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

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about what the New York Times called the

largest bribery scheme and the history of the world.

My guest is David Montero, an investigative journalist and author

of a new book that provides a great survey of the international bribery landscape, kickback

exposing the global corporate bribery network. David, thank you for joining me. Thank you so much

for having me. Your book is divided into fairly discrete chapters, each on a really interesting topic.

But I thought we could focus today on the chapter called Money Boxes. It has a great opening scene.

Perhaps you can recount the story, which also explains the title of the chapter for listeners.

The chapter opens with two sergeants in the U.S. military who've just

landed in Baghdad, Iraq, after the U.S. invasion in 2003, and they have taken up a position

in an old palace of Saddam Hussein's, and they have to do their daily sort of security check.

And I actually spoke to one of them whose name is Kenneth Buff, and he sort of described

that, you know, they were way over their heads when they arrived in Iraq, and really were

just trying to get familiar with this place that they'd blitzed through.

And so they're doing their daily rounds, and they notice that on this very

luxurious estate are all these strange-looking little cottages. So they start walking by, and

they notice that one in particular has been all walled up with cinder blocks. And they think,

hmm, that's sort of strange. And of course, everyone in the U.S. military at this

point had been given the mandate that they needed to look for weapons of mass destruction,

because that's, after all, why we had invaded Iraq in 2003 with the belief that Saddam Hussein

was in possession of these weapons. So they thought these two sergeants, well,

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