Party With Stolen Money

Today's true crime episode. Picture a birthday party in Las Vegas. The year is twenty twelve. A man not yet thirty years old has rented out an entire nightclub, and the champagne alone for the evening will cost more than most people make in a decade. Britney Spears is about to pop out of a giant cake. Paris Hilton is somewhere near the bar. Leonardo DiCaprio is laughing at a private table, and within a year his name will be attached to one of the most celebrated films in Hollywood, a movie about greed, excess and the seductive, hollow thrill of stolen money.

The irony of that is almost too perfect. Because the man throwing this party, the man footing this bill, the man whose signature appears on wire transfers moving hundreds of millions of dollars across a web of shell companies stretching from Kuala Lumpur to Zurich to the Cayman Islands. That man is, at this very moment stealing from his own country. His name is low Take Joe. The world would come to know him as Joe lo and by the time investigators, journalists and prosecut on three continents finished untangling what he did.

They would call it one of the largest financial crimes in human history, a theft of more than four and a half billion dollars, a theft so audacious, so wrapped up in glamour and celebrity and political power, that it would topple a government, implicate one of the most prestigious banks on Wall Street, and leave its architect to this day a fugitive that no government on earth has managed to catch. This is the story of one MDB. This is the story of how a sovereign wealth fund created with the stated mission of building a better Malaysia became instead the private piggybank of a prime minister and the playground of a warton educated con artist with a genius for making powerful people believe exactly what he wanted them to believe.

To understand how this happened, you have to start with the man who was, on paper the architect of Malaysia's future. Najib Brazak became Prime Minister of Malaysia in two thousand and nine inheriting the leadership of UMNO, the United Malay's National Organization, a party that had ruled the country in one form or another without interruption since independence from Britain in nineteen fifty seven. Najib was a child of the Malaysian establishment. His father had been the country's second prime minister.

He had been groomed for power his entire life, and in two thousand and nine, not long after taking office, Najib announced the creation of a new state investment vehicle. It would be called One Malaysia Development Barehood one MDB for short, and its purpose, according to the official language, was development, infrastructure, energy projects, job creation. A modern prosperous Malaysia funded by a sovereign wealth fund that would attract foreign investment and recycle it into the nation's future.

It sounded on paper like exactly the kind of ambitious nation building project that a young, reform minded prime minister might champion. The man who helped Najib design it, who whispered the architecture of one MDB into existence, was barely out of university. Joe Lowe had grown up in Penang, the son of a businessman of middling wealth, comfortable but nowhere near the financial stratosphere he would eventually claim to inhabit. He'd been educated at Harrow, the elite British boarding school and then at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, one of the most prestigious business programs in the world.

And somewhere in those years Low developed two extraordinary talents that would define the rest of his life. An instinct for making himself indispensable to powerful people and an utter, breathtaking shamelessness about lying to get what he wanted. Low had no official position at one MDB. He held no title, no formal seat on its board, but almost from the beginning he was the man pulling the strings behind the curtain, consulted on every major decision, present in every important meeting, the human conduit through which money allegedly flowed from the Gulf into Malaysia, and then investigators would later show into his own pockets.

His pitch to Najib, according to later reporting and trial testimony, was elegant in its cynicism. One MDB wouldn't just fund infrastructure. It could also become something else, a war chest, a source of money that Najib could quietly direct toward political patronage, toward keeping UMNO's machine well oiled, toward buying the kind of loyalty that wins elections. On the surface, this spending could be dressed up as corporate social responsibility. Underneath it would be exactly what it sounds like, a slush fund.

The mechanics of the theft, once you see them laid out, have a kind of dark elegance to them, the way a magic trick looks impossible until someone shows you the hidden compartment. The first major scheme involved a joint venture with PetroSaudi International, a Saudi Arabian oil company. In two thousand and nine, one MDB announced a billion dollar investment into this joint venture, supposedly to fund oil and gas projects in the region. But of that billion dollars, investigators would later determine the vast majority never went anywhere near an actual oil field.

Instead, it was diverted routed through a Saciales registered company with a name almost comically generic, good Star Limited and Good Star, it turned out, was controlled not by PetroSaudi, not by any legitimate joint venture partner, but by Joe Lowe himself. A billion dollars meant to develop a nation vanished into an account that one twenty something financier could access at will. The second and third schemes were if anything, even more brazen because this time they didn't just involve a sketchy joint venture partner in the Gulf.

This time they involved Goldman Sachs, one of the most respected investment banks on the planet. Between twenty twelve and twenty thirteen, Goldman Sachs helped one MDB raise more than six billion dollars through a series of bond offerings, ostensibly to fund infrastructure projects and to support what was described as new strategic economic initiatives between Malaysia and Abu Dhabi. Goldman's fees for this work were, by any normal standard, obscene, reportedly around six hundred millillion dollars, multiples of what such bond sales would typically cost a bank to underwrite.

But Goldman prosecutors would later allege wasn't just collecting an outsized fee for ordinary work. The bank's own bankers, specifically a star deal maker named Tim Leisner, who ran Goldman's Southeast Asia operations, were prosecutors said, directly involved in helping move the stolen money and in paying roughly two billion dollars in bribes to government officials across Malaysia and Abu Dhabi, including prosecutors alleged to Najeeb himself. Picture the scale for a moment. A billion dollars routed through a shell company, then another billion, then another raised through bonds with the implicit credibility of one of the most trusted names in global finance attached to them, then siphoned into an elaborate network of offshore entities with names designed to mean nothing to anyone, companies that existed for no purpose other than to make stolen money harder to trace, And all the while, the public face of one MDB remained relentlessly, almost defiantly upbeat press releases, groundbreaking ceremonies, glossy brochures about a glittering new financial district planned for Kuala Lumpur.

The fund's official narrative and its actual operations existed in two entirely separate universes, and for years almost no one outside a tiny circle of people knew it. Where did the money go? This is the part of the story that made one MDB more than just a financial crime. It's the part that made it a global spectacle. Joe Lowe used the stolen billions to construct, almost overnight, the persona of a billionaire playboy financier, the kind of fabulously wealthy young man who seemed to exist simply to be photographed at the right parties with the right people.

He bought luxury real estate across three continents, penthouses in New York, mansions in Beverly Hills, properties in London. He purchased a super yacht called the Equanimity, valued at around two hundred and fifty million dollars, complete with a helipad and an infinity pool. He spent over three hundred million dollars on fine art, including works by Monette, Bosciot and Van Go, at one point paying nearly forty nine million dollars for a single Boskiocht painting, a record setting sum for the artist's work.

He spent eighty five million dollars on parties in a single nine month stretch. He once ran up one hundred and sixty thousand dollars tab at a single New York City club in one night. He sent two dozen bottles of Christal Champaigne to a celebrity's table simply to be noticed. He paid celebrities reel a List celebrities appearance fees just to show up at his events, so that the parties would feel less like a young financier's birthday celebration and more like a scene out of a film about a young financier's birthday celebration.

And then there's the detail that makes the story genuinely surreal. Low actually helped finance one of those films. Together with Najeeb's own step son, Reza Aziz, Low co founded a production company called Red Granite Pictures, and in twenty thirteen, Had Granite released a movie that would go on to earn five Academy Award nominations. Martin scorsesees The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a stockbroker whose entire life is a monument to fraud, excess, and the corrupting power of stolen money.

Prosecutors would later allege that Red Granite financed the film, along with several others, using money embezzled from one MDB. Low himself was thanked by name in the film's closing credits. A man was stealing billions of dollars from a developing nation's sovereign wealth fund, and he used part of that stolen fortune to bankroll a movie celebrating the glamour of financial fraud. DiCaprio would later return artwork a Picasso a Bosciot that had been gifted to him using one MDB money. Once the scandal broke and the US Department of Justice came calling, the supermodel Miranda Kerr, who dated Low for a time, returned eight million dollars in diamond jewelry.

Low had reportedly purchased a quarter million dollar white ferrari as a wedding gift for a famous reality star. This wasn't subtle theft. This was theft conducted in plain sight, dressed up as the natural extravagance of new money, hiding behind the simple fact that nobody wanted to ask too many questions of a man who seemed to have an endless supply of cash and an endless willingness to spend it on the people around him. For years, this worked. It worked because Lowe was extraordinarily good at his particular brand of confidence game, flattering the right officials, cultivating relationships with royal families in the Gulf, presenting himself as a man with connections so deep and so valuable that nobody wanted to be the one to scare him away by asking inconvenient questions.

It worked because Goldman Sachs, for all its supposed rigor, either failed to ask the obvious questions about where six billion dollars in bond proceeds was actually going, or, as prosecutors would later allege, some of its own employees knew exactly where the money was going and helped it get there anyway. But theft on this scale, sustained over years eventually leaves footprints, and in twenty fifteen those footprints started to surface. A Surowak born British journalist named Claire Rikasel Brown, who ran a small investigative blog called The Sarawak Report, began publishing detailed reports alleging that hundreds of millions of dollars connected to one MDB had moved into accounts controlled by Joe Lowe.

Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal, working in part from a massive trove of leaked documents reportedly handed over by a former PetroSaudi employee, published its own bombshell reporting, and the headline finding was the one that turned this from a story about a mismanaged sovereign wealth fund into a story about a sitting head of state. Nearly seven hundred million dollars connected to one MDB, the journal reported, had been deposited directly into the personal bank accounts of Prime Minister Nijibrazak.

This is the moment the cover up began in earnest because Najib did not resign, he did not call for an independent investigation and stepped back to let it run its course. Instead, he moved to shut the inquiry down from the inside. Malaysia's Attorney general at the time had begun assembling a task force to investigate the allegations swirling around one MDB. He was removed from his position. The new Attorney general who replaced him would later clear Najib of any wrongdoing, characterizing the hundreds of millions of dollars in his personal accounts as a personal donation from a member of the Saudi royal family, a gift supposedly with no strings attached, no connection whatsoever to the sovereign wealth fund his own government had created.

Journalists and politicians who pursued the story too aggressively found themselves targeted. One Malaysian politician who had submitted evidence about one MDB to the Swiss Attorney General and filed police reports against Najib and Low in Hong Kong was arrested and charged under Malaysia's Security Offenses Act, a law typically reserved for terrorism cases, on the theory that his attempts to expose the scandal amounted to an attack on Malaysia's banking system. He and his lawyer were barred from leaving the country.

The Sarawak Sport's website was blocked within Malaysia. A respected Malaysian financial newspaper that had published damaging reporting on one MDB had its publishing license suspended for three months. This is what a cover up looks like when it's being run by the full machinery of a state. Not a single dramatic act of concealment, but a thousand small acts of suppression, each one designed to make the truth just a little bit harder to say out loud, and each person who said it anyway just a little more afraid.

But the story had already escaped Malaysia's borders, and outside the country, no Prime Minister's office could make it disappear. The United States Department of Justice opened its own investigation, eventually describing one MDB as the largest case in the history of its Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, a program specifically designed to claw back asset stolen by corrupt foreign officials. Singapore's banking regulators began investigating the flow of one MDB linked money through accounts at Singaporean banks.

Switzerland's attorney general opened a money laundering probe. Investigators in Hong Kong and Luxembourg in the United Arab Emirates all began pulling their own threads, and in July of twenty sixteen, the US Department of Justice dropped what amounted to a thunderclap, a formal announcement that it believed more than four and a half billion dollars had been siphoned out of one MDB by senior Malasian officials and their associates, and that the United States would be seeking the forfeiture of more than a billion dollars in assets, yacht's real estate, artwork, the proceeds of The Wolf of Wall Street itself that had been purchased with the stolen money.

The Attorney General of the United States at the time called it, in a phrase that would be quoted endlessly in the years that followed. Kleptocracy at its worst. Two years later, the dam finally broke in Malaysia itself. In May twenty eighteen, Malaysians went to the polls in a general election dominated by public fury over one MDB and a rising cost of living that many voters connected directly to the billions that had been stolen from the cun Tree's own development fund. UMNO, the party that had governed Malaysia unbroken for sixty one years since independence, lost, Najib Razak was voted out of office.

What happened next had the quality of a dam breaking all at once. Within days, Najib and his wife, Rosma Manser were barred from leaving the country. Malaysian police raided properties connected to the couple and seized what they described as the largest hall in the nation's history, cash and valuables worth somewhere between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and seventy million dollars, including more than twelve thousand pieces of jewelry, four hundred and twenty three luxury watches, and five hundred and sixty seven designer handbags from thirty seven different brands.

Investigators reportedly needed days just to catalog what they found. Najib was arrested. He was eventually hit with dozens of separate criminal charges abuse of power, money laundering, criminal breach of trust connected to billions of ring it in misappropriated funds, and in twenty twenty, after a trial that captivated the country, he was convicted on seven counts related to a smaller piece of the broader scheme, involving funds from a one m d B unit known as SRC International. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison, later reduced.

He did not go quietly even as the verdicts mounted. Najib maintained, as he does to this day, that he was the victim of a political conspiracy, that he had been deceived by those around him, that he never knowingly took stolen money. In twenty twenty, amid the unraveling, leaked audio recordings reportedly captured Najib asking the then crowned prints of the United Arab Emirates for help fabricating a loan document, a paper trail designed to make it look as though money received by his step son had come from a legitimate Emoradi investment fund rather than from one MDB itself.

It was if the recordings are what investigators say they are a cover up of the cover up, a sitting and then former head of state caught in the act of trying to manufacture a more convenient version of the truth. And what of Joe Low, the young man at the very center of it all, the architect who designed the scheme and who, by US prosecutor's own estimate, personally pocketed something in the range of one and a half billion dollars. He vanished As the scandal accelerated in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, Low simply stopped appearing in public, the parties stopped, the yachts sailed without him in the headlines.

In twenty eighteen, the US Department of Justice formally indicted Low, along with two former Goldman Sachs bankers, on charges connected to the bond schemes and the bribery that allegedly accompanied them. Interpol issued a red notice for his arrest. Malaysia revoked his passport multiple countries, Malaysia, Singapore eventually Kuwait would go on to charge or sentence him in absentia, racking up potential prison terms that combined would keep him behind bars for the rest of several lifetimes if he were ever caught, but he never was.

For years, Lowe's whereabouts were the subject of constant rumor Taiwan, Mainland China, various uncertain sightings that never quite resolved into a confirmed location. He reportedly traveled on multiple passports obtained through citizenship by investment schemes in places like Saint Kitts and Nevs and Cyprus. Identities purchased the same way a person might buy a piece of real estate simply because he had the money to do it, and the schemes asked very few questions. It would take years of independent investigative work, much of it driven by journalists rather than governments, to get closer to an answer.

Two former Wall Street journal reporters, who had broken some of the earliest stories on the scandal and later co authored a book about it called Billion Dollar Whale, continued chasing Low's trail long after most newsrooms had moved on. Their reporting eventually pointed toward an answer. Almost nobody had considered that Low wasn't hiding in some obvious tax haven or allied nation, but was instead living under a fabricated identity in Mainland China, reportedly in a high end neighborhood of Shanghai, using a fake Australian passport under a fictitious Greek name, allegedly providing quiet strategic advice to Chinese state interests navigating Western sanctions.

A remarkable second act for a man who built his first fortune by stealing from his own country. He has never been arrested as recently as this year, reports Sue

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