Episode 4: Backbearings

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Speaker 9 Previously on hot money.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 13 When he said with the boys, what did you say?

Speaker 10 He basically said with the Russians.

Speaker 15 So, is it that one?

Speaker 13 It's that one on the left, those two great big gates there.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 There's a very high fence, which is like a wrought iron fence that's thickly covered with ivy.

Speaker 20 In February, my producer Peggy and I went to Jan Marcelek's former residence in Munich, a place he'd kept almost entirely secret.

Speaker 6 It's where he ran his shadow life, his extracurricular world outside of Weircart, 61 Prince Rikentenstrasse.

Speaker 21 Marseillek rented it for 680,000 euros a year.

Speaker 13 Here he was occupying one of the grandest residential buildings

Speaker 13 in Munich, which is the wealthiest city in Germany and therefore possibly one of the wealthiest cities in all of Europe.

Speaker 18 From the moment I first became drawn into Jan Marslek's world, there's been this huge paradox.

Speaker 28 And coming back to Munich, I'm hit by it full force.

Speaker 13 We're on a street, he's opposite the Russian consulate, and down the road are various embassies and other grand residences.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 29 A villa opposite the Russian consulate, giving Paul those Novichok documents, boasting about your relationships with Russian mercenaries.

Speaker 31 How can you function as a spy, a good spy, if you're compelled to drop hints about being one all the time?

Speaker 13 I don't know, it's a kind of almost like a

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 29 One of my favorite books about espionage is John LeCare's The Honourable Schoolboy.

Speaker 20 MI6, aka The Circus, pick up clues about Russian master spy Carla by looking back in time.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 36 Bakare calls it taking back bearings, and it feels to me like we need to do something similar.

Speaker 38 So far, I've heard about three radically different Jan Marceleks.

Speaker 20 The corporate high flyer, the fraudster, and now the Russian agent.

Speaker 40 And yet, even with that, I have very little sense of who Jan Marcelek really is behind these identities.

Speaker 34 What makes up the the substance of his character?

Speaker 26 What motivates him?

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 18 And so, in this episode, I track down people who knew Marcelk well, worked with him closely, grew up with him in his hometown,

Speaker 6 all to gather clues.

Speaker 21 My name is Sam Jones.

Speaker 30 From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money Season 3 Agent of Chaos Episode 4 Back Bearings

Speaker 25 Jan Marcelek vanished five years ago, after Warcard was exposed as a massive fraud.

Speaker 5 He hasn't been seen in public since, at least not under his real name.

Speaker 30 At first, everyone thought Marcellek had gone to the Philippines.

Speaker 19 He told colleagues he was going to find Warcard's missing billions.

Speaker 38 But then the trail in Manila went cold.

Speaker 42 People wondered whether he'd absconded to China.

Speaker 20 Rumours swirled about his connections to Germany's intelligence services.

Speaker 32 to the Austrians, to Israel.

Speaker 42 Perhaps he'd been taken into protective custody.

Speaker 35 But these were all trails that Marcelec himself had quite deliberately left behind.

Speaker 33 In reality, he'd taken a car over the Alps to a village outside Vienna.

Speaker 45 Travel records show he'd hopped on a plane to Minsk, and from there had gone on to Moscow.

Speaker 38 But even the people close to him didn't know where he ended up.

Speaker 16 They were left to figure things out for themselves.

Speaker 13 Just talk us through when you then go into Prince Regenstrasse.

Speaker 44 What was it like inside and what was going through your head?

Speaker 47 I was scared like to hell.

Speaker 6 I haven't told my wife.

Speaker 48 I've told other people that I'm going there, where I am.

Speaker 25 It's two months after Jan Maslek's disappearance, and this man, we're going to call him Mr.

Speaker 27 Samt, has gained access to his house.

Speaker 50 I had a phone in my socks.

Speaker 51 I did not know what to expect.

Speaker 30 Mr.

Speaker 42 Samt has asked that we don't reveal his real name as a condition of speaking with us, for professional reasons.

Speaker 25 What I can tell you is that he's a high-level PR consultant hired by companies when they're in crisis.

Speaker 42 Samt in German means velvet.

Speaker 33 It's the alias he has chosen for himself.

Speaker 32 That day, Samt is with an ex-business partner of Marcelix who knew about this place, who was in fact a regular visitor.

Speaker 40 They snuck into the house because well they both have questions i mean who doesn't

Speaker 52 so and we walked around and

Speaker 52 unbelievable

Speaker 49 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

Speaker 47 you you walk around and wow and then you see his bedroom which was a black and white painted room like a zebra

Speaker 49 with a mattress on the floor and

Speaker 8 black and white

Speaker 49 bed sheets not like a cozy bedroom

Speaker 25 the house is almost entirely empty which is strange Because when Marcelek fled, all he had with him were two pieces of luggage.

Speaker 24 Someone must have cleared the house out afterwards. There are just a few striking artifacts left behind.

Speaker 49 I was impressed by his medical cabinet.

Speaker 52 It was a normal door.

Speaker 49 Behind the door was

Speaker 49 40 centimeters deep in shelves full of medical stuff.

Speaker 59 And because we were in COVID at that time,

Speaker 49 Everything to fight a virus was there. This is a sedative, this is

Speaker 6 virus,

Speaker 49 this is the flu, and one was for diabetes.

Speaker 27 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.

Speaker 34 There are bottles and bottles of Russian medicines.

Speaker 33 Samp's heart is still racing, and he's scared for a reason.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 61 And he's thinking, Jesus, could there even be a tunnel between these buildings?

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 19 He knew Jan Marcelek for about 18 months.

Speaker 62 But he knew him very well.

Speaker 22 Or at least he knew one side of him.

Speaker 42 And he knew him under pressure.

Speaker 63 I'm hired sometimes when there's something smelly going on and how to

Speaker 61 not avoid, but

Speaker 63 how to go through with it and don't have too much damage.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 60 Samt prides himself on his ability to read people, to watch them, and to a certain extent, to be immune to their charms.

Speaker 41 Can you describe him for us?

Speaker 8 I

Speaker 47 noticed his friendliness. Do you want to drink something?

Speaker 6 And I said, Yeah, I'll grab a coke.

Speaker 64 Oh, no, please allow me to give you a Coke.

Speaker 51 And in very formal, polite German

Speaker 47 Bitter duge Stadtes doch das ich der ane kohler gebe.

Speaker 47 So please you

Speaker 15 almost elaborate.

Speaker 64 With your kind indulgence, you allow me to hand you a coke.

Speaker 49 You know those head waiters in Austrian restaurants?

Speaker 52 Yeah, Herr Ober, Herr Oberkel.

Speaker 64 So to me it was the behavior of a head waiter.

Speaker 14 When I think of an Austrian Oberkelne, I have a specific thing in mind, formal, sometimes stiffly so, maybe even outwardly obsequious,

Speaker 39 but people totally in control of their own worlds.

Speaker 32 In a Viennese café house, you are the guest of the head waiter.

Speaker 24 Samt soon found himself getting close to Marcelek.

Speaker 19 He noticed his quirks.

Speaker 30 Marcelec ate chocolate constantly.

Speaker 18 He kept a big box of lint carré, little individually wrapped chocolate squares, in his office.

Speaker 25 The bin was always full of wrappers. And Samt, he would often bring him chocolate or sweets.

Speaker 22 On those visits, Samt clocks the curious collection of objects in Marcellek's office, like a life-size Donald Trump cardboard cutout, for example.

Speaker 24 One day, he asked another senior wire card executive, Do you know about this

Speaker 63 life-size Trump figure in the office and his

Speaker 55 marshal's office and his altar of Russian officers' caps.

Speaker 51 Like Ushanka, kind of.

Speaker 48 Yeah,

Speaker 15 those heads.

Speaker 21 The executive replies.

Speaker 50 Yeah, I didn't know.

Speaker 53 I've never been in this office, actually.

Speaker 4 He also noticed that while so much of Marcelek's world at work seemed neat, precise,

Speaker 39 there was also chaos kind of hidden away.

Speaker 51 He put all the dirty

Speaker 47 cappuccino and all the dirty china.

Speaker 64 He put it in the cupboard in his conference room.

Speaker 34 Not just a few cups, weeks and weeks and weeks worth of cups.

Speaker 46 Because he didn't want to see it, he didn't want to see the mess.

Speaker 15 Yes, and it was summer, so that was a biotope after a while.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 63 the cleaning woman found it by accident because they were missing so much china.

Speaker 13 And he just put it

Speaker 63 messy-like in this cupboard, and in the back it was already growing.

Speaker 17 There were also times when Samt would catch glimpses of Marcellek's personal life.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 52 I'd like to play built Lego, who who does not.

Speaker 51 And so I bought it and gave it to him as a gift and said, here, that reminds me of you.

Speaker 52 And he looked, oh, Batman. I said, no, the Joker.

Speaker 37 Marcelek brushes off the jibe and eagerly opens the box.

Speaker 51 He started building. And during that building, he received like...

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 59 He was sitting there with me.

Speaker 55 We were talking business and he was building this bat mobiles.

Speaker 63 And then he said, yeah, I'll come later and I'll join you later.

Speaker 49 And we were sitting there. I was sitting on one end of the conference table.

Speaker 8 He was sitting on the other end.

Speaker 59 We were rolling the car.

Speaker 67 But he clearly didn't want to go and spend time.

Speaker 39 He clearly didn't want to go.

Speaker 64 And I had the feeling that it was a difficult relationship.

Speaker 48 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

Speaker 6 and so my bill was less than 50 euros probably

Speaker 49 the whole bill was 700 something

Speaker 49 masterleg started with cavia he had all the classic oyster whatever beefsteak fiorentina and this bottle of sparkling wine.

Speaker 47 And it was a 720 euro bill and he gave 900.

Speaker 49 He tried to be humble or to give the picture of being a humble person devoted to his job.

Speaker 63 On the other hand, paying everything cash and living a life that is in the

Speaker 49 high 1% of Munich.

Speaker 52 Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself.

Speaker 19 Possibly, thought Samt, the early days of WireCard had seen the company pay its executives huge bonuses before it listed.

Speaker 46 But even that didn't quite account for Marcelek's apparent wealth, because it wasn't just flashy dinners.

Speaker 49 He was invested with seven million into Telegram.

Speaker 19 The messaging app, founded in Russia.

Speaker 25 Marcelek was an early shareholder.

Speaker 49 But when you only make a million before tax at Wirecard,

Speaker 57 you have to work 15 years

Speaker 63 and eat ravioli from cans and live in a very reduced lifestyle

Speaker 63 to save up the money to invest like that in one single direct investment.

Speaker 18 And of course, Samt didn't even know at this point about the palatial property on Prince Rigentenstrasse.

Speaker 25 That he found out two months later, after Wirecard blew up, even though they would often meet at a restaurant restaurant very close by.

Speaker 48 I

Speaker 49 could have beaten myself.

Speaker 47 There's Kiefer at the restaurant here in Munich and we met very often at the Kiefer restaurant.

Speaker 49 And his secret office was like 500 meters or less than 500 meters down the road.

Speaker 42 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.

Speaker 24 I needed to talk to someone who'd known him for longer than Samt.

Speaker 19 That's coming up after the break.

Speaker 2 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 2 They're now the best network, according to the experts at an OOCLA speed test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

Speaker 2 With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 2 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 2 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. That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 2 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.
where you can see the sky.

Speaker 2 Best network based on analysis by UCLA of SpeedTest Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Speaker 25 Martin Ostelo first met Jan Marcelek when he joined Warcard almost 16 years ago.

Speaker 52 Young guy.

Speaker 70 At the time he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

Speaker 70 Had a impressive charisma about him, but you never would have thought that this guy would be

Speaker 50 managing the whole company very quickly at the time.

Speaker 24 Back then, in 2005, Marcelek was just 25.

Speaker 27 He hadn't been to university, he hadn't even finished school.

Speaker 58 After joining the company five years earlier in 2000, he'd been quickly promoted.

Speaker 30 And by the time Martin arrived at Warcard, Marcelek was head of I.T.

Speaker 14 Rhetorically, I already realized at that stage that that he was very, very good. He was like a Hoover.

Speaker 67 He could take information extremely quickly and formulate a summary almost in a fashion where you would lick your lips.

Speaker 70 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.

Speaker 18 Martin says that Jan worked his way up the company by bringing order and structure to what was otherwise a chaotic, fast-growing startup.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 67 If you went in and said, I can't do this yet, how do I do it? Take ownership and do it yourself.

Speaker 14 Those people excelled at WireCard in the early days.

Speaker 7 That's why probably

Speaker 67 Jan Masalik had an easy to climb ladder, because he was a doer.

Speaker 23 And one thing he was particularly good at was charming people.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 70 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.

Speaker 7 I think there really

Speaker 14 are traits that I have had strong envy for, but I envied Jan so much because it seemed so damn simple for him.

Speaker 70 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.

Speaker 46 With his people skills, Jan was a good manager.

Speaker 40 He became Martin's boss.

Speaker 26 And as you can hear, Martin really liked him.

Speaker 48 Jan

Speaker 14 had a broad spectrum of friendly,

Speaker 67 formally friendly.

Speaker 67 So when, for example, when you went to Jan and said, do you have a minute or do you have a second?

Speaker 66 He would always say, for you, always.

Speaker 40 Which wasn't to say he didn't have edges.

Speaker 67 I did have the feeling that

Speaker 67 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,

Speaker 6 he could be extremely

Speaker 58 ruthless is the only word I find.

Speaker 19 Over time, Martin noticed that to get on with him, you needed ultimately not to take things too seriously.

Speaker 40 Marcelec liked to test people to see if they could hold their own against him.

Speaker 53 He did

Speaker 67 say things to shock and provoke people here and there. He had a Wiener Schmeid,

Speaker 67 sort of the Vienna joking

Speaker 67 playfulness. So he could get away with murder saying certain things.

Speaker 67 And

Speaker 67 you also have to understand that he was in a circle of management where

Speaker 14 making politically incorrect jokes was

Speaker 71 in fashion.

Speaker 67 I think Jan he'd enjoy walking on a ledge and some people falling down.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 57 He's a bit of a maverick and prefers action over rules.

Speaker 18 But whatever is striking or unusual about Yan, it tends to get masked by the fact that Warcard is also an unusual company.

Speaker 60 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.

Speaker 70 Idult content or emotional content, as we would call it.

Speaker 23 And over the coming years, Warcard's appetite for risk also took it to countries where the rules of business were more ambiguous.

Speaker 67 I had heard before that he had several trips to Russia.

Speaker 8 When would that have been?

Speaker 67 That was four or five years, maybe

Speaker 59 three to five years before Wirecard collapsed.

Speaker 13 So, sort of 2015, 2014, 15, 16, around that.

Speaker 26 A bit later.

Speaker 67 Yeah, yeah, 15, 16, yeah.

Speaker 67 But of course, we did build up Wirecard Russia in that time as well, so

Speaker 7 it

Speaker 67 wasn't so surprising.

Speaker 46 Just weeks before Wirecard collapse, something surprising did happen, and it chilled Martin.

Speaker 25 Marcelek wanted to invest money in a new company that was issuing credit cards.

Speaker 36 He needed the board's approval.

Speaker 19 Martin and another colleague had run the numbers numbers on this company, and they knew this investment was a bad idea.

Speaker 40 Right ahead of the crucial board meeting, they told Marcellek that explicitly.

Speaker 32 They gave him the figures on the returns Wirecard could expect.

Speaker 17 Martin remembers specifically what he said.

Speaker 70 Long term, the card project, over the next decade, if it runs a decade, then it would potentially cover 1.25 million.

Speaker 4 Jan took it all on board.

Speaker 19 There's no way he didn't know the numbers, Martin says.

Speaker 67 Jan was very, very quick in understanding.

Speaker 67 And an hour later, we are sitting in the meeting, and

Speaker 67 he simply ignored what we said.

Speaker 6 He said, the card project alone in the first year will cover the 1.5 million.

Speaker 38 With you in the room.

Speaker 67 With us in the video conference.

Speaker 26 So he just ignored.

Speaker 6 what we had discussed.

Speaker 16 It's a very curious kind of game.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 26 He didn't mishear you.

Speaker 17 He didn't, you know, didn't lose the facts.

Speaker 14 We were flabbergasted.

Speaker 7 We were

Speaker 6 speechless.

Speaker 67 It had never happened like that. I mean, we were all important people in the company.

Speaker 59 It was like a punch in the face.

Speaker 33 What really comes across as Martin recounts this is just how effortlessly and easily Marcellek lied, how confidently.

Speaker 43 It's like he knew he had Martin and his colleague under his thumb and they wouldn't raise an objection.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 25 To day I think Martin is actually quite bemused by everything that has happened.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 19 The collapse of Wirecard and the revelations that Marsalek was a spy, they don't anger him.

Speaker 6 They sadden him.

Speaker 59 I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Marsalek is

Speaker 67 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

Speaker 67 what he turned out to be.

Speaker 14 That is really something that most people who worked at WarCard or witnessed him when discussing it afterwards, we all come to that point.

Speaker 25 When Marcelek's fraud at Warcard was discovered, the company's stock went to zero and Martin's life savings were basically wiped out.

Speaker 19 For me, the remarkable thing is that despite that, Martin evidently still holds quite a lot of affection for his former boss.

Speaker 67 I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?

Speaker 67 And

Speaker 67 how much of it was an act? How much was genius? How much was in between? How much was learned? How much was instinctive?

Speaker 67 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.

Speaker 14 Was that all just a lie?

Speaker 67 At what stage was it a lie?

Speaker 14 What was the turning point?

Speaker 61 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

Speaker 71 actually,

Speaker 67 I think I would love to do that.

Speaker 71 Actually,

Speaker 67 I have thought about getting into Moscow and seeing if I could organize it.

Speaker 71 I was thinking

Speaker 67 one could try that.

Speaker 8 Why haven't you?

Speaker 71 I mean the honest truth is

Speaker 67 would you have the balls to actually go to Moscow and

Speaker 67 feel that you're not endangering yourself and your family?

Speaker 70 That probably

Speaker 67 if I had a guarantee that I would not be touched, I'd love to get his side on this.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 25 But when he thinks back, he really can't say exactly when that might have been.

Speaker 19 Martin realizes that Marcelek could talk, he could charm, he could hold court, he could make you feel like you were his close friend.

Speaker 19 But actually, he almost never revealed anything about his life directly at all.

Speaker 39 What he did at home or where he had come from.

Speaker 4 His whole youth is a complete blank.

Speaker 67 He never spoke of that, nor did he speak of Vienna in his youth,

Speaker 67 which is quite remarkable because, I mean,

Speaker 67 I would have felt like I'd had a lot of personal talks with him, but only later did I realize

Speaker 67 he said a lot, but he didn't really give an insight of his past at all.

Speaker 2 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 2 They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

Speaker 2 With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 2 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 2 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. That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 2 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.
where you can see the sky.

Speaker 2 Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Speaker 39 4Imprint for certain.

Speaker 17 A few months ago, I travelled to a small Austrian town called Kloster Neuburg.

Speaker 22 It's just outside Vienna.

Speaker 25 Kloster Neuburg is dominated by a huge monastery on a hill at its center.

Speaker 40 It's home to about 28,000 people.

Speaker 19 And it's the place where Jan Marcelek grew up.

Speaker 5 In the town hall café, I meet up with four people who knew Jan as a child.

Speaker 19 Rudolf Koch rustles up some Velingete, black coffees.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 22 We all sit down around the table together.

Speaker 19 I hope they might be able to tell me something about Jan Marcelek before Wirecard, about the experiences that formed him as an adult.

Speaker 38 This is the first time that Philip, Rudolph, and Bruno have spoken to the press about Marcelec.

Speaker 30 When Wirecard went down and Marcelek went on the run, it was a shock.

Speaker 59 Top ten wild-collar crime of this century.

Speaker 19 As Philip runs down the list of Jan's exploits, he says it sounds like a bad James Bond plot.

Speaker 19 Rudolph shows me and my producer Peggy an old school yearbook.

Speaker 8 Oh wow.

Speaker 39 Lots more hair.

Speaker 25 In the picture, Jan is in the front row, crouched down, almost ready to spring up again.

Speaker 27 He's looking directly at the camera, arm resting on one knee, fingers laced together.

Speaker 25 There's maybe twenty other students in the class.

Speaker 27 They all look like classic teenagers, awkward in their own bodies.

Speaker 19 Jan, though, he looks very at ease.

Speaker 20 It would of course be totally stupid stupid to expect to see signs of a criminal treasonous future in an old school photo.

Speaker 4 But this...

Speaker 45 this isn't exactly what I expected either.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 25 And because of his time at the Lycée, Jan was fluent in French.

Speaker 40 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.

Speaker 41 The teacher was, of course, totally taken aback.

Speaker 40 But when they tried to put him in his place, Jan answered with a five-minute monologue in flawless French.

Speaker 68 Jan must have gone to the place he always went whenever he could skip a lesson.

Speaker 20 In fact, where he went even in the minutes between lessons, to the library.

Speaker 60 And that's where he got to know Bruno.

Speaker 33 Bruno taught history, German, and philosophy, and he also looked after the school library.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 30 So Jan became Bruno's helper.

Speaker 38 Bruno says that it couldn't have run smoothly without him.

Speaker 27 In fact, when everyone here thinks of Jan back then, they picture him sat in front of the computer in the library.

Speaker 19 He was obsessed with it, and with learning about this new thing called the internet.

Speaker 24 Jan was certainly different from other 15-year-olds who were more likely to be skateboarding or playing football outside.

Speaker 25 Philip says it was like they were all still children, and Jan was somehow not.

Speaker 29 He seemed more like a fully grown adult already.

Speaker 19 Verena says he was maybe aloof, but definitely not arrogant.

Speaker 25 Yet other kids admired him.

Speaker 19 And the teachers, well, the thing Philip remembers them saying is: be more like Jan.

Speaker 19 I wonder if his teachers knew about his strategy to avoid washing his socks.

Speaker 33 that one day Jan announced he had done a cost-benefit analysis and he would never wash a pair of socks again.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 18 If Jan liked computers and enjoyed being atypical, he wasn't a loner, though, says Verena.

Speaker 4 Far from it.

Speaker 25 He had a wide group of friends, and she was part of it.

Speaker 19 And yet she also remembers that Jan never socialized outside of school.

Speaker 25 He never took friends home.

Speaker 40 He had a very private side to his life.

Speaker 36 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 19 He accepted, and he told his schoolmates he was leaving immediately.

Speaker 29 He wasn't going to bother with the exams.

Speaker 31 Everyone thinks he's daft,

Speaker 38 leaving at the 11th hour.

Speaker 25 You've got to have a lot of self-belief, or maybe self-delusion, to do something like that, aged 17.

Speaker 58 Think back to how important exam results seemed to you at that age.

Speaker 19 I can remember believing my whole future depended on them.

Speaker 40 Rudolph jumps in to offer an explanation.

Speaker 37 He says that the job offer was very, very lucrative.

Speaker 25 But all four of them also suggest another possible reason why Jan was so keen to leave Kloster Neuburg.

Speaker 27 I asked about Jan's family.

Speaker 62 He has a younger sister and a brother, both of whom seem to lead perfectly ordinary lives.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 25 But everyone remembers his mother.

Speaker 25 Rudolph, the headmaster, describes Marcelek's mother as combative.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 Verena agrees with Rudolph's assessment.

Speaker 72 She now works for the town council and she knows Frau Maasleck as a conspicuous woman.

Speaker 37 Verena says Jan's mother used to be regularly upset about one thing or another.

Speaker 25 She campaigned against a 5G mask being put up in Klosteneuburg and against a development that would have threatened a nature reserve.

Speaker 19 She says she's very left-wing.

Speaker 72 Everyone thinks Jan had a hard time with his mother, that it was a difficult relationship.

Speaker 62 To the point where Jan, he did whatever he could to get away from home.

Speaker 21 I got in touch with Jan's mother, and to my surprise, she replied.

Speaker 36 I got an email from her.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 22 She has asked that we don't reveal her name here.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 42 She did say that her relationship with her son, quote, changed massively the year before he left home.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 58 She tried to involve a psychologist to mediate between them.

Speaker 15 It It didn't work.

Speaker 34 Jan, she implies, had his teachers charmed, but she was resistant.

Speaker 20 Since then, she says she's only tried to make contact with her son once, in 25 years.

Speaker 19 The emails she sent me had a whole load of attachments.

Speaker 16 18 documents concerning all kinds of things to do with Jan.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 She's read, it would seem, almost all of the books and materials that have been published about the War Card fraud.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 19 It's the organization in Vienna that War Card sponsored.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 19 Whatever happened when he left home, Verena says, seemed significant.

Speaker 57 Because when she next saw Jan after the exams, he appeared to be a changed person.

Speaker 32 It was at a reunion after everyone else had graduated.

Speaker 18 They were around 19 years old.

Speaker 36 She says he boasted that he now knew how the world worked.

Speaker 9 That money could buy him whatever he wanted.

Speaker 22 Even sex.

Speaker 40 Even, he implied, sex with her.

Speaker 5 Incredulous, she told him he was stupid.

Speaker 17 When Verena told this story, everyone around the table seemed shocked.

Speaker 25 It sounded so unlike the Jan they knew, like he'd somehow come off the rails a bit.

Speaker 25 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 31 He wasn't destined to become a fugitive, and it's deeply sad that he did.

Speaker 25 I've always believed that people are much more malleable things than we realize, capable of extremes.

Speaker 19 We have a tendency to see those who end up at the fringes as somehow radically different to us.

Speaker 40 Broken, evil.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 23 When you want to recruit someone as a spy, if you're good at it, you understand something of that.

Speaker 43 You look for the parts of a person's life, their personality, their needs that you can work with, bend, change, use,

Speaker 46 their history.

Speaker 30 But not everyone with a difficult childhood becomes a spy.

Speaker 17 So, how did Jan Marcellet get drawn into it?

Speaker 29 Why did he end up working with the Russians?

Speaker 60 And what did he actually do?

Speaker 30 Coming up on hot money.

Speaker 10 If Moscow decides, and it is always Moscow, who decides, if Moscow decides that this person can be and should be recruited,

Speaker 11 then they work out ways of how to recruit this person.

Speaker 74 This is a dangerous situation because those spies tend to be the better ones, better than the guys who do it solely for money.

Speaker 38 Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

Speaker 39 It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones.

Speaker 33 The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton.

Speaker 46 Our producer is Izzy Carter. Our researcher is Maureen Saint.

Speaker 72 Our show is edited by Karen Shikurchi.

Speaker 62 Fact-checking by Kira Levine.

Speaker 25 Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo d'Oliveira. With additional sound design by Izzy Carter.

Speaker 40 Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet.

Speaker 33 Our show art is by Sean Carney.

Speaker 38 Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines-McQuaid and Matthew Garahan.

Speaker 39 Additional editing by Paul Murphy.

Speaker 62 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.

Speaker 43 I'm Sam Jones.

Speaker 69 This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record. Starbucks pumpkin spice latte arrives at the end of every summer like a pick-me-up to save us from the dreary return from our summer breaks.

Speaker 69 It reminds us that we're actually entering the best time of year, fall. Fall is when music sounds the best.

Speaker 69 Whether listening on a walk with headphones or in a car during your commute, something about the fall foliage makes music hit just a little closer to the bone.

Speaker 69 And with the pumpkin spice latte now available at Starbucks, made with real pumpkin, you can elevate your listening and your taste all at the same time. The Starbucks pumpkin spice latte.

Speaker 69 Get it while it's hot or iced.

Speaker 76 You've probably heard me say this. Connection is one of the biggest keys to happiness.

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Speaker 1 What happens when Delta Airlines sends four creators around the world to find out what is the true power of travel? I love that both trips had very similar mental and social perks.

Speaker 77 Very much so. On both trips, their emotional well-being and social well-being went through the roof.

Speaker 1 Find out more about how travel can support well-being on this special episode of the Psychology of Your 20s, presented by Delta. Fly and live better.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.