Episode 4: Backbearings

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Previously on hot money.

Very fast, actually, he started then talking about his experience in Syria, facilitated by the boys just after the recapture of the city of Panyra from ISIS.

When he said with the boys, what did you say?

He basically said with the Russians.

So, is it that one?

It's that one on the left, those two great big gates there.

It's fucking massive.

Uh yeah, so we're stood outside Prinzke Gedenstrasse.

Well, the house on Krinzkeenstrasse belongs to Jan Marselek.

It's tall, it's snowing slowly through trees without leaves.

There's a very high fence, which is like a wrought iron fence that's thickly covered with ivy.

In February, my producer Peggy and I went to Jan Marcelek's former residence in Munich, a place he'd kept almost entirely secret.

It's where he ran his shadow life, his extracurricular world outside of Weircart, 61 Prince Rikentenstrasse.

Marseillek rented it for 680,000 euros a year.

Here he was occupying one of the grandest residential buildings

in Munich, which is the wealthiest city in Germany and therefore possibly one of the wealthiest cities in all of Europe.

From the moment I first became drawn into Jan Marslek's world, there's been this huge paradox.

And coming back to Munich, I'm hit by it full force.

We're on a street, he's opposite the Russian consulate, and down the road are various embassies and other grand residences.

And I suppose, insofar as you would assume that one of the prime objectives of most people working in intelligence is discretion and to remain hidden, then one wonders why he chose here.

A villa opposite the Russian consulate, giving Paul those Novichok documents, boasting about your relationships with Russian mercenaries.

How can you function as a spy, a good spy, if you're compelled to drop hints about being one all the time?

I don't know, it's a kind of almost like a

Sharon Stone moment from Basic Instinct, you know, the plot of Basic Instinct where she murders her husband, but that's also the plot of of the book she's written, so it couldn't possibly be true.

One of my favorite books about espionage is John LeCare's The Honourable Schoolboy.

MI6, aka The Circus, pick up clues about Russian master spy Carla by looking back in time.

Through looking more closely at how they were misled, at the wreckage, the circus find the traces of something, a thread on which to pull.

Bakare calls it taking back bearings, and it feels to me like we need to do something similar.

So far, I've heard about three radically different Jan Marceleks.

The corporate high flyer, the fraudster, and now the Russian agent.

And yet, even with that, I have very little sense of who Jan Marcelek really is behind these identities.

What makes up the the substance of his character?

What motivates him?

Motive, I think, is the holy grail in this story, not only for what it reveals about one man psychologically, but also what it might help us glimpse about a whole worldview and those who pursue it.

And so, in this episode, I track down people who knew Marcelk well, worked with him closely, grew up with him in his hometown,

all to gather clues.

My name is Sam Jones.

From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money Season 3 Agent of Chaos Episode 4 Back Bearings

Jan Marcelek vanished five years ago, after Warcard was exposed as a massive fraud.

He hasn't been seen in public since, at least not under his real name.

At first, everyone thought Marcellek had gone to the Philippines.

He told colleagues he was going to find Warcard's missing billions.

But then the trail in Manila went cold.

People wondered whether he'd absconded to China.

Rumours swirled about his connections to Germany's intelligence services.

to the Austrians, to Israel.

Perhaps he'd been taken into protective custody.

But these were all trails that Marcelec himself had quite deliberately left behind.

In reality, he'd taken a car over the Alps to a village outside Vienna.

Travel records show he'd hopped on a plane to Minsk, and from there had gone on to Moscow.

But even the people close to him didn't know where he ended up.

They were left to figure things out for themselves.

Just talk us through when you then go into Prince Regenstrasse.

What was it like inside and what was going through your head?

I was scared like to hell.

I haven't told my wife.

I've told other people that I'm going there, where I am.

It's two months after Jan Maslek's disappearance, and this man, we're going to call him Mr.

Samt, has gained access to his house.

I had a phone in my socks.

I did not know what to expect.

Mr.

Samt has asked that we don't reveal his real name as a condition of speaking with us, for professional reasons.

What I can tell you is that he's a high-level PR consultant hired by companies when they're in crisis.

Samt in German means velvet.

It's the alias he has chosen for himself.

That day, Samt is with an ex-business partner of Marcelix who knew about this place, who was in fact a regular visitor.

They snuck into the house because well they both have questions i mean who doesn't

so and we walked around and

unbelievable

you walk around and you see a parallel world yeah this room is soundproof this room is got searched every other week by a specialist for microphones and surveillance stuff and

you you walk around and wow and then you see his bedroom which was a black and white painted room like a zebra

with a mattress on the floor and

black and white

bed sheets not like a cozy bedroom

the house is almost entirely empty which is strange Because when Marcelek fled, all he had with him were two pieces of luggage.

Someone must have cleared the house out afterwards.

There are just a few striking artifacts left behind.

I was impressed by his medical cabinet.

It was a normal door.

Behind the door was

40 centimeters deep in shelves full of medical stuff.

And because we were in COVID at that time,

Everything to fight a virus was there.

This is a sedative, this is

virus,

this is the flu, and one was for diabetes.

It sounds to me like the private stash of someone who never wanted to depend on public health care services, or perhaps someone who never wanted to have to take out a prescription in his own name.

There are bottles and bottles of Russian medicines.

Samp's heart is still racing, and he's scared for a reason.

As he looks out the window from the room he was told was Marcelek's office, there, directly opposite the house, is the Russian consulate.

And he's thinking, Jesus, could there even be a tunnel between these buildings?

Apart from Killian Kleinschmidt, who you heard from in the last episode, Samt is the only person I've met who's been inside the Prince Rikenstrasse house.

He knew Jan Marcelek for about 18 months.

But he knew him very well.

Or at least he knew one side of him.

And he knew him under pressure.

I'm hired sometimes when there's something smelly going on and how to

not avoid, but

how to go through with it and don't have too much damage.

Warcard hired Samt in 2019, when my FT colleagues Dan and Paul were beginning to reveal to the world that the company was a fraud, within days of joining, Samt began working closely with Jan Marcelek.

Samt prides himself on his ability to read people, to watch them, and to a certain extent, to be immune to their charms.

Can you describe him for us?

I

noticed his friendliness.

Do you want to drink something?

And I said, Yeah, I'll grab a coke.

Oh, no, please allow me to give you a Coke.

And in very formal, polite German

Bitter duge Stadtes doch das ich der ane kohler gebe.

So please you

almost elaborate.

With your kind indulgence, you allow me to hand you a coke.

You know those head waiters in Austrian restaurants?

Yeah, Herr Ober, Herr Oberkel.

So to me it was the behavior of a head waiter.

When I think of an Austrian Oberkelne, I have a specific thing in mind, formal, sometimes stiffly so, maybe even outwardly obsequious,

but people totally in control of their own worlds.

In a Viennese café house, you are the guest of the head waiter.

Samt soon found himself getting close to Marcelek.

He noticed his quirks.

Marcelec ate chocolate constantly.

He kept a big box of lint carré, little individually wrapped chocolate squares, in his office.

The bin was always full of wrappers.

And Samt, he would often bring him chocolate or sweets.

On those visits, Samt clocks the curious collection of objects in Marcellek's office, like a life-size Donald Trump cardboard cutout, for example.

One day, he asked another senior wire card executive, Do you know about this

life-size Trump figure in the office and his

marshal's office and his altar of Russian officers' caps.

Like Ushanka, kind of.

Yeah,

those heads.

The executive replies.

Yeah, I didn't know.

I've never been in this office, actually.

He also noticed that while so much of Marcelek's world at work seemed neat, precise,

there was also chaos kind of hidden away.

He put all the dirty

cappuccino and all the dirty china.

He put it in the cupboard in his conference room.

Not just a few cups, weeks and weeks and weeks worth of cups.

Because he didn't want to see it, he didn't want to see the mess.

Yes, and it was summer, so that was a biotope after a while.

And

the cleaning woman found it by accident because they were missing so much china.

And he just put it

messy-like in this cupboard, and in the back it was already growing.

There were also times when Samt would catch glimpses of Marcellek's personal life.

Like one night when it was quite late, and Marcellek had kept him waiting for a long time.

So long that Sampt had had time to go out to a nearby toy shop and buy him a present, a Lego Batmobile.

I'd like to play built Lego, who who does not.

And so I bought it and gave it to him as a gift and said, here, that reminds me of you.

And he looked, oh, Batman.

I said, no, the Joker.

Marcelek brushes off the jibe and eagerly opens the box.

He started building.

And during that building, he received like...

15, 10, 15 phone calls from his girlfriend and his father who were in town and who were waiting for him for dinner.

But he didn't want to go.

He was sitting there with me.

We were talking business and he was building this bat mobiles.

And then he said, yeah, I'll come later and I'll join you later.

And we were sitting there.

I was sitting on one end of the conference table.

He was sitting on the other end.

We were rolling the car.

But he clearly didn't want to go and spend time.

He clearly didn't want to go.

And I had the feeling that it was a difficult relationship.

And then there was the money i remember one time we went into a restaurant here in munich and i had a cappacho real cauliflower two or three coke zero

and so my bill was less than 50 euros probably

the whole bill was 700 something

masterleg started with cavia he had all the classic oyster whatever beefsteak fiorentina and this bottle of sparkling wine.

And it was a 720 euro bill and he gave 900.

He tried to be humble or to give the picture of being a humble person devoted to his job.

On the other hand, paying everything cash and living a life that is in the

high 1% of Munich.

Where does the money come from?

That was something that I always was questioning myself.

Possibly, thought Samt, the early days of WireCard had seen the company pay its executives huge bonuses before it listed.

But even that didn't quite account for Marcelek's apparent wealth, because it wasn't just flashy dinners.

He was invested with seven million into Telegram.

The messaging app, founded in Russia.

Marcelek was an early shareholder.

But when you only make a million before tax at Wirecard,

you have to work 15 years

and eat ravioli from cans and live in a very reduced lifestyle

to save up the money to invest like that in one single direct investment.

And of course, Samt didn't even know at this point about the palatial property on Prince Rigentenstrasse.

That he found out two months later, after Wirecard blew up, even though they would often meet at a restaurant restaurant very close by.

I

could have beaten myself.

There's Kiefer at the restaurant here in Munich and we met very often at the Kiefer restaurant.

And his secret office was like 500 meters or less than 500 meters down the road.

After the day he'd poked around the villa, Samt realizes that really, whatever he thought he confidently knew about Jan Marcelek is barely anything substantial at all, and that in the 18 months they worked together, Marcelec's entire persona at WireCard was effectively a lie.

I needed to talk to someone who'd known him for longer than Samt.

That's coming up after the break.

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Martin Ostelo first met Jan Marcelek when he joined Warcard almost 16 years ago.

Young guy.

At the time he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

Had a impressive charisma about him, but you never would have thought that this guy would be

managing the whole company very quickly at the time.

Back then, in 2005, Marcelek was just 25.

He hadn't been to university, he hadn't even finished school.

After joining the company five years earlier in 2000, he'd been quickly promoted.

And by the time Martin arrived at Warcard, Marcelek was head of I.T.

Rhetorically, I already realized at that stage that that he was very, very good.

He was like a Hoover.

He could take information extremely quickly and formulate a summary almost in a fashion where you would lick your lips.

You'd love to have that ability to quickly take something on board and be able to express it in a form that seemed, on the one hand, smart, but still very, very understandable for a broad audience.

Martin says that Jan worked his way up the company by bringing order and structure to what was otherwise a chaotic, fast-growing startup.

If you were the type of guy or girl to say, there is no structure to this, I can't do this, you were out of the door very, very quickly.

If you went in and said, I can't do this yet, how do I do it?

Take ownership and do it yourself.

Those people excelled at WireCard in the early days.

That's why probably

Jan Masalik had an easy to climb ladder, because he was a doer.

And one thing he was particularly good at was charming people.

Sometimes it almost seemed like he was setting himself a challenge to win someone to his side by doing something like deliberately turning up late.

We had CEOs of very important companies and he would just come 20 minutes late and still charm this individual that they seemed like the best friends afterwards, where you would think that would be inexcusable, but Jan had the ability to turn things around.

I think there really

are traits that I have had strong envy for, but I envied Jan so much because it seemed so damn simple for him.

He really mastered giving you the feeling that you're important despite the fact that you could figure out over many, many years that it was a routine.

With his people skills, Jan was a good manager.

He became Martin's boss.

And as you can hear, Martin really liked him.

Jan

had a broad spectrum of friendly,

formally friendly.

So when, for example, when you went to Jan and said, do you have a minute or do you have a second?

He would always say, for you, always.

Which wasn't to say he didn't have edges.

I did have the feeling that

he liked people or didn't like people.

In occasions when people got on his bad side or showed him that they didn't like him,

he could be extremely

ruthless is the only word I find.

Over time, Martin noticed that to get on with him, you needed ultimately not to take things too seriously.

Marcelec liked to test people to see if they could hold their own against him.

He did

say things to shock and provoke people here and there.

He had a Wiener Schmeid,

sort of the Vienna joking

playfulness.

So he could get away with murder saying certain things.

And

you also have to understand that he was in a circle of management where

making politically incorrect jokes was

in fashion.

I think Jan he'd enjoy walking on a ledge and some people falling down.

So, by the early 2010s, Jan Masalek is a hugely successful young corporate executive.

He's basically the man running this fast-growing German company, which is on its way to a main market listing.

He's a bit of a maverick and prefers action over rules.

But whatever is striking or unusual about Yan, it tends to get masked by the fact that Warcard is also an unusual company.

It primarily processed payments for high-risk industries, the businesses other payment processing companies and banks were hesitant to get wrapped up in, like gaming, gambling, and porn, although WarCard had a different way of describing that.

Idult content or emotional content, as we would call it.

And over the coming years, Warcard's appetite for risk also took it to countries where the rules of business were more ambiguous.

I had heard before that he had several trips to Russia.

When would that have been?

That was four or five years, maybe

three to five years before Wirecard collapsed.

So, sort of 2015, 2014, 15, 16, around that.

A bit later.

Yeah, yeah, 15, 16, yeah.

But of course, we did build up Wirecard Russia in that time as well, so

it

wasn't so surprising.

Just weeks before Wirecard collapse, something surprising did happen, and it chilled Martin.

Marcelek wanted to invest money in a new company that was issuing credit cards.

He needed the board's approval.

Martin and another colleague had run the numbers numbers on this company, and they knew this investment was a bad idea.

Right ahead of the crucial board meeting, they told Marcellek that explicitly.

They gave him the figures on the returns Wirecard could expect.

Martin remembers specifically what he said.

Long term, the card project, over the next decade, if it runs a decade, then it would potentially cover 1.25 million.

Jan took it all on board.

There's no way he didn't know the numbers, Martin says.

Jan was very, very quick in understanding.

And an hour later, we are sitting in the meeting, and

he simply ignored what we said.

He said, the card project alone in the first year will cover the 1.5 million.

With you in the room.

With us in the video conference.

So he just ignored.

what we had discussed.

It's a very curious kind of game.

You know, you're watching him do this, and obviously it's clear, based on everything you understand about him until now, that he, you know, is not stupid.

He didn't mishear you.

He didn't, you know, didn't lose the facts.

We were flabbergasted.

We were

speechless.

It had never happened like that.

I mean, we were all important people in the company.

It was like a punch in the face.

What really comes across as Martin recounts this is just how effortlessly and easily Marcellek lied, how confidently.

It's like he knew he had Martin and his colleague under his thumb and they wouldn't raise an objection.

And I think that's what made it so shocking for Martin, because it obviously raised the question, what else had Marcellek lied so bloodlessly about?

To day I think Martin is actually quite bemused by everything that has happened.

He tells me that part of the reason he decided to talk to me is that it's a kind of coping mechanism, which I think hints at how deeply the whole experience has affected him.

The collapse of Wirecard and the revelations that Marsalek was a spy, they don't anger him.

They sadden him.

I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Marsalek is

he probably could have earned millions, gazillions, with his charm and his wit and his business acumen and his skills that he didn't need to be

what he turned out to be.

That is really something that most people who worked at WarCard or witnessed him when discussing it afterwards, we all come to that point.

When Marcelek's fraud at Warcard was discovered, the company's stock went to zero and Martin's life savings were basically wiped out.

For me, the remarkable thing is that despite that, Martin evidently still holds quite a lot of affection for his former boss.

I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?

And

how much of it was an act?

How much was genius?

How much was in between?

How much was learned?

How much was instinctive?

All these questions I really can't answer.

I also ask myself when Jan wakes up in the morning, what he thinks now of all the contacts, of all the employees.

Was that all just a lie?

At what stage was it a lie?

What was the turning point?

If it was possible to wave a magic wand or whatever, could you imagine going for a drink with him or dinner with him now?

And

actually,

I think I would love to do that.

Actually,

I have thought about getting into Moscow and seeing if I could organize it.

I was thinking

one could try that.

Why haven't you?

I mean the honest truth is

would you have the balls to actually go to Moscow and

feel that you're not endangering yourself and your family?

That probably

if I had a guarantee that I would not be touched, I'd love to get his side on this.

Martin says he feels certain there must have been a point where something in Marcelek's life went quite wrong to set him on the path he took.

But when he thinks back, he really can't say exactly when that might have been.

Martin realizes that Marcelek could talk, he could charm, he could hold court, he could make you feel like you were his close friend.

But actually, he almost never revealed anything about his life directly at all.

What he did at home or where he had come from.

His whole youth is a complete blank.

He never spoke of that, nor did he speak of Vienna in his youth,

which is quite remarkable because, I mean,

I would have felt like I'd had a lot of personal talks with him, but only later did I realize

he said a lot, but he didn't really give an insight of his past at all.

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And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

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A few months ago, I travelled to a small Austrian town called Kloster Neuburg.

It's just outside Vienna.

Kloster Neuburg is dominated by a huge monastery on a hill at its center.

It's home to about 28,000 people.

And it's the place where Jan Marcelek grew up.

In the town hall café, I meet up with four people who knew Jan as a child.

Rudolf Koch rustles up some Velingete, black coffees.

He used to be the headmaster of the local secondary school, Marcelec's school, and he's brought along another teacher, Bruno, and two of Marcelec's classmates, Verena and Philip.

We all sit down around the table together.

I hope they might be able to tell me something about Jan Marcelek before Wirecard, about the experiences that formed him as an adult.

This is the first time that Philip, Rudolph, and Bruno have spoken to the press about Marcelec.

When Wirecard went down and Marcelek went on the run, it was a shock.

Top ten wild-collar crime of this century.

As Philip runs down the list of Jan's exploits, he says it sounds like a bad James Bond plot.

Rudolph shows me and my producer Peggy an old school yearbook.

Oh wow.

Lots more hair.

In the picture, Jan is in the front row, crouched down, almost ready to spring up again.

He's looking directly at the camera, arm resting on one knee, fingers laced together.

There's maybe twenty other students in the class.

They all look like classic teenagers, awkward in their own bodies.

Jan, though, he looks very at ease.

It would of course be totally stupid stupid to expect to see signs of a criminal treasonous future in an old school photo.

But this...

this isn't exactly what I expected either.

I learned Jan actually began his schooling at a Lycée in Vienna, a French private school, before moving back to the local school in Kloster Neuburg when he was 12.

And because of his time at the Lycée, Jan was fluent in French.

Philip, his former classmate, remembers a time when their French class was being taught by a supply teacher, a sub, and Jan just stood up and said he was leaving.

The teacher was, of course, totally taken aback.

But when they tried to put him in his place, Jan answered with a five-minute monologue in flawless French.

Jan must have gone to the place he always went whenever he could skip a lesson.

In fact, where he went even in the minutes between lessons, to the library.

And that's where he got to know Bruno.

Bruno taught history, German, and philosophy, and he also looked after the school library.

Soon after Jan joined the school, the head of IT told Bruno that Marcelek was his star pupil and suggested he could help with the new computer system the library had got.

So Jan became Bruno's helper.

Bruno says that it couldn't have run smoothly without him.

In fact, when everyone here thinks of Jan back then, they picture him sat in front of the computer in the library.

He was obsessed with it, and with learning about this new thing called the internet.

Jan was certainly different from other 15-year-olds who were more likely to be skateboarding or playing football outside.

Philip says it was like they were all still children, and Jan was somehow not.

He seemed more like a fully grown adult already.

Verena says he was maybe aloof, but definitely not arrogant.

Yet other kids admired him.

And the teachers, well, the thing Philip remembers them saying is: be more like Jan.

I wonder if his teachers knew about his strategy to avoid washing his socks.

that one day Jan announced he had done a cost-benefit analysis and he would never wash a pair of socks again.

Calculating the value of his labour and time in washing, drying, and folding the socks, he'd decided it was cheaper just to take out a subscription and have new pairs constantly delivered.

It sounds almost like Jan enjoyed being unconventional, in making decisions, and crucially for me, telling people about those decisions, that seemed to expose or undermine the sense of what others thought of as being normal.

If Jan liked computers and enjoyed being atypical, he wasn't a loner, though, says Verena.

Far from it.

He had a wide group of friends, and she was part of it.

And yet she also remembers that Jan never socialized outside of school.

He never took friends home.

He had a very private side to his life.

Verena uses this German word Schreg to describe him, which you might say means askew, set at a different angle to the rest of the world.

Jan was a straight A student, but in his last year, two weeks before he was due to sit his final high school exams, he received a job offer from a tech company in Vienna.

He accepted, and he told his schoolmates he was leaving immediately.

He wasn't going to bother with the exams.

Everyone thinks he's daft,

leaving at the 11th hour.

You've got to have a lot of self-belief, or maybe self-delusion, to do something like that, aged 17.

Think back to how important exam results seemed to you at that age.

I can remember believing my whole future depended on them.

Rudolph jumps in to offer an explanation.

He says that the job offer was very, very lucrative.

But all four of them also suggest another possible reason why Jan was so keen to leave Kloster Neuburg.

I asked about Jan's family.

He has a younger sister and a brother, both of whom seem to lead perfectly ordinary lives.

No one really remembers anything about his father.

Either way, the father had left the family by the time Jan was going to the local school.

But everyone remembers his mother.

Rudolph, the headmaster, describes Marcelek's mother as combative.

But it's obvious from his body language and the way he raises his eyebrows as he carefully pronounces the word that he wants me to know it's a bit of a euphemism.

Verena agrees with Rudolph's assessment.

She now works for the town council and she knows Frau Maasleck as a conspicuous woman.

Verena says Jan's mother used to be regularly upset about one thing or another.

She campaigned against a 5G mask being put up in Klosteneuburg and against a development that would have threatened a nature reserve.

She says she's very left-wing.

Everyone thinks Jan had a hard time with his mother, that it was a difficult relationship.

To the point where Jan, he did whatever he could to get away from home.

I got in touch with Jan's mother, and to my surprise, she replied.

I got an email from her.

She said she has, quote, no interest in giving us an interview because she has neither the desire, nerves, or time to rake over, quote, an extremely unpleasant period of my life.

She has asked that we don't reveal her name here.

She said it's unfair to label her as combative and said it's a shame for her campaigning efforts in town to get dismissed as left-wing and disruptive.

She did say that her relationship with her son, quote, changed massively the year before he left home.

She says it broke down because she, quote, didn't let him get away with everything and, quote, didn't let him wrap me around his little finger.

She tried to involve a psychologist to mediate between them.

It It didn't work.

Jan, she implies, had his teachers charmed, but she was resistant.

Since then, she says she's only tried to make contact with her son once, in 25 years.

The emails she sent me had a whole load of attachments.

18 documents concerning all kinds of things to do with Jan.

Some are press releases from as far back as 2000, and they make me think that, despite their estrangement, she has been tracking her son's career.

She's read, it would seem, almost all of the books and materials that have been published about the War Card fraud.

A lot of the attachments she's sent me, though, are all about the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society, and she urges me to look more into it.

It's the organization in Vienna that War Card sponsored.

From Marcelek's mother's response, and from what we've heard from others, it's clear that she and her son had a deeply troubled and painful relationship.

Whatever happened when he left home, Verena says, seemed significant.

Because when she next saw Jan after the exams, he appeared to be a changed person.

It was at a reunion after everyone else had graduated.

They were around 19 years old.

She says he boasted that he now knew how the world worked.

That money could buy him whatever he wanted.

Even sex.

Even, he implied, sex with her.

Incredulous, she told him he was stupid.

When Verena told this story, everyone around the table seemed shocked.

It sounded so unlike the Jan they knew, like he'd somehow come off the rails a bit.

Before everyone gets up to leave, to pick up their children from nursery, to go back to work, Philip tells me why he agreed to speak with us.

He says he's speaking with us because he wants people to understand that Jan, though he had a difficult childhood, ended up where he did because he was vulnerable.

He wasn't destined to become a fugitive, and it's deeply sad that he did.

I've always believed that people are much more malleable things than we realize, capable of extremes.

We have a tendency to see those who end up at the fringes as somehow radically different to us.

Broken, evil.

The reality, though, is that with the right pressures, the right challenges, the right circumstances, or all the wrong ones, people can be walked into the strangest shapes and situations.

When you want to recruit someone as a spy, if you're good at it, you understand something of that.

You look for the parts of a person's life, their personality, their needs that you can work with, bend, change, use,

their history.

But not everyone with a difficult childhood becomes a spy.

So, how did Jan Marcellet get drawn into it?

Why did he end up working with the Russians?

And what did he actually do?

Coming up on hot money.

If Moscow decides, and it is always Moscow, who decides, if Moscow decides that this person can be and should be recruited,

then they work out ways of how to recruit this person.

This is a dangerous situation because those spies tend to be the better ones, better than the guys who do it solely for money.

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones.

The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton.

Our producer is Izzy Carter.

Our researcher is Maureen Saint.

Our show is edited by Karen Shikurchi.

Fact-checking by Kira Levine.

Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo d'Oliveira.

With additional sound design by Izzy Carter.

Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet.

Our show art is by Sean Carney.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines-McQuaid and Matthew Garahan.

Additional editing by Paul Murphy.

Special thanks to Rula Kalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackie, Manuele Saragossa, Nigel Hansen, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix, and Greta Cohn.

I'm Sam Jones.

This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.

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