I'm Alexandra Rocky, the host of bribe, swindle, or steel.

We have something a bit different for you this month. It's an excellent four-part series on the story of the Jersey Offshore Files,

a massive document leak that revealed a complicated financial web and sparked stories that are still unfolding.

We hope you enjoyed this lively series produced by the Global Reporting Center at the University of British Columbia and European Investigative Collaborations.

And now, episode one.

Imagine you're an investigative journalist.

You worked on one of the biggest collaborations of your time, the Panama Papers, a massive data leak involving millions of documents.

Countless stories gave the public a look inside the world of offshore banking.

That leak came from a law firm that helped stash wealth for rich, famous clients.

To keep their work secret, teams of journalists poured over the records for years before releasing the stories in carefully coordinated fashion.

Now you've scored a new trove of documents, some 350,000 files from another offshore financial company. It's relatively small,

but it's juicy. Where do you start? How do you entice other reporters to follow you into that

thicket to dedicate months to carving out stories from financial records? Turns out, that was the case for

Nikki Hager. My name is Nicky Hager, said Hager.

And I work as an investigative journalist in New Zealand.

Hager had been in contact with a pair of Americans,

Tanya Dick Stock and her husband, Derren Stock.

They held boxes of documents related to a family legal battle,

and they wanted his help to bring them to

light. Forty gears of transactions, memos, confidential files, all from a small company,

LaHouge, a trust company based in Jersey. That's the island in the English Channel, not Frank

Sinatra's home state. Hager knew he needed a way in. The company and its clients were obscure,

...