This week: a Moscow front tied to Iran and the Houthis, Libya's financial operator, and a sharp guide to oligarch-autocrat alliances. Plus the glass-eel trade, The Copenhagen Test, Raven, and our latest Mauerberger investigation.
Most financial crimes involve stealing a nation's wealth and hiding it abroad. The Mauerberger "Spider Web" is the reverse: it is an inward occupation, using billions in criminal proceeds to buy the licensed brokerages, energy reserves, and media networks that form the state's own internal organs.
This week: the private intelligence industry exposed, Tehran under bombardment, a Harvard weed smuggler's Caribbean empire, and Silicon Valley's weapons obsession. Plus glass eel smuggling, a new Serial podcast, and more.
He’d never been to the club. Still, the system flagged him. We traced it to Patron Scan—a network scanning IDs, capturing faces, and sharing data across venues. Get flagged once, and you can be denied entry in venues across the world, without ever knowing why.
Leaked photographs from a private Instagram account reveal that the son of Thailand’s former Deputy Finance Minister was flying on the Mauerberger network’s Gulfstream and vacationing on their $100 million superyacht—while his father claimed they were just school friends.
He sold his superyachts to shell companies, fired the world's most prestigious yacht manager, and disappeared into the Indian Ocean. This is how Benjamin Mauerberger executed the great yacht swap.
At the launch of Janu Dubai, champagne flowed for the global elite. But behind the "soulful" branding lies a radioactive secret. While developers point to anonymous "Asian funds" for cover, our investigation reveals a $1.5B trail of "pig-butchering" proceeds and a fugitive wanted for fraud.
This week: Anand Giridharadas on the Epstein operating system, Bellingcat's shadow fleet investigation, and Joshua Hunt on sumo and Japan's far-right anxiety. Plus Jafar Panahi's Palme d'Or thriller, Louis Theroux in the manosphere, and the story of El Mencho's death.
This week: the human cost of the Philippines' war on drugs, what AI will do to jobs, a TikTok-fueled parrot black market, plus our latest investigation into the elite fixers who help billionaires disappear.
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