Hello! Welcome to the Joe Lowe episode of Slate Money Criminals. I'm Felix Amonib Axios,

I'm here with a little bit of a spires of The New York Times and elsewhere. Hello.

And we are joined from Singapore by Tom Wright. Welcome, Tom. Thanks for having me. Tom,

who are you? And what brings you on this show? Well, I am a journalist. I was going to say

retired journalists, but you're always a journalist. I'm the co-author of a book, Billion Dollar

Whale, about Joe Lowe and one of the biggest frauds in history. And I'm the co-founder of Project

Brazen, which is a podcast company. We make podcasts based on thrilling true stories.

We are going to talk about Joe Lowe in this episode. It's not easy to steal six billion dollars,

but he managed to do it. We're going to talk about how he managed to do it, whether it was

a Ponzi scheme, who the victims were, who his accomplices were, and where it all stands today.

That's all coming up on Slate Money Criminals.

So, who is this guy? Why was he worthy of turning into a book? And then, I guess, after that,

you can bring us up to speed on what's happened over the past five years.

Well, Joe Lowe is one of the largest, most successful white collar criminals in history. He

helped defraud at least six billion dollars out of a state fund in Malaysia. And the proceeds

went on a wide range of things, including making films like The Wolf of Wall Street,

to pay Paris Hilton, to hang out with him, to pay Leonardo DiCaprio, to gamble with him,

to invest in some bona fide businesses, like EMI Music Publishing and Hotels in Manhattan,

and all of this. Joe Lowe carried this off by persuading the Prime Minister, then Prime Minister

of Malaysian Najib Razak to allow him to sort of run this state fund from behind the scenes,

this Malaysian state fund. And it's as simple as he just stole the money, really, with the

connivance of bankers from Goldman Sachs and private bankers from Switzerland, and all this

...