Introducing Hot Money: The New Narcos

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Ethan Wu (0:36)

Thank Pushkin.

Hey Unhedged listeners, it's Ethan. I am here with Ace FT reporter, Miles Johnson, who is the host of a new season of an FT podcast called Hot Money. Miles, I listened to season one of Hot Money. It was all about the financing of porn, pretty titillating stuff. I don't know how you're gonna outdo that, man. Tell me how.

Miles Johnson (0:57)

It's a tough ask, but this season of Hot Money, it's about international drugs trafficking and cocaine and organized crime. So we focus on a group of shadowy international criminals called the Dubai Super Cartel, which is this group of top criminal masterminds from around Europe who all converge in Dubai and set up this huge international cocaine cartel with the ability to order the assassination of anyone, pretty much anyone anywhere in the planet.

And they are pretty interesting cast of characters. They are people who have priceless stolen masterpieces hanging on their walls. They have private islands, fake passports. They arrange sort of big boxing matches. So basically we focus on that cast of characters and it all begins with a murder because there's an unexpected murder in Holland, which no one can understand at the time, which eventually leads to their downfall.

Ethan Wu (1:54)

Listeners, if you like murder or international drug trafficking or doing coke, do give a listen. We got the first episode of the second season of Hot Money here in your feed right now.

Hope you like it.

Miles Johnson (2:11)

I'm Miles Johnson, and I'm an investigative journalist with The Financial Times. And the story I'm gonna tell you, it's not a love story, but it starts with a wedding. It's a wedding that takes place in Dubai in 2017

It's a hot summer's day at the Burj Al Arab, one of the most expensive hotels in the world. It's a skyscraper shaped like the sail of a ship, rising up from the glittering water of the Persian Gulf.

Guests can arrive across a private bridge in the hotel's fleet of Rolls Royce Phantoms, or fly in, landing on the helipad on the roof. The wedding party that day has been told to keep things discreet, no photos and no social media. Security is tight. The groom is a young Irish entrepreneur, and some of his most important business partners have come to celebrate his big day. But these aren't your average businessmen. Some of them hang priceless stolen masterpieces on their walls. They've got multiple passports with multiple identities, and they can order the assassination of almost anyone anywhere in the world.

Because this isn't just a wedding, this is an international crime summit. It's a meeting of what will come to be known as the Dubai Super Cartel, a shadowy criminal network that controls a multi-billion dollar cocaine empire spanning the globe.

Over the years, I've written about a lot of different things, but more recently, you could perhaps describe my beat as the places where crime and business collide. I've written about Russian billionaires who control private mercenary armies and the Italian mafia laundering their cash through the city of London. I've covered Vatican financial scandals and spy rings that smuggle microchips. Because crime is a business, and modern organized crime groups, they're increasingly run like multinational companies. They have thousands of employees, complicated logistical supply chains, and even investment portfolios. It's a big economic story, but you don't usually read about it in the business pages. Because reporting on international crime groups in the same way we'd report on a blue chip corporation, well, it's hard. Crime bosses, they don't usually have PR teams you can ring up, and mafias, they don't publish audited accounts or glossy annual reports. But the money generated by organized crime is vast, and most of the time, it's invisible. It's like this ocean of shadow cash. We know it's there, but we can't ever really see it. It's trillions of dollars, and it fuels things like weapons trafficking and war. It can even topple governments. And the men celebrating that wedding in Dubai, they've come up with a new model of organized crime. And it's become so successful that by 2017, police believe that they control a third of Europe's cocaine market, worth billions of dollars a year.