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

I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today I'm speaking with Kelly Carr.

Kelly, together with her colleague Jamie Dowdell, wrote the two-part spotlight series for the Boston Globe, Secrets in the Sky.

Their story won one of the two Tr prizes for investigative reporting for 2018. Secrets in the sky is an unnerving story about

the lax oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, of U.S. registered planes and concerns

that this lack of meaningful oversight will be, or perhaps

already is being exploited by narco-traffickers, corrupt politicians seeking to move illicit

funds and terrorists. Kelly, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me.

The research that you have done and that others do into corruption is incredibly painstaking.

It is peeling back layers and layers.

I'm going to ask you to talk about it a little bit because one of the things that we're finding

with corruption is that people are getting better at it, right?

We're making it more difficult and reducing the number of countries they can do it in, changing laws. And so as a result

of that, to run a story like this to ground was very labor intensive. Absolutely. And it required

many, many months of reporting. Jamie and I were initially started this story just poking around in the

state of Wyoming's

business registry. And in Wyoming, you can download the entire registry for all corporations

and LLCs registered in the state. So one day we decided to do that. And soon we were sorting

through a massive spreadsheet. And then we stumbled upon a series of entities that all had the same name with

corresponding numbers attached to each. And there were literally hundreds of them. So it was such

an outlier that it prompted us to just start digging. And I feel like a lot of times reporting

on corruption, that's exactly how it begins with some tiny little thread and then just

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