This inauguration week, we're revisiting a 2020 podcast on President Trump's assault on the civil service. In this episode, Harvard law professor, Matthew Stephenson, provides some context for understanding Trump's executive order on the civil service and then lists the three primary threats it poses for corruption. A more detailed discussion can be found on his Global Anticorruption Blog.

This episode was originally published on 4 November 2020.

Our guest today, Dr. Rebecca Connolly, joins us to discuss her work on the legal governance of outer space relating to militarization, security and commercialization, drawing some interesting parallels to the law of the sea and making it clear that there is still a lot of work to be done.

Karina Litvack joins the podcast to share her insights into climate governance based on her extensive board experience in the oil and gas sector and her role as the Founding Chair of the Climate Governance Initiative. 

As is holiday tradition, we're revisiting our podcast with Peter Hellman, who describes Rudy Kurniawan’s audacious scheme to defraud wine collectors in his excellent book, In Vino Duplicitas: The Rise and Fall of a Wine Forger Extraordinaire.

This episode was originally published on 20 December 2017.

Patrick Gushue, the Department of Justice’s Acting Director of its Corporate Whistleblower Awards Pilot Program, joins the podcast to discuss the program, uptake to date, who is eligible and key considerations as to timing and whistleblower involvement in the misconduct.  More information about the pilot program is available at justice.gov/corporatewhistleblower

Omar Alshogre, refugee, public speaker, and project manager with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, shares the wrenching story of his three years as a political prisoner in the worst of Syria’s prisons. He discusses the role that extortion plays there, simultaneously delegitimizing the regime further and propping it up financially.

Episode resources: 

• Mentioned at (00:33): The Syrian Emergency Task Force
• Mentioned at (00:45): Omar's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 11 March 2020

This episode was originally published on 9 June 2021.

With the holiday travel season approaching, we’re revisiting a podcast episode featuring Paul Radu, the co-founder and co-executive director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Paul describes his team’s work in uncovering an international team of cash machine skimmers that ultimately skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars, largely from tourist hot spots. Travelers often don’t realize their accounts are being drained until after they return home.

This episode was originally published on 9 June 2020.

Walt Pavlo went to work at MCI at a time when telecoms were hungry for go-getters. It was the early 2000s, and Walt enjoyed the freedom and aggressive nature of a recently deregulated industry. But soon he realized that MCI’s most lucrative customers were also its flakiest, and the pressure was on to manage millions of bad debt that accumulated on the books. In this episode, Walt explains how he concocted a fake-loan scheme that netted him money far beyond his dreams — and yet how hollow it felt, right up until the moment it all came crashing down. 

Walt Pavlo is a nationally recognized speaker who writes for Forbes and NYU Law School on white-collar crime and criminal justice. He founded the firm Prisonology in 2014 as a consulting firm to support federal criminal defense attorneys by providing experts who have retired from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He is the co-author of “Stolen Without a Gun: Confessions from Inside History's Biggest Accounting Fraud, the Collapse of MCI WorldCom,” which covers his stint working in the company’s billing department and committing fraud.

Retired Canadian Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cromwell joins the podcast to describe the review he was commissioned to undertake of Hockey Canada’s organizational structure in the aftermath of a sexual assault scandal that shook confidence in the sport in 2018.

In his mid-20s, Chuck Collins made a fateful choice. The great-grandson of Oscar Meyer, and thus an heir to part of the meatpacker’s family fortune, Chuck was skeptical of the riches (some $500,000 in 1986 dollars). He didn’t want to perpetuate the imbalances he saw dynastic wealth creating in society. Rather than live off the interest, or to give a portion to charity, Chuck gave away the entire inheritance, and thus embarked on a most unusual sort of normal life.

In this episode, Chuck explains what reverberations his decision to give away his inheritance had on his family and in his career, and he lays out his case to other similarly privileged Americans: Why life is better without the insulation that great wealth provides, and how billionaires can rejoin American life.

Chuck Collins is the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he edits Inequality.org. He is also a founding member of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of high-net-worth Americans who advocate for public policies — including higher taxes on the wealthy — meant to rein in the political power of the richest Americans. His prolific writings focus on inequality, the racial wealth divide, philanthropy, the climate crisis, and billionaire wealth dynasties. His forthcoming book "Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power and Ruining Our Lives and Planet" will be published in 2025.