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

I'm Alexander Rogge.

Today we're discussing a fascinating story that broke earlier this month about the shipping of

sanctioned Iranian oil, and more specifically, the insurance companies that enable it.

The story comes to us from two investigative reporters from Bloomberg News,

Zach Reiter and Zeke Fox.

Zeke joins me today to discuss that research.

In addition to his work with Bloomberg,

Zeke is the author of Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

Zeke, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Alexandra.

Why do you start by walking us through the story?

We're always very interested in how investigative journalists uncover financial crime,

and this is just such a good example of that.

How did it first come to your attention, and where did you and Zach go from there? Both Zach and I are

generalists and don't really have beats. We're on the investigations team. And I just wrapped up

a few years of being deeply immersed in the crypto world. And we have just been looking around for other interesting

topics that we might want to dive into. Bloomberg has a whole team of reporters who are

specialists on shipping, and they have done some amazing work in the last couple of years on what's come to be

called the Dark Fleet. The Dark Fleet, this is a group of like a few hundred, maybe 500

oil tankers, mostly owned by shell companies that no one's ever heard of, often in Dubai. Basically, this new market has

sprung up for old oil tankers. It turns out, like, as an investigative reporter, it's kind

...