Extreme Wealth – Episode 1: Clay Cockrell and the Champagne Problems of the 1%
Release Date: 09/25/2024
Our Favorite Wine Fraudster
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As is holiday tradition, we're revisiting our podcast with Peter Hellman, who describes Rudy Kurniawan’s audacious scheme to defraud wine collectors in his excellent book, . This episode was originally published on 20 December 2017.
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The DOJ’s New Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program
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Patrick Gushue, the Department of Justice’s Acting Director of its Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program, joins the podcast to discuss the program, uptake to date, who is eligible and key considerations as to timing and whistleblower involvement in the misconduct. More information about the pilot program is available at
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Profiting From Human Rights Atrocities in Syrian Prisons
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, refugee, public speaker, and project manager with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, shares the wrenching story of his three years as a political prisoner in the worst of Syria’s prisons. He discusses the role that extortion plays there, simultaneously delegitimizing the regime further and propping it up financially. Episode resources: Mentioned at (00:33): Mentioned at (00:45): , 11 March 2020 This episode was originally published on 9 June 2021.
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An International ATM Skimming Scheme
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With the holiday travel season approaching, we’re revisiting a podcast episode featuring Paul Radu, the co-founder and co-executive director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Paul describes his team’s work in uncovering an international team of cash machine skimmers that ultimately skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars, largely from tourist hot spots. Travelers often don’t realize their accounts are being drained until after they return home. This episode was originally published on 9 June 2020.
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Extreme Wealth – Episode 8: Walt Pavlo and the Empty Temptations of Fraud
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Walt Pavlo went to work at MCI at a time when telecoms were hungry for go-getters. It was the early 2000s, and Walt enjoyed the freedom and aggressive nature of a recently deregulated industry. But soon he realized that MCI’s most lucrative customers were also its flakiest, and the pressure was on to manage millions of bad debt that accumulated on the books. In this episode, Walt explains how he concocted a fake-loan scheme that netted him money far beyond his dreams — and yet how hollow it felt, right up until the moment it all came crashing down. Walt Pavlo is a nationally...
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Hockey Canada’s Governance Review
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Retired Canadian Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cromwell joins the podcast to describe the review he was commissioned to undertake of Hockey Canada’s organizational structure in the aftermath of a sexual assault scandal that shook confidence in the sport in 2018.
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Extreme Wealth – Episode 7: Chuck Collins and the Burdens of Dynastic Wealth
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In his mid-20s, Chuck Collins made a fateful choice. The great-grandson of Oscar Meyer, and thus an heir to part of the meatpacker’s family fortune, Chuck was skeptical of the riches (some $500,000 in 1986 dollars). He didn’t want to perpetuate the imbalances he saw dynastic wealth creating in society. Rather than live off the interest, or to give a portion to charity, Chuck gave away the entire inheritance, and thus embarked on a most unusual sort of normal life. In this episode, Chuck explains what reverberations his decision to give away his inheritance had on his family and in his...
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Extreme Wealth – Episode 6: Jonathan Rugman and the Stunning Power Plays of MBS
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The sudden ascent of Mohammed bin Salman from an obscure royal heir to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia — the country’s de facto ruler — has fascinated Jonathan Rugman, an author and longtime correspondent in the Middle East. Jonathan’s latest BBC documentary, “The Kingdom,” traces MBS’s life from an unruly youth to a series of Machiavellian maneuvers to cut ahead of cousins and uncles in the line of royal succession. Jonathan’s reporting illuminates a brash but secretive young autocrat whose wealth and power have few equals anywhere on the planet. After years of high-profile...
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Extreme Wealth – Episode 5: Paul Schervish and the Spiritual Duality of Riches
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For more than 20 years, Paul Schervish surveyed many of the richest people in America for a long-running study on how the wealthy view the world and themselves. In this episode, another in our series on extreme wealth, Paul explains how his research and his early years spent as a priest inform his understanding of wealth and its potential to improve the world. Applying sociological and religious scholarship to the question of how what to do with money — and by extension, what to do with the rich — he invites haves and have-nots alike to consider the roles that God, human agency, and...
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Extreme Wealth - Episode 4: Bill Browder and the Pitiless Greed of Vladimir Putin
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Sir William Browder (“Bill”), a financier turned justice advocate, is our guest for this episode of our ongoing series on extreme wealth. Bill has been the engine behind the Magnitsky Act, a law that for the past 12 years has empowered governments to seize the assets of foreign leaders who abuse human rights — a significant countermeasure against corruption and atrocity that has exasperated Vladimir Putin and oligarchs in Russia, where Bill was once a leading foreign investor. His experience working in (and subsequently abandoning) Russia allowed him to see inside that culture and...
info_outlineThis week we debut a special project within Bribe, Swindle or Steal: single-topic episodes that focus on extreme wealth. For years Alexandra Wrage has worked on corporate compliance and anti-corruption efforts, a field that provides a front-row view into human corruptibility. In these episodes, she digs into the practical, philosophical, political, and even spiritual roots of why people risk everything—from scandal to criminal charges—for the allure of money, even when all of their material needs are more than covered. She will explore some surprising challenges of wealth alongside the ways in which greed changes people and extreme wealth changes the rules that we all live by.
Her first guest in this series is Clay Cockrell, a therapist in New York City whose Walk and Talk Therapy practice specializes in treating very wealthy clients. The problems they bring to therapy give him a unique insight into the privileges, the anxieties, and the perils exclusive to the 1%.