Speaker 1: Pushkin. On a winter morning in twenty fifteen, an electrician
Speaker 1: is murdered in a quiet Amsterdam suburb. It looks like
Speaker 1: an assassination, but there's no motive. The Dutch police can't
Speaker 1: figure out what's going on. Eventually, the killing leads investigators
Speaker 1: into a web of cocaine loads, money laundering, and shadowy
Speaker 1: government agencies that stretches from Dublin to Dubai. At the
Speaker 1: center is a cocaine supercartel and a secret proxy war
Speaker 1: between democracies and dictatorships. I'm Miles Johnson, and I'm an
Speaker 1: investigative reporter for the Financial Times, and I've always really
Speaker 1: been interested in the ways that crime and business me
Speaker 1: because they always meet. Because crime is a business. The
Speaker 1: global black market, it's worth trillions of dollars. It's this
Speaker 1: vast ocean of shadow cash. We know it's there and
Speaker 1: we can feel its impact, but it's often hard to see.
Speaker 1: That makes reporting on it pretty tough. But occasionally you
Speaker 1: can get a glimpse of what's happening under the surface.
Speaker 1: A man in his fifties was shot with one bullet
Speaker 1: in the head.
Speaker 2: These are not no bedtime stories. This is getting real.
Speaker 1: There's always an element of look, you don't know if
Speaker 1: somebody behind that door has a gun.
Speaker 3: It became clear to me as a prosecutor that what
Speaker 3: they were doing is they were using the fighters as
Speaker 3: a way to move money through the system.
Speaker 2: We've got blog apacas from South America, look into London the.
Speaker 1: Money, and then sometimes if you keep digging, you start
Speaker 1: to see a much bigger pattern.
Speaker 4: The cart tells they run these organizations like a Fortune
Speaker 4: five hundred company in a sense of they want to
Speaker 4: maximize profits and reduce risks.
Speaker 2: All criminals ultimately wish and aim for becoming legitimate, to
Speaker 2: transitioning into legitimate businessmen, bringing the wealth they make with them.
Speaker 1: This season, on the multi award winning podcast Hot Money,
Speaker 1: the Dubai supercartel, drug kingpins and murder brokers who are
Speaker 1: thriving in a global order that seems to be breaking apart.
Speaker 1: Hot Money, the New Narcos from Pushkin Industries and The
Speaker 1: Financial Times out this December. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.