Brokers, Bagmen, & Moles

In the 1980s, brokers at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange were not Ivy League financial-types. They were mostly blue-collar workers with on-the-job training in commodities exchanges. And they were making more money than most knew what to do with. All that cash caught the interest of the FBI, who suspected financial fraud at the Merc. But after undercover agents spent thousands of hours on the floor losing millions of dollars in taxpayer money, their investigation turned out to be a bad investment.

In “Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles” host Anjay Nagpal takes listeners into the pits of Chicago’s exchanges to detail one of the costliest FBI investigations ever. Were authorities really going after the handful of small fish they caught - or did they actually have their sights on some blue chip executives?