In this edition of CRAFT, Kevin Riehle tells us about his decades-long career in counterintelligence, a former supervisor who turned out to be a Russian mole, which country received the most Soviet defectors and more.
SICPA, which makes special ink for currencies, is one of the most secretive companies we’ve heard of. Owned and controlled by the founding family, SICPA stays quiet about its globe-spanning operations.
In 2008, Robert “Zach” Zachariasiewicz – then a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration – was in a Bangkok police station. Sitting across the table was Viktor Bout, a notorious Soviet-born arms dealer that Zach had been investigating.
Bout had just been arrested in a hotel conference room, where
Over three decades ago, an international bank called BCCI was shut down by regulators. BCCI had been bankrolling the criminal activities of fraudsters and dictators, as well as CIA operations abroad.
The collapse of BCCI became the obsession of a struggling artist named Mark Lombardi who was moonlighting as a
By now we’ve all heard about the ballooning wealth of America’s garden variety billionaires. But further down the rich list, quietly climbing the rankings is Gianluigi Aponte, an Italian shipping magnate whose fortune at least doubled during the pandemic.
Aponte represents a hidden class of the ultra-rich whose
On paper, you don't really need to know about a company called SICPA. Even the name is a bit of a turn-off. Ink? Who cares?
But SICPA is actually a very powerful and secretive company with tentacles across the world. That ink? It's a special type called optically variable ink,
