In most crime shows or movies, the crimes are well defined. Drugs, extortion, robbery, murder. In such cases, if the culprits are caught, they get due punishments. What’s remarkable about Dirty Money is most of the crimes are white collar and the criminals are too big, too rich and too well connected to suffer any consequences for their actions. Dirty Money makes The Big Short and Erin Bronkovich seem tame in comparison. Moreover, these crime shows are safe to watch in the sense that most of us are not connected to the crimes directly in any way. There is a feeling of safety that comes from the distancing.
Unfortunately, Dirty Money destroys this safe feeling with a hammer of Thor. There are many examples in the twelve episodes spanning over two seasons that are too close for comfort. Take for instance, the episode called Dirty Gold. Do you own any jewelry, Cartier perhaps? Or maybe a Rolex watch? How about an iPhone? Turns out all these companies buy gold that comes from Peru and other South American countries and most of it is dirty. The documentary estimates that 80% of the gold bought by US Mint is tainted. Gold is a major source of money laundering for drug mafia in South America. All the cash that is collected from seeping drugs on American streets is sent back to a fabricated company in Peru. It buys illegal gold and sells it to US Treasury and companies like Apple or Cartier. They transfer the money to the company’s account and voila! The money is now whiter than ever. So there is a big chance that the gold found in our jewelry, watches, phones has been obtained through exploitation of workers, selling of drugs and possibly loss of lives along the way.
Do you have an account at HSBC? Well, HSBC was responsible for laundering millions of dollars of drug money from some of the deadliest drug cartels in Mexico. And here’s the kicker. If you sell drugs and are caught, you will end up serving a long time in jail. So how many years of jail time did the HSBC management serve? Zilch, nada, zero. They were fined $1.2 billion which is few weeks profit for the bank and that was it. It seems that the powers that be decided that HSBC was too big to fail and an indictment will have a bad effect of the US economy.
Then there’s the other bank Wells Fargo. They opened thousands of illegal accounts across all of US. The bankers were under so much pressure to open new accounts that they started doing it for their cats and dogs. Then there was the “cross selling” that was supposedly the winning strategy of Wells Fargo. This means selling a range of products to a customer, often without her consent. So you open credit cards, checking accounts, saving accounts everything and then they pay the extra charges. The shareholders are happy because the customers on paper are increasing but in reality it’s a cancerous growth. When the cross selling scandal broke, the CEO John Stumpf resigned and had to pay back $41 million that he had received in equity awards.
The series starts with the famous Volkswagen scandal. VW lied to their customers that they were driving a clean diesel car when the reality was the exact opposite. They manipulated the testing device and kept on lying till there was no other alternative left. Even though they had to buy back the cars in US, their cars are still running in Europe where the laws are flexible and implementation is complicated due to nature of EU.
There was a time when Valeant Pharmaceuticals was the hottest name in the pharma industry. Their strategy was to buy companies and sell their drugs at higher prices, sometimes the increase was more than 100%. They did not believe in spending money in R & D. Their stock fell by 90% after the scandal broke. The episode also features a brilliant short seller Fahmi Quadir who spent two years researching on the company.
Then there is Donald Trump. He has been involved in so many controversies that they could have done the whole series on him. The episode destroys the myth that he did not get much help from his father and the disaster that was the Taj Mahal casino that went bankrupt. He also opened Trump university that used aggressive tactics to enroll students for real estate courses and delivered nothing. After getting sued, he settled the case and the video features him saying, “I never settle a case.”
If you ever wonder why Trump favours Jared Kushner so much, you get the answer in the episode Slumlord Millionaire that is based on him. Kushner companies violated many laws in New York, used aggressive tactics for harassing the tenants and extorting as much money as they could. They even went to the length of identifying tenants who were living when the landlord was the previous owner and started suing them for violations.
After watching these episodes, the mystery of why so many seemingly sane people support Trump becomes even deeper. I believe that after all this, if people still don’t see Trump for the man who he is, it is because they don’t want to.
Finally, there is the scandal of the ex-prime minister of Malaysia, Mohammad Najib Razak. This gentleman started an investment firm called 1Malaysia Development Bernadette (1MDB). They embezzled billions of dollars with the ready help of Goldman Sachs. Facilitating all this was the mysterious figure of Jho Low, a businessman who was often seen partying with the likes of Paris Hilton and giving white Ferrari as a wedding gift to Kim Kardashian. He also provided finance of $100 million for The Wolf of Wall Street and Leonardo DiCaprio thanked him during one of the award ceremonies. Jho Low is an international fugitive at the moment, believed to have taken refuge in China.
The number of ways in which the scandals in Dirty Money are connected to our lives is what makes it worrying and frightening.
