Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today I'm speaking with Casey Michelle.

Casey's a journalist, researcher, podcaster in his own right, and for our purposes today,

he's the author of American kleptocracy, how the U.S. created the world's

greatest money laundering scheme in history. It's a lively book and expands on so much of the work

done in this field. Thank you for joining me, Casey. Anytime. Thanks, Alexandra. Longtime listener,

first time guest, so very excited to be here. Your book will be out in November, but I was delighted to

receive an advance copy, so thank you for that. I raced through it. It's great storytelling with

some new details about some familiar characters, the Obi-angs, Kolomoisky, the Mamedovs of

Azerbaijan. Actually, why don't I just pause there, Casey, and let you recount

some of your favorite anecdotes, because although the book holds together very coherently,

it is a collection in some respects of fairly shocking anecdotes. I think the book, if nothing else,

it provided me an opportunity to compile a whole range of, as you just mentioned, different

stories. And when

you're writing about something like transnational money laundering, clubtocracy writ large,

and these kinds of oligarchic and in some cases despotic figures, sometimes the only way

you can really get through it or handle it is try to have a little fun with some of the stories

or identify some of the more memorable elements of these

against transnational money laundering schemes. I certainly think on my end, when you go into

writing a book, you have kind of an overarching idea of what you're going to write about, what

direction things are going to go in. This is my first book. And I had a little bit of that

beforehand, but I will say that I never expected, certainly my first book,

...