Man: And action!
Goldberg: You’ve heard about "The Wolf of Wall Street,"
but what about the Wolf of Malaysia?
This guy.
This is one of the biggest financial frauds of all time.
Jho Low is spending absurd amounts of money
and partying with the who’s who of Hollywood.
Marell: Paris Hilton is hanging out with him.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s there with him.
Britney Spears popped out of a cake.
You get a bottle,
you get a bottle, you get a bottle!
Leonardo DiCaprio’s new buddy must be the same guy
investing millions of dollars into "The Wolf of Wall Street."
Was there any connection between the corruption in Malaysia
and the millions that were being invested
in this Hollywood movie?
Goldberg: Jho Low was taking government money
meant for the poor
and spending it on himself.
Rewcastle Brown: $700 million
in one single bank transfer?
What kind of person would do that?
Could he get away with this?
Goldberg: We’ll see.
I’m Whoopi Goldberg, and this is "The Con."
-- Captions by VITAC --
What if I told you there’s a con
that ensnared some of the world’s biggest movie stars
and involved international money laundering,
bribery, and billions of dollars?
Would you believe me?
Well, honey, strap in.
♪
To guide us through this epic party
is Scam Goddess Laci Mosley,
who has made a career out of dissecting
the world’s most infamous con artists.
This is the story of Jho Low,
who went about as low as you could go,
committing one of the biggest heists of all time.
Marell: I live in Las Vegas.
I used to work in nightlife on the Strip
within the VIP services department.
I first got introduced to Jho Low around 2009, 2010.
We were told some crazy big spender’s coming to town
and we had to pull out all the stops.
He probably spent, you know, in the multiple six figures
his first time there,
and everyone was like, "Who the hell is this guy?"
Mozingo: I’ve been a bottle-service waitress
at some of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas.
When Jho Low came into our club,
he would clear out the inventory.
He bought every single table
a bottle of champagne and a bottle of tequila.
Marell: It was just something that you didn’t see --
spending a million dollars in one night.
My tables were wondering, "How can he afford all of this?"
Marell: I have a picture of me with one of the porters,
and there’s all this cash on the table.
He would just give everyone that walked by him money.
Mozingo: I don’t think anyone asked questions
about how he got his money because in Las Vegas,
we have a "don’t ask and don’t tell" policy.
He didn’t look like the type of person that partied.
He looked...smart.
Marell: Jho Low was pretty nerdy.
He had glasses, short.
We’ve heard of Napoleon syndrome, right?
He’s a little guy, and he had a huge ego.
I’ve never really seen
anyone pay people to hang out with them.
When Jho Low was walking into the club
with celebrities like Paris Hilton,
Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kim Kardashian,
it completely changed our whole perspective.
He paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in appearance fees
for celebrities to hang out and party with him.
Goldberg: So, who exactly is this Malaysian mystery man?
Jho Low grew up in Penang Island, Malaysia,
which is a very quaint suburban neighborhood.
His father had built wealth
off of iron mining and selling liquor.
Goldberg: Jho Low’s family wasn’t filthy rich,
but they had British boarding-school money,
and that buys you status.
His father sent him to the best schools.
He went to Harrow in London, which is an all-boys school
where the royal family goes -- literal princes.
And the connections that he forged there
definitely benefited him in the future.
Goldberg: Harrow is like Hogwarts, but for political power.
This is where Jho Low befriends Riza Aziz,
stepson of the Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak.
Low is scrappy, and he goes to Wharton,
which is one of the top business schools in the world,
and he keeps his ties to home
by running a Malaysian student organization.
But he also networks.
And while he’s at Wharton,
he rents out this nightclub in Philadelphia
and spends $40,000 throwing this giant party,
and he becomes known as the "Asian Great Gatsby."
Once you’re in the room where it happens,
you got to make the most of it,
and that’s exactly what Low was doing.
He gets to know the top people
from the top families around the world.
Goldberg: After charming his ultra-rich schoolmates,
Jho Low starts brokering deals
between Middle Eastern oil companies
and the Malaysian government.
He was hungry, and he was a hustler.
Goldberg: Jho Low continued to work his connections
until some curious deals caught the attention
of intrepid reporter Clare Rewcastle Brown.
Rewcastle Brown: I had not been back to Malaysia
since I left as a child,
and I ended up returning round about 2006
to take part in a media conference
that I’d been invited to speak at.
And it was then that I realized
I had to start reporting on the corruption
that was taking place and just not being reported.
It was then that I started to look at the guys
at the top of the heap in Malaysia --
the Prime Minister, Najib Razak, and his government,
who were looting the country.
And it was very plain
that, you know, the people were being left destitute.
They were so powerful that they weren’t really bothering
to cover up very well what they were up to.
And so I started looking at this,
and it was then that I heard about this movie,
"Wolf of Wall Street."
My sources told me
Najib’s wife had started
to pressure ministers in the government
to show this film to schoolchildren in Malaysia.
[ Snorting ] Ohh!
Goldberg: Schoolchildren?
This movie is barely suitable for college kids.
So, this was baffling until a friend of mine
sent me a little piece of information,
which was Najib’s son Riza Aziz
was the producer of the movie.
I got online and I looked up
what was going on with this $100-million movie
involving Leonardo DiCaprio and top directors.
And as I flicked through the information,
something caught my eye,
which was that at every launch party,
at every PR event,
standing next to the stars
was young protégé of the Prime Minister, Jho Low.
He was also popping up in the U. S. and European press
for just being this outrageous high roller and big spender.
And it begged a question, which was,
was there any connection
between the corruption in Malaysia
and the millions that were being invested
in this Hollywood movie?
The more I looked into this, I felt that this is
an incredibly important story on so many levels.
A story this big might be able to change things.
That’s what I was thinking.
I didn’t realize that this was going to end up being
the biggest theft ever recorded that I was about to uncover.
Goldberg: Before she stumbled on the Malaysia connection
to "The Wolf of Wall Street,"
investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown
had been tracking the complex government corruption
in Malaysia for many years.
Jarvis: Malaysia is really a tale of two countries.
On the one hand, you have
these rapidly developing cities.
But on the other hand,
there are the rural portions of the country
where you have extreme poverty,
people who are living
on just a couple hundred dollars a month.
Goldberg: One of the ways the government can help the poor
is by creating a sovereign wealth fund
which encourages economic investment
and the creation of jobs.
In 2009, after he makes
several high-profile connections,
Jho Low is able to get in front
of the new Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak.
And Jho Low has a reason for this meeting.
He convinces the Prime Minister of Malaysia
to create 1MDB,
1Malaysia Development Berhad,
which is a sovereign wealth fund.
And a lot of countries have these,
and they’re supposed to do economic development
on behalf of the citizens.
Wright: When Jho Low persuades Najib to set up
this sovereign wealth fund called 1MDB,
he sort of told him that it would be very easy
to raise billions of dollars on international markets
to borrow the money effectively.
This was at a time after the global financial crisis
when interest rates were very, very low.
It was very cheap to borrow money.
And, extraordinarily, they agreed to allow Jho Low
to run it secretly from behind the scenes.
You know, Jho Low’s only in his late 20s at this point,
which is just an extraordinary thing that he would be allowed
to run a multibillion-dollar pot of money
that’s supposed to be controlled by the Malaysian state.
Goldberg: A notorious party boy with a big pile of money.
Ha! What could go wrong?
1MDB was launched with great fanfare.
It was all in the news.
The Prime Minister did all his press conferences,
and there was fancy videos
with sort of planned cities springing out of Malaysia.
And everybody was told this was going to be a fund
that was going to help the country and the poor.
Jarvis: We know that Jho Low is this master networker,
and he uses 1MDB to wield more power,
to drive that influence,
to build business and drive it forward.
One of the first orders of business for 1MDB
is to meet with a Saudi oil company,
and they will form a joint venture
in order to benefit the people of Malaysia.
The idea behind the joint venture
is that 1MDB shows up with the money, the investment,
and PetroSaudi has the assets, the oil fields.
Rewcastle Brown: So, Jho Low called a meeting
of the board of 1MDB to discuss this plan
to invest in a joint venture with PetroSaudi.
Najib said, "I want this speeded through as quickly as possible
and do what Jho Low tells you."
If you have a country
that is so centralized, so authoritarian,
then, you know, all that matters
is what the big boss guy says.
So they set up this first joint venture of 1MDB
with this Saudi, royally connected company
as a government-to-government enterprise,
and that was going to invest in oil
to make profits for Malaysia.
The thing that’s important to remember here is that 1MDB
was really being run by two men,
Prime Minister Najib and Jho Low.
Goldberg: Alright. The deal’s been done,
and now it’s time to celebrate.
At this point, Jho Low is spending money
like it really, truly grows on trees.
Jho Low wasn’t just providing these lavish parties
for whoever was at the club.
He was also inviting celebrities
and paying them tens of thousands of dollars
in appearance fees.
And some of those celebrities
are renowned party girls like Paris Hilton.
Mozingo: People were writing articles
about these mind-boggling extravaganzas
that Jho Low was putting on.
People can get addicted to the flashy Vegas lifestyle.
Spending money, getting all that attention from people,
it’s very addictive.
As a lot of you in this room know,
I like to plan my evenings
and make sure that I always go to the best parties.
Marell: They would actually bring him the microphone
from the sound booth that the DJ would use,
and they would give him the microphone
and he would order for the whole club.
I mean, there was 140 tables at the place.
Low: 50 bottles of Cristal!
Jarvis: Jho Low is spending absurd amounts of money
and partying with the who’s who of Hollywood,
and people think it’s a little weird.
But you have to remember the time.
We’re just coming out of a gigantic recession.
So while people have questions,
there’s a lot of also looking the other way.
This guy is going to spend money with your business?
Just take it.
Goldberg: Jho Low is having an epic time raising his profile.
And while the party circuit
isn’t asking any questions about the money...
one person is.
It looked like the money had gone into PetroSaudi
and disappeared.
That was the big mystery.
You know, why wasn’t the money
going into the official joint venture account?
And so I started looking at that.
I needed to keep probing and keep asking questions.
I was absolutely determined to get to the bottom of it.
♪
Goldberg: After the PetroSaudi deal,
Jho Low emerges from a cloud of champagne and cologne
and jumps straight into 1MDB’s second big deal.
This time, it’s green power plants in Malaysia.
For 1MDB’s second joint venture,
Jho Low really pulled from the same playbook.
He went to an Abu Dhabi power company
where he had several high-profile connections.
They were going to bring power plants to Malaysia
and create more economic development and more jobs.
Goldberg: Expensive projects help build up Malaysia’s economy,
and that means one thing -- they need more money.
Well, luckily, investment bankers
have been to a few of Jho Low’s parties.
[ Chuckling ] Go figure.
So Jho Low turns to his new friend at Goldman Sachs,
Tim Leissner.
Cohan: Tim Leissner was a managing director at Goldman Sachs
and the chairman
of Goldman Sachs’ Southeast Asia division.
And this story is full of celebrity twists and turns.
Tim Leissner is married to Kimora Lee Simmons.
Goldberg: Kimora Lee Simmons is a model and TV personality.
Cute story here --
she met Tim on a 13-hour flight to Malaysia.
By the time they hit the tarmac, they were engaged.
So, yeah, Tim loves to make a deal.
Having Goldman involved was really important for Jho Low
because when Goldman goes out on global markets and says,
"Well, look, we’re involved with this attempt
to raise money for this fund,"
it just gives it a stamp of approval
of one of the world’s most powerful investment banks.
They said they were going to invest in power plants.
So they bought one power plant with some of the money,
and all the rest of the money disappeared.
I suspect, again, most of the money
was spirited away into an offshore account.
Goldberg: Yet again, a bunch of money has gone missing.
But not Jho Low.
He’s setting off fireworks in Vegas
that are impossible to miss.
Mozingo: Jho Low started coming to Las Vegas more frequently,
and every time he did,
it seemed like he was one-upping the last time that he was here.
Marell: One of the craziest times --
Around November 2012,
I think it was Jho Low’s 30th birthday party.
They built this stage on the Las Vegas Strip.
It had, like, a 24-foot ice bar.
There was a Ferris wheel,
and Paris Hilton is hanging out with him.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s there with him.
Britney Spears popped out of a cake
and sung him "Happy Birthday."
It’s insane, right?
♪
Jho Low wasn’t throwing your average parties.
We’re not talking about a hat with a strap, okay?
He’s poppin’ bottles, but not just for him --
for everyone in the establishment.
You get a bottle,
you get a bottle, you get a bottle!
And now somehow even more celebrities get involved.
Jho Low was hanging out with Miranda Kerr so often
and purchasing her jewelry and a crystal piano
that it became a rumor that perhaps they were dating.
Goldberg: Everything is turning up aces for Jho Low,
but back in Malaysia, not much is turning up at all.
♪
1MDB -- none of the things they’ve promised --
the build-out of oil fields or power plants --
none of it ever materializes.
Rewcastle Brown: Billions of dollars had been raised,
and no one knew where the money had gone.
And Najib wasn’t really bothering
to answer those questions.
So they decide to have a third bond.
And this one is for $3 billion
that they are going to raise supposedly with the objective
of developing a business district
in the center of Kuala Lumpur.
The Malaysian public are being told
that they are going to help put Malaysia on the map.
That was the narrative.
And my goodness --
within a week, Goldman Sachs has raised that $3 billion
through the usual back channels,
you know, all done undercover
just through their private customers.
And the money went into an offshore account.
Goldberg: This is around the time
"The Wolf of Wall Street" becomes a big hit,
and the spotlight is even brighter.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
Goldberg: That’s when Clare put two and two together.
So I wrote that article
about Wall Street greed and Malaysian money,
and I had had such interesting feedback
in the form of very angry legal letters
threatening to destroy me financially,
alleging that, you know, this was totally untrue
and I should remove everything I had written
and stop asking these questions.
There were multiple attempts to defame me
and numerous other attempts on my security.
And such a kind of defensive response told me
that I was standing on, you know, sore feet.
I jumped on a plane to Los Angeles
and uncovered some really interesting information.
I started talking to a number of people in the film industry,
and they were able to explain to me how very unusual
the way that the movie gave a full-screen credit to Jho Low.
And, you know, you can only come to one conclusion, really,
which was that this was financial support.
And just constantly asking the question,
where has this money come?
Oh, and where has 1MDB’s money gone, by the way?
Come August of 2014,
Riza Aziz and his production company, Red Granite,
decided they were going to have to come out
with some kind of story because my articles
had caused them a lot of problems and questions.
Cohan: When Red Granite Films was asked
what the source of their financing was
for "The Wolf of Wall Street,"
the film company told The New York Times
that the source of the financing
and the funds for the film was all legitimate.
So, when someone starts changing their story,
you know you’ve got them on the run.
What I knew was that 1MDB
put on the spot
the most powerful man in Malaysia and his government.
This was his personal project,
and I was beginning to show how it had been corrupted.
So I found myself sucked into a country’s drama
as a prime minister tried to get out of the corner
that this story had put him into.
So I just kept unraveling bit by bit
the contradictions, the changing stories.
And it was towards the end of 2014
that I located the inside source
who was going to give me the first real information
about what had happened at 1MDB.
Goldberg: Clare had begun exposing 1MDB
and dodging the threats that came with it,
but she was determined to answer the billion-dollar question --
how did they pull off what could be the biggest heist in history?
Rewcastle Brown: Now I needed to find evidence
that answered the questions.
So I would always take every opportunity
to ask people from Malaysia
who might have inside information.
"Did you -- Have you any more on this 1MDB?"
And on one occasion,
I asked that of an opposition aide.
We were having some noodles
in a Malaysian restaurant in London.
And he said, "Oh, well, funny you should ask me that."
He said, "I’ve been approached by someone
who says they’ve got the inside information
on the PetroSaudi deal with 1MDB.
He can prove that the money was all stolen.
It could bring down the Prime Minister."
[ Indistinct shouting ]
"He’s given me a document. It’s on my phone," he said.
"Shall I send it to you?"
And I said -- [Panting] "Yes!"
It was kind of like a page of riddles
with little snippets of e-mails,
addresses, names sprinkled about.
And frankly, I can’t think of anyone else but me
who would have looked at that document
and said, "I know that’s genuine."
So I decided to contact the person
who had sent out this taster document,
and we agreed to meet in Thailand.
By the time I arrived to Thailand,
I was a bit nervous,
so we met in the foyer
of a five-star hotel in the middle of Bangkok,
and I realized that I was talking
to a genuine whistleblower.
♪
Goldberg: The whistleblower uncovers more and more numbers
that don’t add up at PetroSaudi.
So he decides to leave.
♪
I’m sitting in a room looking at PetroSaudi’s server
and looking at some of the bank payments that he’s showing me.
And one of the documents comes up,
and it’s kind of, like,
payment from 1MDB to Good Star Limited --
seven and then just, like, all these zeroes.
[ Printer whirring ]
$700 million in one single bank transfer
to a company called Good Star?
I said, "What’s this Good Star?
Why is that on PetroSaudi’s database?"
And he turned to me, he said,
"Oh, that guy Jho Low owns Good Star."
Goldberg: Good Star? Jho Low better get a good lawyer.
Clare just found hard evidence
that he’s laundering money through shell companies.
Cohan: Such brazen thievery.
Such brazen bribery.
That’s pretty unusual, I have to say.
Traditionally, when you’re talking about
this kind of money,
you have checks and balances in place.
But in the case of 1MDB,
a lot of those checks and balances
all went back to the same person -- Jho Low.
And all this money was divided up
between these party boys from the Gulf at PetroSaudi
and the party boys from 1MDB, Jho Low and his pals.
You know, he was traveling around the world.
He was popping up on superyachts.
He was taking parties to the Brazil World Cup.
In fact, some of the better headlines described him
as the Malaysian man of mystery because, you know,
he couldn’t account for all this spending that he was doing.
And finally, the dots were joining up
because the whistleblower
gave me the copy of the material.
So before, I had valid questions.
Now I had solid evidence.
♪
Look, as a journalist, you need evidence.
There’s no story without a smoking gun,
and that’s what this is.
This hard drive with hundreds of thousands of messages on it
is really the break that Clare needs to report out this story
and get the authorities involved.
Goldberg: Armed with new evidence, Clare was ready
to blow the lid off this story once again.
I went back with this hot disc,
and I contacted The Sunday Times,
and they were really interested in this story.
And the narrative was that Jho Low was behind the heist.
♪
In 2015, Clare Rewcastle Brown
breaks the story about Jho Low.
And this is the beginning of the end for this party boy.
Rewcastle Brown: And all this money, of course,
had gone through the United States
in the U. S. dollar.
So I contacted the FBI...
and they were interested.
♪
McMurry: I spent 24 years in the FBI.
I spent the majority of my career
working international organized crime,
money laundering investigations,
and international corruption issues.
In 2015, the FBI, in partnership with the Department of Justice,
had decided to form specific squads
to investigate what is referred to as kleptocracy.
Kleptocracy is essentially a term
that’s used for individuals
who take advantage of their position of power,
whether it’s in the government or through political contacts,
to enrich themselves at the cost and expense
of the citizens of the country that they’re in.
We were starting off by going through this backlog of cases,
and there was substantial cases that needed to be investigated.
And we started hearing media reports about 1MDB
and this scandal in Malaysia.
And the thing that immediately caught our eye
was what seemed to be clear connections to the United States
and the fact that the proceeds from this alleged embezzlement
were actually spent in the United States
and had been funneled into the United States.
Sproule: My name is Christen Sproule,
and I was an assistant United States attorney
for the U. S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.
Jho Low is a con man and was able to pull off
the largest, most expensive fraud of all time.
What’s interesting about this case
is that, at base, the scheme was simple.
The first heist was to steal the money
that was already in the 1MDB fund.
The second and third heists
were money that was raised by issuing bonds.
And then once the money came into the fund,
it was then diverted to shell companies.
It can be easier to steal a billion dollars
than it is to rob a 7-Eleven.
Goldberg: Just like that, Jho Low’s house of cards
started to tumble.
What about all those cool diamonds?
Well, it turned out they were hot,
and the FBI was comin’ to collect.
Goldberg: After five years of the high life,
Jho Low has made a big name for himself,
and it even made the big screen.
But it’s also making the rounds at the FBI.
In 2015, when the FBI and the Department of Justice
officially opened an investigation into 1MDB,
the criminal conduct had been going on for a number of years.
We started taking a deep look at Jho Low as the main suspect.
But it’s crystal clear with this case
and any of these kleptocracy cases is,
none of this can happen
without really powerful people being complicit.
Sproule: We began with a civil asset forfeiture
because we knew we could trace dirty money into the assets.
That is easier in this case to do
than to get enough evidence to prove that Jho Low was guilty.
Jho Low learning about the DOJ’s investigation was a concern,
so we did attempt to gather our information
as discreetly as possible
to protect the assets and the evidence.
At this point, Jho Low is in a fraud party fugue.
Everyone’s asking questions.
The walls are starting to cave in.
But if you were to see Jho Low, you would think
that it’s just good times that are gonna keep rollin’.
[ Lively orchestra plays ]
Jho Low would try to keep his name out of the press,
but by throwing all these parties
and spending all this money,
he just attracted that attention,
which upset his co-conspirators because it was
drawing unnecessary attention to the scheme,
and people started asking questions
where all this money was coming from.
And it was because Jho Low was throwing it around
like it was Monopoly money.
Goldberg: But the FBI was not playing games.
They were collecting evidence and following the money
so they could send Jho Low directly to jail.
Everyone in Jho Low’s circle is living incredibly large.
Sproule: Through our investigation, we discovered
Joe Lo purchased
incredibly expensive real estate,
homes in Los Angeles,
a $40-million house in Beverly Hills.
He buys Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s house
in Time Warner Center in New York City.
He purchased a hotel at one point.
He purchased a Bombardier jet. He purchased a yacht.
He starts buying artwork.
Sproule: Monets and "Dustheads" by Basquiat.
Sold at $43,500,000!
He purchased millions of dollars in jewelry for Miranda Kerr.
And each one of those transactions
is the crime of money laundering.
Goldberg: The FBI now has enough evidence
that Jho Low has laundered money
and violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Jarvis: In June of 2017,
the DOJ announces the U.S. is seeking the forfeiture
of more than a billion dollars in assets
misappropriated from 1MDB.
The 1MDB fund held tremendous promise
for the Malaysian people.
A number of corrupt 1MDB officials
treated this public trust as a personal bank account.
At this point, the FBI turned into the repo man.
They came for every single gift
that Jho Low had gifted all of these celebrities.
Goldberg: When Jho Low’s celebrity pals
found out their friendship
had been bought with stolen cash,
they were all too happy to cooperate.
The DOJ went knocking
on Leonardo DiCaprio and Miranda Kerr’s doors,
asking for their gifts back.
Miranda Kerr had to give back her jewelry.
She agreed to cooperate.
But we couldn’t physically seize
the crystal piano he purchased for Miranda Kerr
because Miranda Kerr had glass walls built around the piano.
So I believe she still has that piano.
So, one of the assets DOJ seized
were the rights to the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street."
And it’s actually the first time in history that we knew of
that anyone had ever seized
intellectual property rights to a movie.
And I actually remember one of the FBI agents asked me,
"How are we going to do this?"
And I -- I actually said,
"We’re just gonna [bleep] do it."
[ Chuckles ] That’s what I said. Um...
Goldberg: Isn’t it just sweet justice
that the FBI seized the profits from a movie
about a corrupt money launderer brought down by the FBI?
It was important to us to seize these assets
because we wanted to get as much money as we could
back to the citizens of Malaysia.
They make on average $500 a month.
These are very poor people.
And so it was always on my mind.
These were people who were going to be saddled with this debt
for -- you know, for years to come.
So we were putting together a criminal case
against not only Jho Low,
but also Tim Leissner, who was a Goldman Sachs banker.
What we were able to find out
during the course of our investigation is
in order for Tim Leissner and Goldman Sachs
to win the rights to raise that capital for 1MDB,
they had paid bribes to essentially people
on the 1MDB board to win that work.
And when an individual or an entity lies in an e-mail
about the nature of a transaction
such as the one that 1MDB was involved in,
that’s a crime.
So now we had a series of crimes
that we could charge individuals with.
Goldberg: Jho Low catches wind that the feds are onto him,
and he quickly goes to ground.
For the first time in a very long time,
Jho Low doesn’t want to get his photo taken.
So at this point, Jho Low decides to pick up and go.
Sproule: We didn’t know where Jho Low was.
At that point, he may pop up in certain places
and we could track his yacht,
but we didn’t know if he was on that yacht.
Is he gonna get away? Who knows?
♪
Goldberg: Finally, the massive 1MDB con is crumbling.
Assets are being seized, charges are being filed,
but the FBI cannot seem to find Jho Low.
Nowhere. Nowhere.
Rewcastle Brown: Jho Low is the ultimate con man.
He lied, he deceived,
and he left Malaysia with humongous debts.
All the people who took the money,
who turned a blind eye,
they deserve to be named and shamed for what they did.
McMurry: We developed enough evidence
where we charged Tim Leissner.
He was instrumental in securing this work for Goldman Sachs
and ensuring that they won the right to raise this capital
for 1MDB through paying bribes.
Tim Leissner directly benefited from those bribes.
Goldman Sachs as an institution benefited from those bribes
to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Tim Leissner pled guilty. He is still awaiting sentencing.
Jarvis: Goldman Sachs settles with the Malaysian authorities
for $3.9 billion in July of 2020.
McMurry: According to Tim Leissner,
Jho Low was the mastermind of the scheme,
but it certainly took multiple people,
including the Prime Minister of Malaysia,
to actually make the scheme work.
Reporter: Can I ask you, sir, why you haven’t resigned
over involvement in a corruption scandal
of global proportions, sir?!
Rewcastle Brown: When this all blew up,
it created a massive political upheaval in Malaysia.
As the Feds were closing in on Jho Low
and all of his accomplices in the U. S.,
Najib, the Prime Minister of Malaysia at the time,
was ousted from his position.
Goldberg: Najib was then put on trial
for embezzling $9.9 million,
a mere fraction of the total amount that disappeared.
Cohan: Najib Razak was convicted,
is out on bail while he’s appealing his sentence,
but it seems unlikely
that he will be victorious in that appeal.
Riza Aziz, who was the producer of "Wolf of Wall Street,"
returned to Malaysia,
but the charges against him were dropped.
Red Granite Pictures made a deal with the U. S. Justice Department
and had to give up $60 million of profits from the movie.
♪
Putting someone in jail, into prison,
you know, only does so much.
It’s taking the profit out of the crime
and often returning those funds to the crime victims
that I think is the true justice.
I mean, that’s the only real way to make someone whole again
or at least partly whole again.
The Malaysian citizens were the victims of Jho Low’s crime.
They had the economic stability and prosperity of their country
and their children’s futures stolen by Jho Low
and spent at, you know, parties in Las Vegas.
Marell: When he stopped coming in
and we learned that all of the money he was spending
was stolen --
He probably spent, you know,
$10 million in Vegas in a couple years.
Sometimes I would think about
how the money that was being spent in Vegas
could help, you know, the less fortunate.
♪
This is one of the biggest financial frauds of all time.
Jarvis: The real victims in this story
are the people of Malaysia,
people who thought they were getting a better future.
To provide people with that kind of hope
and then to just steal it away,
what kind of person would do that?
McMurry: The public officials that were supposed to serve them
decided to steal this money
rather than use it for what it was intended for.
And the impacts can be felt for generations.
The power plants and the railroad stations
that were never built,
things that would have changed people’s lives,
given them opportunities that now they won’t have.
Jho Low has now been on the run for years
with this investigation still ongoing.
And it really begs the question...
could he get away with this?
Sproule: Jho Low is in the wind.
There are rumors that Jho Low is in Shanghai.
There are also rumors that he continues to party.
He’s clearly found a country that’s willing to harbor him.
Cohan: Jho Low, he’s effectively nowhere to be seen.
He’s become sort of a "Where’s Waldo?" character.
Where in the world is Jho Low?
McMurry: If Jho Low remains a fugitive --
I believe he’s still in his 30s. He’s a young man.
And he’s got a long way to go.
He’s doomed to an existence
where he’s going to always be looking over his shoulder
because the United States will never stop looking for him.
He’s going to get caught.
He’ll be arrested.
Goldberg: You hear that, Jho Low?
We’re comin’ for you.
♪