Extreme Wealth – Episode 7: Chuck Collins and the Burdens of Dynastic Wealth
Release Date: 11/06/2024
Profiting From Human Rights Atrocities in Syrian Prisons
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
, 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.
info_outline
An International ATM Skimming Scheme
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
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.
info_outline
Extreme Wealth – Episode 8: Walt Pavlo and the Empty Temptations of Fraud
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
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...
info_outline
Hockey Canada’s Governance Review
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
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.
info_outline
Extreme Wealth – Episode 7: Chuck Collins and the Burdens of Dynastic Wealth
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
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...
info_outline
Extreme Wealth – Episode 6: Jonathan Rugman and the Stunning Power Plays of MBS
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
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...
info_outline
Extreme Wealth – Episode 5: Paul Schervish and the Spiritual Duality of Riches
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
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...
info_outline
Extreme Wealth - Episode 4: Bill Browder and the Pitiless Greed of Vladimir Putin
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
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_outline
Extreme Wealth – Episode 3: Jennifer Risher and the Limits of Sudden Wealth
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
The author and philanthropist Jennifer Risher continues our series on extreme wealth by telling the story of her ear-popping rise from a middle-class Microsoft employee in the early ‘90s to an unexpected multimillionaire. The stock options she accrued with her husband, David — a fellow Microsoft employee who went on to join Amazon and who is now the CEO of Lyft — gave Jennifer immediate entry to a world of privilege that, as the child of a working-class household, she’d never expected to join. Her experience showed her the peculiar nature of personal wealth: an agent of tremendous...
info_outline
Extreme Wealth – Episode 2: Steve Fishman Inside the Mind of Prisoner Bernie Madoff
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
In this episode — another in our series on extreme wealth — the journalist Steve Fishman discusses his reporting on Bernie Madoff and the collapse of Madoff’s $65 billion ponzi scheme. Steve doggedly pursued the story even after the financier was sent to a federal prison in North Carolina. Eventually the two men connected for a series of phone interviews that gave Steve a unique insight into the truths and lies that enabled Madoff to con investors at an industrial scale. Steve explains that greed was but one motivation for Madoff, an apex Manhattan insider who never forgot humiliations...
info_outlineIn 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 career, and he lays out his case to other similarly privileged Americans: Why life is better without the insulation that great wealth provides, and how billionaires can rejoin American life.
Chuck Collins is the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he edits Inequality.org. He is also a founding member of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of high-net-worth Americans who advocate for public policies — including higher taxes on the wealthy — meant to rein in the political power of the richest Americans. His prolific writings focus on inequality, the racial wealth divide, philanthropy, the climate crisis, and billionaire wealth dynasties. His forthcoming book "Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power and Ruining Our Lives and Planet" will be published in 2025.