each week, Alexandra and her guests will discuss who commits “white collar crime”, how it works and what is being done to stop it.

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Extreme Wealth – Episode 6: Jonathan Rugman and the Stunning Power Plays of MBS

Oct 30 2024 47 mins

The sudden ascent of Mohammed bin Salman from an obscure royal heir to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia — the country’s de facto ruler — has fascinated Jonathan Rugman, an author and longtime correspondent in the Middle East. Jonathan’s latest BBC documentary, “The Kingdom,” traces MBS’s life from an unruly youth to a series of Machiavellian maneuvers to cut ahead of

Extreme Wealth – Episode 5: Paul Schervish and the Spiritual Duality of Riches

Oct 22 2024 30 mins

For more than 20 years, Paul Schervish surveyed many of the richest people in America for a long-running study on how the wealthy view the world and themselves. In this episode, another in our series on extreme wealth, Paul explains how his research and his early years spent as a priest inform his understanding of wealth and its potential to improve the world. Applying sociological

Extreme Wealth - Episode 4: Bill Browder and the Pitiless Greed of Vladimir Putin

Oct 15 2024 35 mins

Sir William Browder (“Bill”), a financier turned justice advocate, is our guest for this episode of our ongoing series on extreme wealth. Bill has been the engine behind the Magnitsky Act, a law that for the past 12 years has empowered governments to seize the assets of foreign leaders who abuse human rights — a significant countermeasure against corruption and atrocity that

Extreme Wealth: Jennifer Risher and the Limits of Sudden Wealth

Oct 08 2024 36 mins

The author and philanthropist Jennifer Risher continues our series on extreme wealth by telling the story of her ear-popping rise from a middle-class Microsoft employee in the early ‘90s to an unexpected multimillionaire. The stock options she accrued with her husband, David — a fellow Microsoft employee who went on to join Amazon and who is now the CEO of Lyft — gave Jennife

Extreme Wealth: Steve Fishman Inside the Mind of Prisoner Bernie Madoff

Oct 02 2024 38 mins

In this episode — another in our series on extreme wealth — the journalist Steve Fishman discusses his reporting on Bernie Madoff and the collapse of Madoff’s $65 billion ponzi scheme. Steve doggedly pursued the story even after the financier was sent to a federal prison in North Carolina. Eventually the two men connected for a series of phone interviews that gave Steve a uni

Extreme Wealth: Clay Cockrell and the Champagne Problems of the 1%

Sep 25 2024 34 mins

This week we debut a special project within Bribe, Swindle or Steal: single-topic episodes that focus on extreme wealth. For years Alexandra Wrage has worked on corporate compliance and anti-corruption efforts, a field that provides a front-row view into human corruptibility. In these episodes, she digs into the practical, philosophical, political, and even spiritual roots of why p

The Sentencing of Roger Stone

Sep 18 2024 22 mins

In this episode from 2020, Randall Eliason, law professor and former Assistant U.S. Attorney provides an excellent account of the days leading up to the sentencing of political operative Roger Stone. The Department of Justice’s unprecedented interference in--and reversal of--its prosecutorial team’s recommendation led to the resignation from the case of all four prosecutors. Ov

Primer on Money-Laundering

Sep 11 2024 35 mins

A 22-year veteran of Treasury and consultant to the Dept of Justice, John Madinger sheds light on some of the money-laundering schemes he has uncovered and why the Breaking Bad car wash scheme probably wouldn’t have worked. This episode was originally posted: December 27, 2017

“Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us”

Sep 03 2024 21 mins

Brian Klaas, Associate Professor at University College London and host of the award-winning podcast “Power Corrupts,” joins us to discuss his book “Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us”. Brian describes research on who is drawn to positions of power and how power impacts us, including potentially re-wiring our brains. This episode was originally published 30 Ma

How Local News Uncovers Local Fraud

Aug 27 2024 15 mins

David Jackson, a senior reporter with Injustice Watch, discusses his work exposing corruption, which has led to both indictments and legislative reform.