Speaker 1: Previously on Hot Money Very Fast.
Speaker 2: Actually started then talking about his experience in Syria facilitated
Speaker 2: by the boys, just after the recapture of the city
Speaker 2: of Panira from Isis.
Speaker 1: When he said with the boys, what did you.
Speaker 3: Basically said with the Russians?
Speaker 4: So is it that one? It's that one on the left,
Speaker 4: those two great big gates there, it's fucking massive.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So we stood outside Prince Cageddonklasa. Well, the house on
Speaker 4: Prince Cogeddon Tlaca belongs to the Master elect. It's tall,
Speaker 4: it's snowing slowly through trees without leaves. It's a very
Speaker 4: high fence, which is like a wrought iron fence that's
Speaker 4: thickly covered with ivy. In February, my producer Peggy and
Speaker 4: I went to Yan Marslek's former residence in Munich, a
Speaker 4: place he'd kept almost entirely secret. It's where he ran
Speaker 4: his shadow life, his extra curricular world outside of Wirekat
Speaker 4: sixty one Prince Rickenstrasse. Marcelek rented it for six hundred
Speaker 4: and eighty thousand euros a year. Here he was occupying
Speaker 4: one of the grandest residential buildings in Munich, which is
Speaker 4: the wealthiest city in Germany and therefore possibly one of
Speaker 4: the wealthiest cities in all of Europe. From the moment
Speaker 4: I first became drawn into Yan masslex world, there's been
Speaker 4: this huge paradox, and coming back to Munich, I'm hit
Speaker 4: by it full force. We're on a street he's opposite
Speaker 4: the Russian consulate, and down the road to various embassies
Speaker 4: and other grand residences.
Speaker 1: And I suppose, in so far as you would.
Speaker 4: Assume that one of the prime objectives of most people
Speaker 4: working in intelligence's discretion and to remain hidden, then one
Speaker 4: wonders why he chose here a villa opposite the Russian consulate,
Speaker 4: giving Paul those Novelchok documents, boasting about your relationships with
Speaker 4: Russian mercenaries. How can you function as a spy, a
Speaker 4: good spy if you're compelled to drop hints about being
Speaker 4: one all the time.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: It's a kind of almost like a Sharon Stone moment
Speaker 4: from Basic Instinct. You know the plot of Basic Instinct
Speaker 4: where she she murders her husband. But that's also the
Speaker 4: plot of the book she's written, so it couldn't possibly
Speaker 4: be true. One of my favorite books about espionage is
Speaker 4: John Lecare's The Honorable Schoolboy six aka the Circus pick
Speaker 4: up clues about Russian master spy Krla by looking back
Speaker 4: in time. Through looking more closely at how they were
Speaker 4: misled at the wreckage, the Circus find the traces of something,
Speaker 4: a thread on which to pull. Pakai calls it taking
Speaker 4: back bearings, and it feels to me like we need
Speaker 4: to do something similar. So far, I've heard about three
Speaker 4: radically different yan marslects, the corporate high flier, the fraudster,
Speaker 4: and now the Russian agent. And yet even with that,
Speaker 4: I have very little sense of who yan Marcelek really
Speaker 4: is behind these identities, what makes up the substance of
Speaker 4: his character, what motivates him. Motive, I think, is the
Speaker 4: holy grail in this story, not only for what it
Speaker 4: reveals about one man psychologically, but also what it might
Speaker 4: help us glimpse about a whole worldview and those who
Speaker 4: pursue it. And so in this episode, I track down
Speaker 4: people who knew Marslek well, worked with him, closely, grew
Speaker 4: up with him in his hometown, all to gather clues.
Speaker 4: My name is Sam Jones from the Financial Times and
Speaker 4: Pushkin Industries. This is Hot Money Season three, Agent of
Speaker 4: Chaos episode four, Back Bearings. Jan Marcelek vanished five years
Speaker 4: ago after Warkard was exposed as a massive fraud. He
Speaker 4: hasn't been seen in public since, at least not under
Speaker 4: his real name. At first, everyone thought Marcelek had gone
Speaker 4: to the Philippines. He told colleagues he was going to
Speaker 4: find Warcard's missing billions. But then the trail in Manila
Speaker 4: went cold. People wondered whether he'd absconded to China. Rumours
Speaker 4: world about his connections to Germany's intelligence services, to the Austrians,
Speaker 4: to Israel. Perhaps he'd been taken into protective custody. But
Speaker 4: these were all trails that Marcelek himself had quite deliberately
Speaker 4: left behind. In reality, he'd taken a car over the
Speaker 4: Alps to a village outside Vienna. Travel records show he'd
Speaker 4: hopped on a plane to Minsk and from there had
Speaker 4: gone on to Moscow. But even the people close to
Speaker 4: him didn't know where he ended up. They were left
Speaker 4: to figure things out for themselves.
Speaker 1: Just talk us through.
Speaker 4: When you then go into Prince against Vassa, what was
Speaker 4: it like inside?
Speaker 1: And what were you what was going through your head?
Speaker 3: I was scared like toll I haven't told my wife.
Speaker 3: I've told other people that I'm going there where I am.
Speaker 4: It's two months after jan Marcelek's disappearance, and this man
Speaker 4: we're going to call him mister Sampt, has gained access
Speaker 4: to his house.
Speaker 3: I had a phone in my socks and did not
Speaker 3: know what to expect.
Speaker 4: Mister Sampt has asked that we don't reveal his real
Speaker 4: name as a condition of speaking with us, for professional reasons.
Speaker 4: What I can tell you is that he's a high
Speaker 4: level PR consultant hired by companies when they're in crisis.
Speaker 4: Sumpt in German means velvet. It's the alias he has
Speaker 4: chosen for himself. That day, Sumpt is with an ex
Speaker 4: business partner of marcele X who knew about this place,
Speaker 4: who was in fact a regular visitor. They snuck into
Speaker 4: the house because well, they both have questions, I mean, who.
Speaker 3: Doesn't so and we walked around and unbelievable. You walk
Speaker 3: around and you see a parallel world. Yeah, this room
Speaker 3: is sound proof. This room is searched every other week
Speaker 3: by a specialist for microphones and surveillance stuff. You walk
Speaker 3: around and wow, And then you see his bedroom, which
Speaker 3: was a black and white painted room like a zebra,
Speaker 3: with a mattress on the floor and black and white
Speaker 3: bed sheets, not like a cozy bedroom.
Speaker 4: The house is almost entirely empty, which is strange because
Speaker 4: when mars Leac fled all he had with him were
Speaker 4: two pieces of luggage. Someone must have cleared the house
Speaker 4: out afterwards. There were just a few striking artifacts left behind.
Speaker 3: I was impressed by his medical cabinet. It was a
Speaker 3: normal door, looked in and out. Behind the door was
Speaker 3: forty centimeters deep in shelves full of medical stuff. And
Speaker 3: because we're were in COVID at that time, everything to
Speaker 3: fight a virus was there. This is a sedative, is virus,
Speaker 3: this is the flu, and one was for diabetes.
Speaker 4: It sounds to me like the private stash of someone
Speaker 4: who never wanted to depend on public health care services,
Speaker 4: or perhaps someone who never wanted to have to take
Speaker 4: out a prescription in his own name. There are bottles
Speaker 4: and bottles of Russian medicines. Sam's heart is still racing
Speaker 4: and he's scared for a reason. As he looks out
Speaker 4: the window from the room he was told was marce
Speaker 4: Lex's office. There directly opposite the house is the Russian
Speaker 4: Consulate and he's thinking, Jesus, could there even be a
Speaker 4: tunnel between these buildings? Apart from Killian Kleinschmidt, who you
Speaker 4: heard from in the last episode, Sampt is the only
Speaker 4: person I've met who's been inside the Prince ri again
Speaker 4: Shtasa house. He knew yan Marslek for about eighteen months,
Speaker 4: but he knew him very well, or at least he
Speaker 4: knew one side of him, and he knew him under pressure.
Speaker 3: I'm hired sometimes awareness something smelly going on in how
Speaker 3: to not avoid, but how to go through with it
Speaker 3: and don't have too much damage.
Speaker 4: Wakaard hired Sampt in twenty nineteen when my FT colleagues
Speaker 4: Dan and Paul were beginning to reveal to the world
Speaker 4: that the company was a fraud. Within days of joining,
Speaker 4: Samt began working closely with Yan Marcelek. Sam prides himself
Speaker 4: on his ability to read people, to watch them, and
Speaker 4: to a certain extent, to be immune to their charms.
Speaker 1: Can you describe him for us?
Speaker 3: I noticed his friendliness do you want to drink something?
Speaker 3: And then said yeah, I'll grab a cop Oh no,
Speaker 3: please allow me to give you a coke and very formal,
Speaker 3: polite German battla Geber so please you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, almost elaborate with your kind indulgence.
Speaker 3: You allow me to hand you a coke. You know
Speaker 3: those headwaiters and Austrian restaurants, Yeah, oberber So, it to
Speaker 3: me was the behavior of a head waiter.
Speaker 4: When I think of an Austrian Oberkellner, I have a
Speaker 4: specific thing in mind. Formal, sometimes stiffly so, maybe even
Speaker 4: outwardly obsequious, but people totally in control of their own worlds.
Speaker 4: In a Viennese cafe house, you are the guest of
Speaker 4: the head waiter. Sam soon found himself getting close to Marcelek.
Speaker 4: He noticed his quirks. Marcelec ate chocolate constantly. He kept
Speaker 4: a big box of lint carret little individually wrapped chocolate
Speaker 4: squares in his office. The bin was always full of rappers,
Speaker 4: and Sampt he would often bring him chocolate or sweets
Speaker 4: on those visits. Sampt clocks the curious collection of objects
Speaker 4: in marce Le's office, like a life size Donald Trump
Speaker 4: cardboard cutout. For example, one day he asked another senior
Speaker 4: wirecard executive.
Speaker 5: Do you know about this life size Trump figure in
Speaker 5: the office and in Marshal X Marshal's office and his
Speaker 5: altar of Russian officers keps like Ushanka kind of yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: those heads.
Speaker 4: The executive replies, yeah.
Speaker 3: And no, I've never been in this office. Actually.
Speaker 4: He also noticed that while so much of mars le
Speaker 4: X world at work seemed neat precise, there was also
Speaker 4: chaos kind of hidden away.
Speaker 3: He put all the dirty cappuccino and all the dirty china.
Speaker 3: He put it in the cupboard in his conference.
Speaker 4: Room, not just a few cups, weeks and weeks and
Speaker 4: weeks worth.
Speaker 1: Of cups because he didn't want to see it.
Speaker 3: He didn't want to see the mess. Yes, and it
Speaker 3: was summer, so that was a biotope.
Speaker 1: After a while, and.
Speaker 3: The cleaning woman found it by accident because they were
Speaker 3: missing so much china, and he just put it messy
Speaker 3: like in this cupboard and in the back it was
Speaker 3: already growing.
Speaker 4: There were also times when Samt would catch glimpses of
Speaker 4: Marcelet's personal life, like one night when it was quite
Speaker 4: late and Marcelek had kept him waiting for a long time,
Speaker 4: so long that Samt had had time to go out
Speaker 4: to a nearby toy shop and buy him a present,
Speaker 4: a Lego batmobile.
Speaker 3: I like to play build Lego who does not. And
Speaker 3: so I bought it and gave it to him as
Speaker 3: a gift and said, here, that reminds me of you.
Speaker 3: And he looked out Batman as said no, the.
Speaker 4: Joker, Marcelet brushes off the gibe and eagerly opens the box.
Speaker 3: We started building, and during that building he received like
Speaker 3: fifteen ten to fifteen phone calls from his girlfriend and
Speaker 3: his father who were in town and who were waiting
Speaker 3: for him for dinner, but he didn't want to go.
Speaker 3: He was sitting there with me. We were talking business
Speaker 3: and he was building this batmobiles and then he said, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'll come later and I'll join you later. And we
Speaker 3: were sitting there. I was sitting on one end of
Speaker 3: the conference tail, he was in on the other, and
Speaker 3: we were rolling the car. But he clearly didn't didn't
Speaker 3: want to go and spend. He clearly didn't want to go,
Speaker 3: and I had the feeling that it was a difficult relationship.
Speaker 1: And then there was the money.
Speaker 3: I remember one time we went into a restaurant here
Speaker 3: in Munich and I had a capacco real cauliflower, two
Speaker 3: or three coke zero, and so my bill was less
Speaker 3: than fifty euros, probably the whole bill was seven hundred something.
Speaker 3: Marsade started with Cavia. He had all the classic oyster
Speaker 3: whatever beefsticked Fiorentina, and this bottle of sparkling wine, and
Speaker 3: it was a seven hundred and twenty euro bill and
Speaker 3: he gave nine hundred. He tried to be humble, or
Speaker 3: to give the picture of being a humble person devoted
Speaker 3: to his job. On the other hand, paying everything cash
Speaker 3: and living a life that is in the high one
Speaker 3: percent of Munich. Where does the money come from? That
Speaker 3: was something that I always was questioning.
Speaker 4: Myself, possibly thought Sampt. The early days of Wakad had
Speaker 4: seen the company pay its executives huge bonuses before it listed.
Speaker 4: But even that didn't quite account for Marclec's apparent wealth,
Speaker 4: because it wasn't just flashy dinners.
Speaker 3: He was invested with seven million into Telegram.
Speaker 4: The messaging app founded in Russia. Marcelek was an early shareholder.
Speaker 3: But when you only make a million before tex at wirecard,
Speaker 3: you have to work fifteen years and eat ravioli from
Speaker 3: cans and live in a very reduced lifestyle to save
Speaker 3: up the money to invest like that in one single
Speaker 3: direct investment.
Speaker 4: And of course samt didn't even know at this point
Speaker 4: about the palatial property on Prince Rigenstrasser that he found
Speaker 4: out two months later after warecard blew up. Even though
Speaker 4: they would often meet at a restaurant very close by, I.
Speaker 3: Could have beaten myself. There's Kifa at a restaurant he
Speaker 3: in Munich, and we met very often at the Kiefer restaurant,
Speaker 3: and his secret office was like five hundred meters or
Speaker 3: less than five hundred meters down the road.
Speaker 4: After the day he'd poked around the villa, sumptualizes that really,
Speaker 4: whatever he thought he confidently knew about Yan Marsilek is
Speaker 4: barely anything substantial at all, and that in the eighteen
Speaker 4: months they worked together, Marcelek's entire persona at Wakard was
Speaker 4: effectively a lie. I needed to talk to someone who'd
Speaker 4: known him for longer than SAMD. That's coming up after
Speaker 4: the break. Martin Ostelo first met Jan Marcelek when he
Speaker 4: joined warkat almost sixteen years ago.
Speaker 6: Young guy at the time. He was wearing a tea
Speaker 6: shirt and jeans, had an impressive charisma about him. But
Speaker 6: you never would have thought that this guy would be
Speaker 6: the manageable company very quickly at the time.
Speaker 4: Back then, in two thousand and five, Marcelek was just
Speaker 4: twenty five. He hadn't been to university, he hadn't even
Speaker 4: finished school. After joining the company five years earlier in
Speaker 4: two thousand, he'd been quickly promoted, and by the time
Speaker 4: Martin arrived at Warkat Marcelek was head of it.
Speaker 6: Rhetorically, I already realized at that stage that he was very,
Speaker 6: very good. He was like a hoover. He could take
Speaker 6: information extremely quickly and formulate a summary, almost in a
Speaker 6: fashion where you would lick your lips. Well, you'd love
Speaker 6: to have that ability to quickly take something on board
Speaker 6: and be able to express it in a form that seemed,
Speaker 6: on the one hand, smart but still very very understandable
Speaker 6: for a broad audience.
Speaker 4: Martin says that Yan worked his way up the company
Speaker 4: by bringing order and structure to what was otherwise a chaotic,
Speaker 4: fast growing startup.
Speaker 6: If you were the type of guy or girl to
Speaker 6: say there's no structure of this, I can't do this,
Speaker 6: you were out of the door very very quickly. If
Speaker 6: you went in and said I can't do this yet,
Speaker 6: how do I do it? Take ownership and do it yourself.
Speaker 6: Those people exceled at wire card in the early days.
Speaker 6: That's why probably Jan Maselek had an easy to climb
Speaker 6: ladder because he was a doer.
Speaker 4: And one thing he was particularly good at was charming people.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it almost seemed like he was setting himself a
Speaker 4: challenge to win someone to in side by doing something
Speaker 4: like deliberately turning up late.
Speaker 6: We had CEOs of very important companies and he would
Speaker 6: just come twenty minutes late and still charm this individual
Speaker 6: that they seemed like the best friends afterwards, where you
Speaker 6: would think that would be inexcusable, but Ian had the
Speaker 6: ability to turn things around. I think there really there
Speaker 6: are traits that I have had strong envy for, but
Speaker 6: I envied Ian so much because it seemed so damn
Speaker 6: simple for him. He really mastered giving you the feeling
Speaker 6: that you're important, despite the fact that you could figure
Speaker 6: out over many, many years that it was a routine.
Speaker 4: With his people skills, Jan was a good manager. He
Speaker 4: became Martin's boss, and as you can hear, Martin really
Speaker 4: liked him.
Speaker 6: Iyan had a broad spectrum of friendly to formally friendly.
Speaker 6: So when, for example, when you went to young and
Speaker 6: said do you have a minute, do you have a second.
Speaker 6: He would always say for you always.
Speaker 4: Which wasn't to say he didn't have edges.
Speaker 6: I did have the feeling that he liked people or
Speaker 6: didn't like people. In occasions when people got on his
Speaker 6: bad side or showed him that they didn't like him,
Speaker 6: he could be extremely ruthless is the only word I find.
Speaker 4: Over time, Martin noticed that to get on with him
Speaker 4: you needed, ultimately not to take things too seriously. Marcelet
Speaker 4: liked to test people to see if they could hold
Speaker 4: their own against him.
Speaker 6: He did say things to shock and provoke people here
Speaker 6: and there. He had a Vina Shmid sort of the
Speaker 6: Vienna joking, a playfulness, slayfulness, so he could get away
Speaker 6: with murderers saying certain things. And you also have to
Speaker 6: understand that he was in a circle of management where
Speaker 6: making politically incorrect jokes was in fashion. I think Jan
Speaker 6: he'd enjoy walking on a ledge and some people falling down.
Speaker 4: So by the early twenty tens, Jan Masselek is a
Speaker 4: hugely successful young corporate executive. He's basically the man running
Speaker 4: this fast growing German company which is on its way
Speaker 4: to a main market listing. He's a bit of a
Speaker 4: Maverick and prefers action over rules. But whatever is striking
Speaker 4: or unusual about Yan, it tends to get masked by
Speaker 4: the fact that Moicade is also an unusual company. It
Speaker 4: primarily processed payments for high risk industries. The business's other
Speaker 4: payment processes in companies and banks were hesitant to get
Speaker 4: wrapped up in like gaming, gambling and pawn although Walcatt
Speaker 4: had a different way of describing that.
Speaker 6: A dult content or emotional content as we would call it.
Speaker 4: And over the coming years, Wakat's appetite for risk also
Speaker 4: took it to countries where the rules of business were
Speaker 4: more ambiguous.
Speaker 6: I had heard before that he had several trips to Russia.
Speaker 3: When would that have been.
Speaker 6: That was four or five years maybe three, three to
Speaker 6: five years before Wirecard Gillets, so.
Speaker 4: Sort of twenty fifteen, twenty fourteen, fifteen sixteen, a round.
Speaker 6: A bit later, yeah, yeah, fifteen sixteen. Yeah. But of
Speaker 6: course we did build up Wirecard Russia in that time
Speaker 6: as well, so it wasn't so surprising.
Speaker 4: Just weeks before Wirecard collapsed, something surprising did happen, and
Speaker 4: it chilled Martin Marcelet wanted to invest money in a
Speaker 4: new company that was issuing credit cards. He needed the
Speaker 4: board's approval. Martin and another colleague had run the numbers
Speaker 4: on this company and they knew this investment was a
Speaker 4: bad idea. Right ahead of the crucial board meeting, they
Speaker 4: told marcelect that explicitly they gave him the figures on
Speaker 4: the returns wirecard could expect. Martin remembers specifically what he said, long.
Speaker 6: Term, the card project over the next decade, if it
Speaker 6: runs a decade, then it would potentially cover one point
Speaker 6: to five million.
Speaker 4: Yan took it all on board. There's no way he
Speaker 4: didn't know the numbers.
Speaker 1: Martin says, Jan was very.
Speaker 6: Very quick in understanding, and an hour later we are
Speaker 6: sitting in the meeting and he simply ignored what we said.
Speaker 6: He said, the card project alone in the first year
Speaker 6: will covered the one point five.
Speaker 1: Million, with you in the room, with us in the
Speaker 1: video conference.
Speaker 6: So he just ignored what we had discussed.
Speaker 1: It's a very curious kind of game.
Speaker 4: You know, you're watching him do this, and obviously it's clear,
Speaker 4: based on everything you understand about him until now, that
Speaker 4: he you know, is not stupid. He didn't mishear you.
Speaker 4: He didn't, you know, didn't lose the facts.
Speaker 6: We were flabbergasted, We were speechless. It had never happened
Speaker 6: like that. I mean, we were all important people in
Speaker 6: the company. It was like a puns in the face.
Speaker 4: What really comes across, as Martin recounts, this is just
Speaker 4: how effortlessly and easily Marcelect liede how confidently. It's like
Speaker 4: he knew he had Martin and his colleague under his thumb,
Speaker 4: and they wouldn't raise an objection. And I think that's
Speaker 4: what made it so shocking for Martin, because it obviously
Speaker 4: raised the question what else had Marcelet lied so bloodlessly about. Today,
Speaker 4: I think Martin is actually quite amused by everything that
Speaker 4: has happened. He tells me that part of the reason
Speaker 4: he decided to talk to me is that it's a
Speaker 4: kind of coping mechanism, which I think hints at how
Speaker 4: deeply the whole experience has affected him. The collapse of
Speaker 4: Wirecard and the revelations that Marcelect was a spy. They
Speaker 4: don't anger him, they sadden him.
Speaker 6: I think the biggest tragedy of young marcellek is he
Speaker 6: probably could have earned millions gazillions with his charm and
Speaker 6: his wit and his business of humen and his skills
Speaker 6: that he didn't need to be what he turned out
Speaker 6: to be. That is really something that most people who
Speaker 6: work at Wargard or witnessed him. When discussing it afterwards,
Speaker 6: we all come to that point.
Speaker 4: When marcell x fraud at Wakaard was discovered, the company's
Speaker 4: stock went to zero and Martin's life savings were basically
Speaker 4: wiped out. For me, the remarkable thing is that despite that,
Speaker 4: Martin evidently still holds quite a lot of affection for
Speaker 4: his former boss.
Speaker 6: I often asked myself, now did I know the true
Speaker 6: jan at all? And how much of it was an act?
Speaker 6: How much was a genius, how much was in between?
Speaker 6: How much was learned, how much was instinctive? All these
Speaker 6: questions I really can't answer. I also asked myself when
Speaker 6: young wakes up in the morning, what he thinks now
Speaker 6: of all the contexts of all the employees. Was that
Speaker 6: all just a lie? At what stage was a lie?
Speaker 6: What was the turning point?
Speaker 4: If it was possible to wave a magic wands or whatever?
Speaker 4: Could you imagine going for a drink with him or
Speaker 4: dinner with him?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 6: And Oh yeah, actually I think I would love to
Speaker 6: do that. Actually, I have thought about getting into Moscow
Speaker 6: and seeing if I could organize it. I was thinking
Speaker 6: one could try that.
Speaker 1: Why haven't you?
Speaker 6: I mean, honest truce is, would you have the balls
Speaker 6: to actually go to Moscow? And I feel that, you know,
Speaker 6: endangering yourself and your family that probably if I had
Speaker 6: a guarantee that I would not be touched. I'd love
Speaker 6: to get his side on this.
Speaker 4: Martin says he feels certain there must have been a
Speaker 4: point where something in marce Lex's life went quite wrong
Speaker 4: to set him on the path he took, but when
Speaker 4: he thinks back, he really can't say exactly when that
Speaker 4: might have been. Martin realizes that Marcelet could talk, he
Speaker 4: could charm, he could hold court, he could make you
Speaker 4: feel like you were his clothes friend, but actually he
Speaker 4: almost never revealed anything about his life directly at all.
Speaker 4: What he did at home or where he had come from.
Speaker 6: His whole youth is a complete blank. He never spoke
Speaker 6: of that, nor did he speak of Vienna in his youth,
Speaker 6: which is quite remarkable, because I mean, I would have
Speaker 6: felt like I'd had a lot of personal talks with him,
Speaker 6: But only later did I realize he said a lot,
Speaker 6: but he didn't really give an insight of his past
Speaker 6: at all.
Speaker 4: A few months ago, I traveled to a small Austrian
Speaker 4: town called Kloster Neuberg. It's just outside Vienna Cluster. Neuberg
Speaker 4: is dominated by a huge monastery on a hill at
Speaker 4: its center. It's home to about twenty eight thousand people,
Speaker 4: and it's the place where Yan Marcelect grew up. In
Speaker 4: the town hall cafe, I meet up with four people
Speaker 4: who knew Yan as a child. Rudolf Koch rustles up
Speaker 4: some Vellingta black coffees. He used to be the head
Speaker 4: master of the local secondary school, Marcelex School, and he's
Speaker 4: brought along another teacher, Bruno, and two of marcele X's classmates,
Speaker 4: Verena and Philip. We all sit down around the table together.
Speaker 4: I hope they might be able to tell me something
Speaker 4: about Yan Marcelect before Wakard, about the experiences that formed
Speaker 4: him as an adult. This is the first time that Philip,
Speaker 4: Rudolph and Bruno have spoken to the press about Marcelek.
Speaker 4: When Wakard went down and Marcelek went on the run,
Speaker 4: it was a shock.
Speaker 3: Top ten white collar crime of y.
Speaker 6: And financier from Lubushop Vad and me and as.
Speaker 4: As Philip runs down the list of Jan's exploits, he
Speaker 4: says it sounds like a bad James.
Speaker 3: Bond plot, essentially James Bond Blood.
Speaker 4: Rudolph shows me and my producer Peggy and old school yearbook.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, lots more hair.
Speaker 4: Yeah. In the picture, Yana is in the front row,
Speaker 4: crouched down, almost ready to spring up again. He's looking
Speaker 4: directly at the camera, arm resting on one knee, fingers
Speaker 4: laced together. There's maybe twenty other students in the class.
Speaker 4: They all look like classic teenagers, awkward in their own bodies. Yan,
Speaker 4: though he looks very at ease. It would, of course
Speaker 4: be totally stupid to expect to see signs of a criminal,
Speaker 4: treasonous future in an old school photo. But this, this
Speaker 4: isn't exactly what I expected either, I learned. Yan actually
Speaker 4: began his schooling at a less in Vienna, a French
Speaker 4: private school, before moving back to the local school in
Speaker 4: Klosterneuburg when he was twelve, and because of his time
Speaker 4: at the Lise, Yan was fluent in French. Philip, his
Speaker 4: former classmate, remembers a time when their French class was
Speaker 4: being taught by a supply teacher, a sub and Jan
Speaker 4: just stood up and said he was leaving. The teacher was,
Speaker 4: of course totally taken aback, but when they tried to
Speaker 4: put him in his place, Yan answered with a five
Speaker 4: minute monologue in flawless.
Speaker 6: French and.
Speaker 3: Totally baffled.
Speaker 4: Yan must have gone to the place he always went
Speaker 4: whenever he could skip a lesson. In fact, where he
Speaker 4: went even in the minutes between lessons, to the library.
Speaker 4: And that's where he got to know Bruno.
Speaker 3: I mena active and said I'm going to skip Nazi mid.
Speaker 4: Bruno taught history, German and philosophy, and he also looked
Speaker 4: after the school library. Soon after Yan joined the school,
Speaker 4: the head of it told Bruno that Marcelek was his
Speaker 4: star pupil and suggested he could help with the new
Speaker 4: computer system the library had got. So Jan became Bruno's helper.
Speaker 4: Bruno says that it couldn't have run smoothly without him.
Speaker 6: On Jan mats l.
Speaker 4: In fact, when everyone here thinks of Jan back then,
Speaker 4: they picture him sat in front of the computer in
Speaker 4: the library. He was obsessed with it and with learning
Speaker 4: about this new thing called the internet. Jan was certainly
Speaker 4: different from other fifteen year olds who were more likely
Speaker 4: to be skateboarding or playing football outside.
Speaker 6: He had the imkiful as eston Avaksen and the aston fineering.
Speaker 4: Philip says, it was like they were all still children
Speaker 4: and was somehow not. He seemed more like a fully
Speaker 4: grown adult already. But you haven't, Na says he was
Speaker 4: maybe aloof but definitely not arrogant blink of.
Speaker 2: In cambem I need to f.
Speaker 4: Yet other kids admired him, and the teachers well, the thing,
Speaker 4: Philip remembers them saying, is be more like Yan.
Speaker 3: What is his name? So?
Speaker 4: I wonder if his teachers knew about his strategy to
Speaker 4: avoid washing his socks.
Speaker 6: Well the Abbots said for this washing to Soten.
Speaker 3: Samoning.
Speaker 4: Philip says that one day Yan announced he had done
Speaker 4: a cost benefit analysis and he would never wash a
Speaker 4: pair of socks again. Calculating the value of his labor
Speaker 4: and time in washing, drying, and folding the sock, he
Speaker 4: decided it was cheaper just to take out a subscription
Speaker 4: and have new pairs constantly delivered. It sounds almost like
Speaker 4: Yan enjoyed being unconventional in making decisions and crucially for me,
Speaker 4: telling people about those decisions that seemed to expose or
Speaker 4: undermine the sense of what others thought of as being normal.
Speaker 4: If Yan liked computers and enjoyed being a typical he
Speaker 4: wasn't a loner, though, says Verena. Far from it. He
Speaker 4: had a wide group of friends and she was part
Speaker 4: of it. And yet she also remembers that Yan never
Speaker 4: socialized outside of school. He never took friends home. He
Speaker 4: had a very private side to his life.
Speaker 6: His actor had on z prevad umfertin is thus bobbedcap
Speaker 6: mitk Norman or a Mitklasen as I saw.
Speaker 4: Verena uses this German word schreg to describe him, which
Speaker 4: you might say means a skew set at a different
Speaker 4: angle to the rest of the world. Jan was a
Speaker 4: straight a student, but in his last year, two weeks
Speaker 4: before he was due to sit his final high school exams,
Speaker 4: he received a job offer from a tech company in Vienna.
Speaker 4: He accepted and he told his schoolmates he was leaving immediately.
Speaker 4: He wasn't going to bother with the exams androns.
Speaker 3: And again he's a jam pistols.
Speaker 4: Everyone thinks he's daft leaving at the eleventh hour. You've
Speaker 4: got to have a lot of self belief or maybe
Speaker 4: self delusion to do something like that aged seventeen. Think
Speaker 4: back to how important exam results seem to you at
Speaker 4: that age. I can remember believing my whole future depended
Speaker 4: on them. Rudolph jumps in to offer an explanation.
Speaker 1: SI.
Speaker 4: He says that the job offer was very, very lucrative.
Speaker 4: But all four of them also suggest another possible reason
Speaker 4: why Yan so keen to leave Kloster Neuberg. I asked
Speaker 4: about Yan's family. He has a younger sister and a brother,
Speaker 4: both of whom seem to lead perfectly ordinary lives. No
Speaker 4: one really remembers anything about his father either way. The
Speaker 4: father had left the family by the time Yann was
Speaker 4: going to the local school, but everyone remembers his.
Speaker 1: Mothershists and mutovs kim ferusch.
Speaker 4: Rudolph, the head master, describes Marcelek's mother as combative, but
Speaker 4: it's obvious from his body language and the way he
Speaker 4: raises his eyebrows as he carefully pronounces the word that
Speaker 4: he wants me to know it's a bit of a euphemism.
Speaker 1: As a from marge.
Speaker 4: Verreina agrees with Rudolph's assessment. She now works for the
Speaker 4: town council and she knows from Marcelek as a conspicuous woman.
Speaker 4: Doraina says Yan's mother used to be regularly upset about
Speaker 4: one thing or another. She campaigned against a five G
Speaker 4: mask being put up in Ploster Neuberg and against a
Speaker 4: development that would have threatened a nature reserve. She says
Speaker 4: she's very left wing. Everyone thinks Yan had a hard
Speaker 4: time with his mother, that it was a difficult relationship,
Speaker 4: to the point where Yan he did whatever he could
Speaker 4: to get away from home. I got in touch with
Speaker 4: Anne's mother, and to my surprise, she replied, I got
Speaker 4: an email from her. She said she has quote no
Speaker 4: interest in giving us an interview because she has neither
Speaker 4: the desire, nerves, or time to wreak over quote an
Speaker 4: extremely unpleasant period of my life. She has asked that
Speaker 4: we don't reveal her name here. She said it's unfair
Speaker 4: to label her as combative and said it's a shame
Speaker 4: for her campaigning efforts in town to get dismissed as
Speaker 4: left wing and disruptive. She did say that her relationship
Speaker 4: with her son quote changed massively the year before he
Speaker 4: left home. She says it broke down because she quote
Speaker 4: didn't let him get away with everything and quote didn't
Speaker 4: let him wrap me around his little finger. She tried
Speaker 4: to involve a psychologist to mediate between them. It didn't work. Yan,
Speaker 4: she implies, had his teachers charmed, but she was resistant.
Speaker 4: Since then, she says, she's only tried to make contact
Speaker 4: with her son once in twenty five years. The emails
Speaker 4: she sent me had a whole load of attachments, eighteen
Speaker 4: documents concerning all kinds of things to do with Yan.
Speaker 4: Some are press releases from as far back as two thousand,
Speaker 4: and they make me think that despite their estrangement, she
Speaker 4: has been tracking her son's career. She's read, it would
Speaker 4: seem almost all of the books and materials that have
Speaker 4: been published about the Warequad fraud. A lot of the
Speaker 4: attachments she's sent me, though, are all about the Austrian
Speaker 4: Russian Friendship Society, and she urges me to look more
Speaker 4: into it. It's the organization in Vienna that Wakaard sponsored.
Speaker 4: From marcell X's mother's response and from what we've heard
Speaker 4: from others, it's clear that she and her son had
Speaker 4: a deeply troubled and painful relationship whatever happened when he
Speaker 4: left home, Verena says seemed significant because when she next
Speaker 4: saw Yan after the exams, he appeared to be a
Speaker 4: changed person. It was at a reunion after everyone else
Speaker 4: had graduated. They were around nineteen years old. She says
Speaker 4: he boasted that he now knew how the world worked,
Speaker 4: that money could buy him whatever he wanted, even sex,
Speaker 4: Even he implied sex with her. Incredulous, she told him
Speaker 4: he was stupid. When Verena told this story, every one
Speaker 4: around the table seemed shocked. It sounded so unlike the
Speaker 4: Yan they knew, like he'd somehow come off the rails
Speaker 4: a bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Before everyone gets up to leave to pick up their
Speaker 4: children from nursery to go back to work, Philip tells
Speaker 4: me why he agreed to speak with us.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Pela, he or pilatives and for whom just doesn't sure.
Speaker 4: He says he's speaking with us because he wants people
Speaker 4: to understand that Yan, though he had a difficult childhood,
Speaker 4: ended up where he did because he was vulnerable. He
Speaker 4: wasn't destined to become a fugitive, and it's deeply sad
Speaker 4: that he did. I've always believed that people are much
Speaker 4: more malleable things than we realize. Capable of extremes. We
Speaker 4: have a tendency to see those who end up at
Speaker 4: the fringes are somehow radically different to us broken evil.
Speaker 4: The reality, though, is that with the right pressures, the
Speaker 4: right challenges, the right circumstances, or all the wrong ones,
Speaker 4: people can be walked into the strangest shapes and situations.
Speaker 4: When you want to recruit someone as a spy, if
Speaker 4: you're good at it, you understand something of that. You
Speaker 4: look for the parts of a person's life, their personality,
Speaker 4: their needs that you can work with, bend, change, use
Speaker 4: their history. But not everyone with a difficult childhood becomes
Speaker 4: a spy. So how did Yan Marcelett get drawn into it?
Speaker 4: Why did he end up working with the Russians? And
Speaker 4: what did he actually do coming up on hot money?
Speaker 7: If Moscow decides and it is always Moscow who decides,
Speaker 7: if Moscow decided that this person can be and should
Speaker 7: be recruited, then they work out ways of how to
Speaker 7: recruit disperson.
Speaker 4: This is a dangerous situation because those spies tend to
Speaker 4: be the better ones, better than the guys who do
Speaker 4: it solely for money. Hot Money is a production of
Speaker 4: the financial times and pushkin Industries. It was written and
Speaker 4: reported by me Sam Jones. The senior producer and co
Speaker 4: writer is Peggy Sutton. Our producer is Izzy Carter. Our
Speaker 4: researcher is Marine Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shakerci,
Speaker 4: fact checking by Kira Levine, Sound design and mastering by
Speaker 4: Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de Olivia, with additional sound design
Speaker 4: by Izzy Carter. Original music from Matthias Boss and John
Speaker 4: Evans of Stellwagon Symphonet. Our show art is by Sean Carney.
Speaker 4: Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines McQuaid and
Speaker 4: Matthew Garahan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to
Speaker 4: Ruler Calaffe, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackie, Manuela Saragosa,
Speaker 4: Nigel Hanson, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan,
Speaker 4: Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix, and Greta Cohne.
Speaker 1: I'm Sam Jones.