No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
How Fat Leonard Breached the Navy's OODA Loop with Tom Wright
In this episode of No Way Out, investigative journalist Tom Wright joins us to dissect the infamous Fat Leonard scandal, a dark chapter in U.S. Navy history where corruption, manipulation, and ethical breaches were exposed on a massive scale. Leonard Francis, the Malaysian contractor at the heart of the scandal, exploited systemic weaknesses in Navy operations, unraveling how deep-rooted issues in military culture can jeopardize national security.
Tom Wright, Ponch (a retired Navy captain), and Mark McGrath (a former Marine Corps captain) explore the challenges whistleblowers faced, the struggles of NCIS investigators, and the broader cultural and systemic flaws that allowed corruption to flourish. We also examine parallels between military corruption and financial scandals, highlighting the role of press freedom and investigative journalism in exposing these wrongs.
This episode is a deep dive into the perils of unchecked power, the complexities of leadership accountability, and the importance of maintaining institutional integrity in the face of corruption.
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Acta Non Verba – with Marcus Aurelius Anderson
Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast...
No. So, Tom, we're really glad that you could you could join us. As you know, Ponch and I are both naval officers. I'm a former Marine Corps captain, Ponch is a retired Navy captain and aviator and this is a scandal that we're both very, very aware of, Things that we saw with our own eyes in a lot of, in a lot of cases. I listened to your podcast several times and I was so glad to just be a low-level First Lieutenant Combat Arms Officer that was of no interest to Fat Leonard whatsoever.
Mark McGrath:But what our interest is in the discussion is more around the lines of John Boyd's definitions of evil and corruption, which we talk about quite a bit, and what we think is that Boyd gave very clear definitions of those two concepts in such a way that they're attainable, understandable, they're realistic, and it's not a bunch of men in a boardroom twirling their mustaches or a bunch of witches sitting around a pot looking to boil puppies or anything like that that evil and corruption are real. And in the course of this case, as you've investigated, there were a lot of different stories about signals maybe weak signals at first that were potentially cluing people off. And, as it relates to us and what we do professionally. We're constantly helping organizations identify these sorts of things so that they don't fall in the same type of trap, and we think that Fat Leonard's case and story has a lot of broader lessons for not just the military but for really any team and any discipline. Ponch, is there anything that you want to add to that as we dig into this?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, I'm with you uh, you and I got to live some of this uh late 90s, early 2000s, uh, when we were doing our westpacs and floating around into the, in the, into the, uh, middle east, there.
Tom Wright:so a lot of overlap with the stories and the people uh that are in tom's stories yeah, when you guys talk about corruption uh, your podcast and why it happens, why groups sign up for rules that they're supposed to adhere to and then they break them, and why do they break them. I think that's a key element to the Fat Leonard story. You know there's no organization in the world like the US military for high standards of valor and ethical behavior military for high standards of valor and ethical behavior. And you know, for those of us that like a world that's ruled by law and wants a US military that's, you know, solid, especially in the Pacific right, what happened in the Fat Leonard case is just astounding and I think you know I've covered a lot of corruption.
Tom Wright:Just to introduce myself to people who listen to your podcast but maybe don't know me, you know I wrote a book called Billion Dollar Whale, co-authored a book called Billion Dollar Whale about Joe Lowe, who's this fraudster who stole $6 billion and made Hollywood movies and corrupted Goldman Sachs and all this kind of stuff. And then you know we've got a company called Project Brazen where we do podcasts and the first podcast we did was Fat Leonard, this story of crazy corruption in the US Navy, where I'm sure most of your listeners do know the story. But just to quickly recap, this contractor, leonard Francis, who you know put food fuel and took the feces off of boats, you know aircraft carriers across the Pacific for decades Ran a scam which is very simple it was basically turned the Seventh Fleet, you know main ship into a party boat when it rolled into ports. Organize women, organize Cristal. Organize hotel suites. Give wives Chanel handbags. Give wives, you know, free holidays, that kind of thing. In return, everyone turned a blind eye to him, overcharging to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
Tom Wright:And just to finish, the thought about why do people break rules when they sign up to them, whether it's US Navy officers, high-ranking officers, including four-star admirals, or it's Goldman Sachs bankers in the JOLO 1MDB case, it's often because people say, well, everyone's doing it, and I don't know if you come across that a lot in the work you do, but it's like, well, this guy took this thing, why shouldn't I take it? And I'm not paid enough. I'm keeping america safe, I'm keeping the free world safe on these boats, I'm away from my family, not paid enough and I'm going to take these parties, I'm going to and that and that. That's you know. Similar thing in banking, wall street. Oh, if I didn't take this dodgy deal and make millions, the next bank down the block would do it, and I'm just doing what everyone does, you know.
Mark McGrath:It seems in a lot of these cases too, at these levels the list of the punished is always very small at the top and very large at the bottom, meaning that the, I believe if maybe you could update us on some of the changes but I think a rear admiral lower half, which is a O-10, was the highest rank that actually was sent to prison. And then there was a series of Navy captains, maybe a Marine colonel, maybe some Navy commanders, sort of lower level, that were seriously, seriously punished and a lot of the higher ups maybe got a bad letter or a slap on the wrist or they didn't get a third star or a fourth star but they quote, unquote got away with it.
Tom Wright:That's exactly right. I think only one admiral went to jail over one star, and that was the first admiral to go to jail in the Navy's 200 plus years history, you know, since independence. Yeah, you have this saying in the Navy, don't you? Different Spanx for different ranks, and nothing could be truer in the meeting out of justice in this case, than that aphorism, because you know, this didn't happen just because of low-level officers enjoying sex and then signing off on, you know. You know, oh, double the amount of fuel that actually was put into the ship that allowed leonard to make all this extra money. Didn't happen just because of them. They were crucial to it.
Tom Wright:But there was this thing, was this whole scam was allowed to go on for so long because leonard had top cover from from admirals that he had known since when they you know you, you started this podcast by saying you were too junior, but he did actually look for junior guys. You know he was around since the 90s. He started to build this and let's, let's not forget, you know, in most scams there's always a competency right, whether it's jolo in the billion dollar oil scan scandal, or or or fat leonard in this scandal. He was very good at what he did. You know when. You know, when september the 11th happened, just before that, when the um uh uss coal was bombed by al-qaeda in the in the harvard aid and just before september the 11th, the navy was very worried about al-qaeda attacks on ships from this, from the sea, the, from the sea when they were at port yeah, uss coal.
Mark McGrath:Right, the uss coal was so leonard would le.
Tom Wright:So Leonard would protect those boats with, you know, what he called a ring of steel. He was able to get fenders out to boats in places where other contractors couldn't do it. So you know, he had a competency to him. But the admirals liked that competency, you know. And then the dirty secret is everyone needs a bag man if you want to go into port in a corrupt country where everyone expects handouts, you can't make them. So leonard dealt with all of that.
Tom Wright:Um, but yeah, but those admirals who, who also enjoyed, you know, frankly, the prostitutes and the, the partying and all of that, they, they weren't sanctioned in the same way that the more junior officers were. You know, maybe they, like you said, they didn't get their third star or fourth star. There was an admiral who was in line to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs who you know was quietly pushed out of the running for that highest office of the US military, you know. But yeah, I mean, there are many admirals involved in the story who are still. You know they left the Navy, but with honor, you know.
Mark McGrath:So that's what happened and we'll bounce around with this and back and forth. I guess you brought some light on. One of the sort of paradox of this is that the fleet in the Pacific, with Leonard doing what he was very competent at, was actually highly effective. Doing what he was very competent at was actually highly effective, and that's kind of the strange, sort of weird thing about this is that all in addition to all these horrible things of corrupting officers and getting them to do things that they basically swore an oath not to do that the effectiveness of the fleet in the Pacific was actually pretty high. And, as you say I think you pointed out earlier in one of the podcasts describing the role of what he actually did I mean this goes back to when ships have been going into port for thousands of years, that sort of for lack of a better term mafia-type system of back deals and bargains and things like that that make things actually flow smoother.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Hey, mark, I want to build on that, that mafia point you brought up there. So, living in Naples, italy, the things you learn are you pay people to park your car, which they're not actually parking your car, they're just standing behind you and waving you in and they want a couple of euros. So you kind of learn a little bit about the culture and you pay your landlords. I lived in Casal de Principe, which is heavily run by the Camorra, and we paid everything in cash. Right, it was go write a check at the Navy base, take cash, give it to them and a couple of weeks later your landlords would show up with a baby that they didn't have a couple of weeks ago and it came from Russia, or something like that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So what I'm trying to do is paint a picture here. Is that sometimes and I'm not saying that this is the right way to do business when you go around the world, not everybody does business the way we do business right, and sometimes you go to a different culture. You go into port and you're with the shore patrol and you see lawyers and you see people with bags of money and they're ready to bail out sailors, right. So this is the type of world we live in. When we travel the world, we get exposed to these types of things, and I'm not saying this justifies what happened then, but I just want to build some context in there, that here you have these naval officers that some lived in Europe and had spent a couple of years in Naples and maybe went over to the Blue Ridge in Japan and got to experience something like this. So I want to hear your thoughts on that, tom or Mark.
Tom Wright:Well, that's exactly right what both of you have said. I mean, leonard's big break came. So he was a guy from Malaysia. It's called Fat Leonard, by the way, because he was 400 pounds at some point. I think he lost weight after that, but he was a very charming guy and you know, we smuggled him a microphone in jail. We'll get to how he ended up in jail later but we smuggled him a microphone in home arrest and he's very charming.
Tom Wright:If you listen to the Fat Leonard podcast on Project Brazen, which is on Apple or Spotify or wherever you know, he comes across as someone who can get things done and charm you. And you know, as you were saying, you know, in certain parts of the world, corruption is the norm, not the. You know, it's just how you get anything done done. And the US for years had had its own base in Subic Bay in the Philippines, which allowed it to have a sort of permanent outpost in the southern part of the Pacific, and also, of course, has the base in Yokosuka in Japan. And Subic Bay closed in the 90s due to politics in the Philippines and the US Navy was looking around for like, where is it going to go? Where is it going to be able to dock its ships when they're in that more southern part of Asia not the northern part, you know where they had the Yokosuka base in Japan, and Leonard solved problems. He created a pier and a place for the US Navy to go to Bali in Indonesia and that involved paying tons of corruption money that the US Navy never had to pay anything of that corruption money because Leonard just dealt with it all. So you know I'm not being holier than thou about this whole thing. You know we all operate in the real world and often in the real world these kinds of things happen and the US Navy had a reason to want to be in some of these places, right To project US power to you know. Of course, that whole area was later rife with Abu Sayyaf, which was an al-Qaeda affiliate. So there are all kinds of national security reasons why we want everybody wants the US in this part of the world.
Tom Wright:But that competency that he had and that ability to be the bag man for the US Navy, it started to affect the best practices of the US Navy in Asia, in my view, because people would see that they would see the bags of cash, they would come to these ports and there would be women, there would be cars with liquor in the trunk and he would give the keys to the captain and he would have the car with the liquor, and then there would be women put on and parties with Rolexes as store prices and this kind of thing, and it starts to look like a scene in a mafia school Saisy Mafia movie, you know something like that in the end.
Tom Wright:And the question is, what's a bit of corruption to oil the wheels of something that you know, we all know happens, and maybe we just sort of don't, we don't see it as detrimental to an organization. And at what point does it do what you guys are all so involved in in debating, which is like actually corrode the organization? In this case it totally corroded the organization because the whole chain of command of the 7th Fleet was pushed out right in the end either jailed or pushed out if you're an admiral and so it was devastating for the US military.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah. And then there's again that paradox of is the fleet as effective now as it was when I'd say no, mark. I mean, you look at what's going on globally. We're not and again, this is my opinion, not government-backed view or anything like that. There are dark constraints that Fat Leonard allowed or enabled us to have back then, maybe for security and projection of power and all that stuff. So these dark constraints, sometimes we live in these systems where we have to have those things, and that's what Fat Leonard, that's what brought rise to Fat Leonard, in my opinion, is he filled a need, right, a need, by our military.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Again, I'm not justifying anything. I'm saying that we do live in a river where scams happen and things happen. It's just how people react to that. I think that's the important thing here is how we react to those things matters right and honor, courage and commitment, all those things that we learned in the military and the Navy. How do you, do you speak up in the environment? Or, like Tom brought up earlier, I'm doing this because everybody else is doing that, right, and that's the the, the world we live in when we talk about systems. The system we're in drives our behaviors Right. So again, I'm not defending anybody on this. I'm just pointing out that this is the nature of being a human. I mean we've, we've got to deal with these things.
Tom Wright:You're human, I mean we've got to deal with these things. You're right. I mean, when Leonard was arrested which we can explain now actually, but when he was arrested and he lost the contract all of the Pacific by this point he was in charge of this husbanding work he was taken over by another company that was an Italian based company, I think, and that guy was subsequently arrested in the US for corruption. So you know, leonard in the podcast is very much defending himself by saying well, you know, when I lost the contract, it was taken over by this other company and the head of that company is now also indicted in the US for corruption. And I think Inchcape and others, you know many of these companies have faced problems and so that's exactly backing up what you say. But I think when we get in, you know, looking at it from an institution building standpoint, if the leaders start to say well, you know everyone's doing it, then so should I. Then that organization is screwed.
Mark McGrath:Yeah yeah, it doesn't. It just takes uh in in this case um one catalyst right, like I think it was. Was it marcy, uh mizowitz? That was sort of the. The match that started the chain of events that brought the whole thing down was mark it's so funny, you mentioned marcy, marcy, so, so, um, I've gotten to know her very well.
Tom Wright:she, um, we're, um, we just got back recently a script from Pete Chiarelli, who's a script writer, who wrote a piece in a bunch of Hollywood movies, including Crazy Rich Asians, and he's writing Fat Linnet as a film. Oh, wow, and you know, we've all gotten to know Marcy very well. So, you know, there are heroes and heroines in this story, because there are people who stand up and say well, that isn't right. Um, her husband, uh, mike mishevitz, was one of the people who was in charge of the logistics of the seventh fleet aboard the blue ridge, um, and, and you know, based out of japan, and he was an annapolis grad right, like he was an annapolis grad and an immigrant from cambodia that had escaped the Khmer Rouge, and I mean he had a very illustrious career up to this point.
Tom Wright:Well, he's a famous story because, you're right, he actually fled as a kid the killing fields, the genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s, and then managed to climb his way up grad Navy Academy Is that right? And then the United States Naval Academy Naval Academy, sorry. Managed to climb his way up grad uh navy academy navy academy is that right? And then united states naval academy naval academy sorry. And then ended up commanding a ship, the uss mustin um, and then becoming I don't know what his official title was. He was basically head of logistics for the seventh fleet, so he was crucial to leonard because he would control where ships would go, and leonard really wanted to to influence that, because he wanted to send them to ports where he could, like, have better margins.
Tom Wright:Um, and and and you think about just think about that for a second a non-us citizen, through this corrupt network, was controlling where these two billion dollar uh ships were going. You know these, these aircraft carriers, and that's just shocking. But anyway, yeah, marcy, you know she's crucial in the story because her complaints you know about her own husband now her ex-husband led the NCIS to start investigating and Leonard, of course, had corrupted the head or the chief officer, quantico in the NCIS. So he actually had real time information about the investigations that were going on into him that had started under Marcy. So he knew that Marcy had started this problem for him and he went to Mike Marcy's then husband and tried to put pressure on her to stop. And so that's the whole amazing sort of third act endgame of this whole thing.
Mark McGrath:But for those listening, that's the like, that she was the catalyst, like she was the one that was sort of the whistleblower or the one that raised the question that basically unraveled the rest of the story.
Tom Wright:You know there are. Yeah, there's her. There's a guy called David Shouse in Hong Kong who was more a sort of supply side guy. Yeah, a woman called Teresa Kelly in Singapore. There were people who questioned it and there were lots and lots and lots of investigations into Leonard over the years, brought up to the NCIS, and they would always get sort of shelves for a number of reasons.
Tom Wright:This is where the admirals come in, because the admirals are like well, look all right, whatever. Turn a is where the admirals come in because the admirals are like well, look all right, whatever. Turn a blind eye to this. This is not a big deal. Um, if we get rid of this guy, who's going to do this job? Who's going to bring us fenders in the middle? You know, fenders are those. Those who don't know are these, I guess, what would you call them? Huge buoys that allow you to bring a ship up against the port and not get destroyed. Right, right, yeah, stuff like that. You know, having that in the right place when a ship comes into a remote port, it's not not easy.
Mark McGrath:Um, for these, you know getting phone booths so sailors and marines can call home and getting uh, liberty, liberty ports. I mean I remember uh, you know the places that are described in the in the, in the uh in the podcast, like panang. We went to panang and kodakita, baloo and andaya and Phuket and other places and every time the ship would pull in, you know it would have everything waiting for us, so it would be phone booths and things to call home and they would bring on fresh fruit and offload garbage and other stuff. I mean it really is a very important service for the fleet to have when it's operating.
Tom Wright:Yeah. So the question is like where does you know if the admirals wanted him? Because of competency? So I don't think corruption is ever really like there's an evil genius who wants to sort of be the beneficiary of all this corruption. I mean, it does happen, right, like in the 1MDB case, the Jolo case. You know there are Goldman Sachs bankers, a Goldman Sachs banker called Tim Leisner who's pleaded guilty to helping steal $200 million. That's just pure greed, right, the guy was just, he wanted to be the like, he wanted to act like a billionaire. So he.
Tom Wright:But I think in other cases where corruption flourishes, some of the leaders who are involved, they could justify. They still took corrupt acts, perhaps, but they can justify it in their own minds because there's multiple things going on. Maybe they enjoyed a party atop a helipad, you know, with Cristal and Lobster, and then turned a blind eye to overcharging. Maybe they slept with prostitutes. But also, maybe they really believed that this guy was the best guy for operational efficiency, for the, for the navy, in these weird places where bribery needed to be paid, and you know he was. He was the guy who could get things there. So it's a very complex, I think, in the minds of those who who oiled the wheels of this. You know it's probably a very complex matter for them so you don't really start with the quibono.
Mark McGrath:Then the quibono question, right, because because boyd would say that corruption would occur when individuals or groups for their own benefit, like some, somebody would act for their own benefit, they would violate the codes of conduct and standards of behavior they profess or expected to uphold. And as as ponch and I, being former naval officers, I mean that's very serious. I mean that's a very serious thing and, as you say, not necessarily, and I think, with Boyd's definition and this is really what we talk about a lot you don't have to have an evil genius, plotter per se. The system is created and the system drives behaviors. Is that?
Tom Wright:yeah, yeah I think that's fascinating. I think I think that's exactly what happened, and in this case you could say the system drives the behaviors in two ways. One is this thing like this idea that this is a difficult job we're doing and, okay, this guy cuts corners, but we've got to get it done right. So that's one, that's one thing, and nobody's anyone who stands up and tries to say, look, this is wrong, can be batted down as being like an ancient new or you're just like naive. You just join. You just turn up in asia. You don't understand asia, this kind of thing, right, and that that's happened. You know, I've been in asia for 30 years and that always happened in business too, right, like, oh, you're so naive, you don't really understand how things get done here. And then you know the other one that's a bit more nefarious is well, you know, everybody's doing it. It's always been like this um, why shouldn't we, why shouldn't we enjoy these?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:you know, yeah these women or these you know?
Tom Wright:I mean we should, we should say for listeners. I mean the. The most shocking part of this story just to change gears a little bit is that leonard would organize these, these orgies with, with navy officers that he would sometimes take part in himself, um, and he would. He would put recording devices into the karaoke machines that they would have in suites of hotels in Asia and has sexual compromise on very senior US Navy officers. So this is one of the reasons why this was not just we're not just talking about corruption here, right, and because often in white collar crime you can say oh, you know what is it? $700 billion US defense budget every year. This is like, think leonard was 20 something million or something. It's like peanuts, right, total peanuts.
Tom Wright:And you could argue, while eric prince did the same thing. But this is a national security issue too, because this was a non-us, a non-us citizen moving ships at his will through his corrupt puppets in the seventh fleet and then recording sexual compromise on on navy officers. That if he'd ever been able, if he, you know, if he'd gone to china or russia or something which he tried to do at the very end of this story tried to flee to russia from jail, um, wow, you know and, as you say in the podcast, the compromise exists on servers that are not within the realm of the United States.
Tom Wright:Correct? Yeah, because when. So you know, to finish up the Marcy thing, when Marcy went to the NCIS and the NCIS investigations got going, they figured out that they had a mole in the NCIS, which is this guy, john Beliveau, who had been Quantico agent of the year, you know, at the NCIS Very different to the CBS TV show, right and they had to set up an off-the-books NCIS investigation to be able to then lure Leonard to San Diego under the guise of, well, let's discuss new contracts for the next you know 10 years or five years, and then arrested him let's discuss new contracts for the next 10 years or five years. And then arrested him. And so they had to sort of create fake paper trails in the NCIS. They were closing the investigation. So Beliveau thought they were closed, told Leonard they were closed but kept a secret investigation going and lured him to the States. So it's a crazy story.
Mark McGrath:And David Shouse. Yeah, david Shouse was a navy supply officer, correct?
Tom Wright:that was noticing discrepancies in in receipts or spreadsheets in hong kong, in hong kong yeah so there's him in hong kong and there's a, there's a woman called teresa kelly, who same kind of uh officer in um, these are civilians, I believe. Right, they're not. They're not uh officers actually. Um in singapore who who noticed discrepancies in what he was charging, and I think there were more than you know two dozen complaints opened into leonard at the ncis or just never taken anywhere. So I think that that you know, that body has come out very badly, the ncis has come out very badly from all of this because they just don't, they just did not do their job.
Mark McGrath:How many, how much? I mean, I guess, starting with yourself and your own experience, and then I say, would probably with marcy and david and others that were trying to shine light on this. I mean, talk about the resistance that you know. I imagine that you probably faced a lot of resistance in trying to dig deeper into this story and I imagine that, as you say, marcy had some pressure. Um, you know what? What are the resistance in that sort of a situation?
Tom Wright:well, you know, david shouse was, um, he ended up leaving um the supply service and setting and you end up working for another contractor and Leonard sort of ruined his business. Let Leonard, you know, was so angry with him, um, that he ruined. He renounced his citizenship too, I believe, right, didn't he? Yeah, he actually has a Hong Kong passport now, yeah, and he's not he's not married to a Hong Kong or a Chinese citizen. So he's said in the podcast I'm not sure if we know, we know it for sure but he's probably the first, uh, us, uh, or first person who was working for the us military to go to now be a chinese national, because if you're a hong kong passport holder these days, you're a chinese national, wow. So so, yeah, he was, you know, he did the right thing and he was, leonard was vindictive, and same with marcy, you know, um, uh, with Marcy, he, she had gone back to live in the states because of the Fukushima earthquake and, yeah, leonard put a lot of pressure on her husband, who was also leaving, to keep her quiet, um, and so it led to sort of violence at the family house, at home, um, and an unraveling of that marriage where they had, you know, young children far away from the US, living in Yokosuka, japan. So yeah, and you know myself, when I, you know, I think I could admit that I got a bit charmed by Leonard.
Tom Wright:If you listen to the podcast, you'll see he's very, he is a very persuasive guy and that's another element of corruption, isn't it? There's always has to be somebody who makes you believe that it's okay, what's happening, um, and leonard is that guy. There were times when I would sit with my, my wife, and discuss what he told me that day. This is all done, you know, like this podcast, during during covid, talk to him for over 20 hours and he'll be like, oh, you know, maybe he's, you know, maybe he's got a point. You know, you get to that point with him.
Tom Wright:But then, you know, some crazy stories started to come out. I got to know his former girlfriend with whom he'd had children, a Filipino woman called Morena, and he had stolen his children with her, kidnapped his children with her. They were living with her in the Philippines. He invited her to Singapore and took the children and until now that woman hasn't seen her children since, you know, since all of this happened. So he's really a misogynist and we should talk about that. I mean, there's a misogynistic element to this whole story as well the way that some of these guys treat women, talk about women. He talks about the mother of his child, morena, as a whore in the podcast. You know he uses that word.
Tom Wright:Yeah, I recall that. Yeah, which is really shocking and that's when I fall out with him in some of the later episodes. But yeah, just a really shocking story.
Mark McGrath:Hmm, punch, I keep thinking of entropy. Right, you know, all systems create entropy and this sort of the.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:As these things start and continue, the, the system becomes entropic um yeah, I've just been sitting here thinking about the uh port visit we had on the constellation uh to hong kong and it was the first time going into hong kong for a while. I think it was 2000, 2001, right after uh, I think 2019, they shut off all visits there and how smooth that that visit went and I think we went again and then all the times we went into, hey, we're pulling a KL. All of a sudden You're like what I didn't know. We had a port visit and we just had these port visits pop up all the time on us, which was great, don't get me wrong. And that's before we had to head out to the Middle East. There you brought up Eric Prince. I know you're looking at corruption from different angles, but just, can you make a connection there on? Just allow our listeners to understand who Eric Prince is and why you brought him up?
Tom Wright:Well, yeah, I mean, eric Prince is obviously, you know, I don't know one of the most successful contractors and benefited greatly from the from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and benefited greatly from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This company is called Blackwater and, yeah, he again was. I think you could paint a sort of pretty similar or you could paint a parallel with Leonard, in the sense that he okay, eric Prince was never indicted we should be very clear about that but he benefited because he was very, very effective at doing what he did, which was supplying. I mean, you guys tell me you were there, but he was very effective at supplying contractors to do jobs when the military isn't large enough to do it. That's where he's putting it and made a hell of a lot of money doing that in the decade or so. I think that he was very active in the Middle East.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah. So I'm here in Virginia Beach and just down the road is where Blackwater originated from. And then your point about that is, during the height of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars we were, you know, guys would leave the military, these Navy SEALs would leave and they'd go off and get a pot of money to go back over and do what they were kind of doing, so again filling a need. And we go back to the military-industrial complex. Right, the MIC, did I say that? Right, military-industrial complex, yeah, which we've had. Other folks say it's the military-industrial-congressional complex. Other folks say it's the military-industrial-congressional complex that that drives everything. And I'm sure there's connections to Congress in all this as well. I mean, this isn't just driven by the US DOD Department of the Navy, it's not just driven by just the State Department. This is a whole holistic thing that's going on in the way we fight wars now. Or, yeah, I'll say that, how we fight wars now and how we've done it in the past. There's a reason you should buy Raytheon stock right now, right, so, it is.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I mean, the level of corruption is so widespread at the moment that, mark and I, when we started this podcast, that was one of our big fears is, hey, so widespread at the moment that, uh, you know, mark and I, when we started this podcast, that that was one of our big fears is, hey, we're going to let people know that this is happening at scale, but we're going to build it around John Boyd's OODA loop, um, you know, and create a way for people to understand how to think through things and to get them, uh, provide exposure to different points of view, which is important because you can't change the system from within. So, uh, points of view, which is important because you can't change a system from within. So, I thank you for bringing up the Eric Prince point there, and I'm sure there's connections to Sam Bankman. Freid, am I saying the name right, freid?
Tom Wright:Freid. Yeah, freid Freid FTX. Oh, we actually did a podcast about him as well, but I mean, that's slightly different in the sense that this whole crypto frauds that we're seeing these days. I think those are pure Ponzi schemes Sam Bankman-Fried and other of these crypto companies. There are victims. They're normally mom-and-pop investors who get into it and don't really know what they're doing. It's like gambling what they're doing, um, and you know the reason. There are reasons why it's like gambling. There are reasons why these guys set up their, their crypto empires in hong kong and other places which aren't probably regulated right. It's because you do it in the us, um, and that's why sam batman ended up in jail, because he you know he was doing. He was stealing customer money and he had a you know he was using the us dollar and so the US Justice Department went after him. The case of someone like Eric Prince they had a lot of bad press with Nisar Square, where the Iraqi citizens were killed by Blackwater guards that were running a mock there. There's all that stuff.
Tom Wright:But I think he would defend himself. I actually read his his book about, about this all and he defends himself by sort of saying if I remember, who else supplies this service. Yeah, and I think that that that's, you know, crypto. There's no service. That's a ponzi scheme, that in both leon case and you know this, this military contracting story there's a service, right, it's just there's not a lot of competition, um, especially, I mean, like Leonard, he was the only person doing this really at scale in the Pacific. So I don't, I mean, I haven't looked into this closely, but I imagine now there are many fewer port visits to far flung ports in in Asia. They're probably just going more to the established places.
Mark McGrath:So yeah, that's really what it is. The other thing I think about and Ponch, and I have talked about this a lot out in the Pacific there's been no shortage of tragedies, of skippers getting relieved and ships colliding and other things like that, and I think I wonder if it points to things like that and, leonard, if there is some kind of connection to a broader cultural issue internally that, as we know, a system can't verify its own efficacy within itself If it is in kind of a funk that I can't get out of because these are these yeah, well, there was a.
Tom Wright:There was a collision off of singapore, um, quite soon after this whole thing, and, and some people I mean you tell me what you think that, like some former navy officers were telling me, they thought that it was a result of the hollowing out of the leadership after the fat leonard scandal. I think there was, there was a couple, there was one off singapore. People got, people got punished for these collisions, um, but yeah, I mean, I don't know if you can make that direct link on I'm not I'm not an expert enough on on operations in the us navy, but for sure what I do know is that the US Navy was reeling for this because Leonard was. So Leonard was lured to San Diego in 2015, I think, arrested then and this is what we're almost a decade later and I think you know, 20 something officers and supply officials were indicted. A bunch went to jail. Mike Misiewicz, marcy's husband, went to jail and is out now, and he was scrubbing ships for a while in San Diego. Amazingly, his son just graduated from Annapolis as well. His son, him and Marcy are now divorced, graduated from annapolis as well. You know his, his son, and him and marcy are now divorced, um, and you know it's, uh, leonard himself. So so leonard um is in, got cancer, was allowed what he was. The states he pleaded guilty, so he was a state's witness in all these cases involving other lower level navy officers. Because he got cancer, he was allowed to go live under house arrest in a in a tony neighborhood in san diego and that's where we shipped him the microphone in 2021 for the fat leonard podcast.
Tom Wright:He ends up after the podcast came out. He was sort of furious with the podcast, even though he'd spent 20 hours talking to me, because it clouded his deal with the government, and so he cut his ankle monitor off and went on the run and he escaped over the border into Mexico, ended up in Venezuela and was re-arrested trying to board a flight to Russia, which is where everyone goes who doesn't want to be sent back to the States. But unluckily for him, he stewed for a while in a venezuelan jail and then the us had had this guy in jail in the us who was a venezuelan uh, actually wasn't a venezuelan, but he was a bag man for venezuelan president maduro, nicholas maduro. So Maduro wanted this guy back in Venezuela, so the prisoner swapped this guy for Leonard and Leonard was sent back to San Diego and he's now back in jail there where we're still waiting for him to be sentenced 10 years after this whole thing started. So, yeah, it's just.
Tom Wright:And then a lot of those Navy officers that went to jail in the past 10 years many of them have had their convictions vacated, I think, because of prosecutorial misconduct and these kinds of things. So it's been a massive mess for the department of justice. It's. It's been very embarrassing for the navy because some some went to jail, others, like we said, were just quietly pensioned off, sent out, you know, sent into retirement, didn't get their fourth star or three star or whatever.
Mark McGrath:It seemed like Beliveau from the NCIS got the harshest sentence.
Tom Wright:Yeah, he got 12 years, if I'm not mistaken. 12 years, yeah, whereas I think you know somebody like Mike Mishevitz got a few years and is out. Yeah, beliveau is still in jail. You know Beliveau was going into the ncas investigative. You know that I think it was called k-net or something like this. It's like a system for downloading investigative documents and leaking them to lennox. So I mean, this was really like treacherous, treasonous stuff, um, and he was caught on wire tap or phone tap saying things like you treat your hookers better than you treat me, asking for cash, all this kind of totally crazy, crazy stuff. Yeah, and let's underline, this guy was Quantico Officer of the Year at NCI.
Tom Wright:So, that's the institutional problem we've got.
Mark McGrath:The other thing that puzzled me and this is at the limit of my own research I couldn't find one person that was dishonorably discharged. And so in the US military, if you are dishonorably discharged, that's about as bad as it can get. It's a boulder you're going to carry on your shoulder to your death, a stigma. And I don't think I saw and I Googled and searched and looked for this um that I didn't seem like one person was dishonorably discharged, which is ironic because, as a you know, as a former officer, that would have young Marines, you know, do things out in town, um, you know, worthy of being dishonorably discharged. They certainly pale in comparison to some of the things that I would hear that these officers did, you know, um, which is did, which is a puzzle to me.
Tom Wright:Yeah, yeah Well, different strengths, different ranks, right.
Mark McGrath:I'm sure Ponch could think of things that on your deployments that sailors would do and be dishonorably discharged. That certainly didn't threaten the national security of the United States.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, hey, mark, I'm just curious what kind of protection you have if you're dishonorably discharged. Does the UCMJ still apply to you? I don't know, do you know?
Mark McGrath:I think once you're well, depending on the gravity of your sentence, right. So I mean, there's guys that are putting Leavenworth for life. There's guys that are I'm thinking of one, you know writing bad checks, you know.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, but maybe there's a reason for that. I don't know. It may be because if you get discharged then I can't come back and charge you with something you've done. I don't know, there may be a reason for it.
Mark McGrath:Well, I know, Remember if a Marine would get dishonorably discharged and go back to town the first thing on a job application at McDonald's. Were you a veteran? If not, were you dishonorably discharged? I mean, that's a big, that's on every job application.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, yeah. And I think the guys that got kicked out of the military for not taking the vaccine got I don't know if they got dishonorably or other than honorable Well, I mean the way this happened was that the Department of Justice took.
Tom Wright:This was either dealt with by the department of justice or by the navy under the the what is it right?
Tom Wright:exactly which is the military courts yeah and the, the lower level guys, got dealt with by the department of justice. Yeah, and the higher level guy this, I mean, this is broadly speaking, it's not exactly true. There were some lower level guys on both but but the but the, the higher level guys got dealt with by the navy and you know they were given, uh, that, yeah, not dishonorably discharged. They were given letters of censure, I think they were called um I think that's right and basically written a letter saying you know, your behavior has shone a poor light on the Navy, but then they still retired with benefits and with the same number of stars if they were admirals or whatever it is, and that allowed a lot of them to go on to then be advisors. You know major defense companies or you referred to Raytheon earlier or you know congressional play roles in the Republican Party and think tanks or whatever it is you know. So really no punishment at all.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, you know I'm not going to say the name on here, but there was an aviator that was brought up on charges for this and I knew him here in Virginia Beach. I think I ran into him again in Europe over the years and just before 2012, when I knew him was, I think you get like 60 days or 600 days, thirty thousand dollar fine. Um, what other kind of fines and imprisonment, uh, were there involved with this case? If you can, share.
Tom Wright:Well, like we said, the the longest term given out so far was to the ncas officer, beliveau, who had helped leonard, and that was 12 years. He's still in jail, um, and then people like michael chevitz got fairly long terms. There was a number of other that. So the case that was going on last year of I think maybe seven or eight officers, um, those were the guys who were in sort of command of the seventh fleet, that was, those ended up getting mainly thrown out, um because of prosecutorial missteps, um, and you know this, I I think the terms of all range to a few years.
Tom Wright:I think most of the people are out who of the of the 20 plus people who were sentenced? I think most of those people are out um and were more and were more junior. There were some supply officials in singapore who who some pleaded guilty, and I think a lot of those guys who pleaded guilty and did jail time and got out are really angry because they then look at these other uh cases that have been vacated, or or the admirals who didn't do time, and so they just feel like they were really scapegoated and although you know they did wrong, it's quite easy to agree with them at the same time. Right that this was? This was definitely not.
Mark McGrath:Justice was not evenly meted out in this case what kind of resistance did you receive personally as you, the further you got into this, like what were some of the things that mean? Did people try to obfuscate you or or cut you off or sue?
Tom Wright:you or anything like that. Nothing at all. The only a couple of things happened. What one was?
Tom Wright:The navy had no interaction with us at all on the story, so they would refuse to to really interact at all. So that's just because there's no. You know, in pr sometimes there's nothing you can say, right, um, and this was the case. Um, when we, when the podcast came out, uh, leonard was still this witness before this, before he went on the run, so he was still in jail and he was going to the courthouse in san diego to take part in this trial of these other navy officers. It was still ongoing at the time and the defense council for those navy officers subpoenaed, went to the court and asked to subpoena our tapes. So what they wanted was they wanted all of our raw tapes from the interviews with Lennon.
Tom Wright:So obviously there's a podcast of nine episodes, but there's also the raw tapes, which were like akin to my notebooks, right, all the other chat that Lennon and I had, the other chat that Leonard and I had, and they said that the reason to want to see the raw tapes was they said, oh well, there may be some thing that Tom Wright, me, had left out from my podcast. That would help their clients and might get them off. Like you know, leonard, admitting to lying about them or something. I don't know what they really wanted and we fought that about them, or or something. I don't know what they really wanted and we fought that um subpoena, because, as a journalist, it's very important that, um, under the first amendment of the us constitution, which makes you the freest country in the world, um, there's a, there's the journalist rights are protected, and that includes the government not coming and rifling through our notebooks, because you know, often we have sources that we don't want to divulge, that have talked to us on background and you know.
Tom Wright:So this was like definitely very, and if you get a reputation for losing, you know, first Amendment cases like this, who's going to talk to you in the future? Right, because you know you might talk to me, punch, and then I put your name in a notebook but I don't show it to anyone. But then the government like subpoenas it, and so we fought it, but we lost. So we were ordered by the judge, who totally mishandled this case in many ways. Which courts did you?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:fight that in Tom, Was it US courts that was.
Tom Wright:Did you fight that in, tom? Which was that was? That was the, uh, a court in san diego federal court. Okay, okay, thank you. It was a judge in that court who had, who had ordered us to hand over notebooks, and so the way that we, we, we did send them the, the, and it was actually our partner in the us who was subpoenaed because it had to be a us entity, and we, um, we said okay, well, we'll adhere to this because we have to, otherwise we're going to be in a world of, you know, of a. Okay, we'll adhere to this because we have to, otherwise we're going to be in a world of a mess. But we'll also put out the transcripts of all of these interviews for the public because that way we're complying. But we're also trying to stick as close as we can to our own ethics.
Tom Wright:So I know, journalists get a bad rap these days, especially in the States, and there's culture wars. But you do need a free press and it needs to be protected by the government, otherwise it can't really do its job. So the judge made a huge and her ruling was that the Navy officers write to a free trial, to a fair trial. Trumped our First Amendment protections as journalists. But that was just a very poor ruling in my view because there was like why would I have left out anything? Leonard's saying something like that for my podcast? That's the whole point. Journalists are going to put that in right. If he'd said something like you know that was going to help their case, it would be in our podcast.
Mark McGrath:As an outsider looking inside the system, what was the most shocking thing that you uncovered? I mean, I guess there's so many examples in this case, but what were the things that really just took you for a loop that you couldn't believe?
Tom Wright:that truth was stranger than fiction oh, I mean, can we, can we, can we talk about bawdy things on this podcast? I mean, like the, the thing that is truly shocking. You can edit it out or bleep it out and, if you want, but the the thing that's truly shocking is when the seventh fleet pull into the port in in manila and they go to, they, they, they take a room, a suite, in the manila hotel, which is where General Douglas MacArthur had lived during the second world war. You know, hero of the second world war, and he'd lived there in the early parts of the war, I think, and he obviously, general Douglas MacArthur, famously smoked a corn cob pipe oh yeah and there was a rep.
Tom Wright:I mean, I think this room was a replica anyway, I'm not sure it was the exact room that he'd lived in because I think I think some things have gotten destroyed in the war, but they they bring back you know, these are very senior navy officers with leonard they bring back prostitutes to this room and they smash the case that the replica of the corn macarthur's corncob pipe is in and then proceed to use it as a dildo on the women, like in front of each other and just the. The sort of the image of that and what it says about how they conceived a hero of the us military and their own roles and and what they were doing on the on the flagship of the 7th Fleet, you know, the US's major fleet in the Pacific is just shocking. And yeah, I just think they'd lost their way.
Mark McGrath:Well, I guess a follow-up to that is an outsider looking in. Did you feel that the things that you learned and encountered, do you think that those things and encountered, do you think that those things were isolated, or do you think that that represented a broader, more pervasive culture that's elsewhere around, not just isolated to the fat lender incident?
Tom Wright:Well, I've talked to very senior Navy people, and off the record, who say, look, you got it wrong, or like you didn't get it wrong, but this is a few bad eggs. You know, that was the way of describing what happened. And I, you know, again, I'm not an expert. I haven't spent my whole career on the us navy. I spenta lot of time on this story and I can't subscribe to that point of view, at least in this frame of you know, do I think everybody in the us military is bad? No, I think the preponderance people would be would be good.
Tom Wright:Um, and I think you know the like, like most institutions, it's not. It's not that everybody's bad, and I think some people who are bad in this case it just happened like mike mishevitz is a good example. It's like he was. He was this cambodian immigrant like we're talking about. He got this command of a ship and he he has human failings and human reasons for doing what he did. He was insecure, he wasn't from the normal, you know, waspish background that would end up commanding a ship. Maybe and you know so leonard was going to help him make a big success of his career. This is all going to be in our film that we're making right um. So you know you can, you can understand it, but yeah, it doesn't make. It doesn't mean that it was just a few bad eggs.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I understand it. I mean, I totally can see how, like I said, I know some of the folks that were involved. I could see how their personalities, their backgrounds, how they gravitated toward this type of behavior. And again, it's context that matters, right, there's a war and again, I'm not justifying this, it's just the whole thing here is corruption happens within systems, right, and that's what we got to be aware of and do something about and listen to those weak signals and those outliers that are saying, hey, this isn't right, we can't squash them.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And it's going back to your First Amendment point. There is the moment we squash the flow of information, we're done, it's over, right, and I see people doing this now that talk about complex, adapted systems, that talk about weak signals, that talk about the importance of information flow, but the moment they don't like something, they want to suppress it, right, because it doesn't fit their orientation, their worldview. Our point on this is we need that information to flow and I back you up 100% on your view about the First Amendment. As a journalist, you have that protection, or you should have that protection that you need to be a journalist, right, and we need that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And we're losing that in this type of atmosphere and I think what's happening is the things that happened during the fat Leonard period is happening at scale everywhere. Everywhere we look, there's scandals or there's. I mean it's, it's just mind blowing. So my frustration with folks is when they come at us and say, um you know, hey, I want to talk about weak signal detection, complex adaptive systems, interactions, agile, all this bullshit that people are talking about. It's their actions that matter and I'm pissed because I see this all the time and I just want our listeners to know that. That's why we fucking created this podcast, right?
Mark McGrath:Right Moose, Absolutely.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, well, and also too, tom, in your own research of looking at us in our podcast right, right, moose, absolutely, yeah. Well, and also too, tom, in your own research of looking at us in our podcast. You see that John Boyd is our sort of you know what we're building off of his work and developing his work, and he was very famous for challenging bureaucracy and challenging graft and challenging corruption, so a story like this ties right in. But he's also very famous for saying that you have to challenge all assumptions because otherwise what becomes doctrine today will be dogma forever after, and these things get locked into cultures, these things get locked into organizations that are wrong, and they can go on unchallenged. Your investigative journalism challenges hold points of views that need to be changed.
Mark McGrath:The way punch, and I uh do uh, adaptive leadership, advisory.
Mark McGrath:I mean we're challenging assumptions, I mean that's got to be, otherwise these sort of islands they'll punch us talking about information flow, sort of these things sort of uh, they swell up as hubs that never change and people just build off of, because it's, I don't know, safety in numbers or who knows what, but it doesn't lead to excellence, it doesn't lead to progress, and that's kind of the intent and I think you've done a beautiful job of having this discussion with us why this is important to study, why this podcast, why this is important to study, why this podcast, which is brilliantly done with sound and everything everybody should listen to this.
Mark McGrath:If you're a leader or a team in any industry, in any discipline, this is worth listening to and having a discussion around, because it's chock full of lessons. And that would be my next question to you If you were standing in front of a company what do you think are the biggest takeaways that you hope that, when people listen to the Fat Leonard podcast, what are the things that they could extract so that they're on guard for or aware of what would be your intent for the work that you've done here?
Tom Wright:Well, I think, just flowing from what you both just so eloquently said, I think it's when something becomes dogma, it's dangerous, and I think the dogma in this case was that this guy is the only guy that gets it done, right, right, and the corruption is the unintended consequence of that. But this is operational. Operational, you know, efficiency trumps a little bit of backsheesh, right, and that that became that became like the. You know, and dogma in this case is often said by the people who've been around the longest, and and, like I think we said earlier, you're naive if you challenge that right. And so, you know, in the film version of this, which I think is going to be fantastic, there's going to be these characters who do challenge it and they're going to face a lot of roadblocks because you're coming up against and I think it is difficult to change institutions that work in a certain way, and especially to do that in the context of, of a world that had gone through september, the 11th, and, and and attacks on the us, and then the threat from al-qaeda.
Tom Wright:You know, um, you could be tarnished as unpatriotic to like take on love, or you could be tarnished as, uh, a blue stocking. You know, you don't like sex, uh, what's wrong with a bit of like prostitution or something like this? You know you're not one of the lads and so to really stand up to that stuff is difficult. So, yeah, I think, if you, if you, and if you're young, and I've got, I've got, uh, high school kids and I tell them, you know it's easier to be misled too because you're you're insecure, right, and you, you're in this institution, you're learning, and you two have been around the block a bit so you can have this podcast and try to make your mark, right and same with me. But young people and you know these generally were young people and if they weren't young they've been around, been around, leonard, since when they were young. They made it to Admiral, you know. So it's hard to stand up against the dogma, but you have to.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, that was an interesting thing in the podcast about how he would earmark or identify officers very young in their career and he would stick with them as their careers progressed through the ranks very young in their career and he would stick with them as their careers progressed through the ranks which he it seems like he had an uncanny ability to identify who was who was climbing and what he could help them with or get from them yeah, fraudsters, fraudsters are always very like.
Tom Wright:Successful fraudsters are always brilliant. You know jolo, the fraudster in the billion dollar whale I mean we wrote, we wrote this book called Billion Dollar Whale. It was a New York Times bestseller. It sold a lot of copies in the US. You know he was able to figure out what people wanted and then give it to them. It was a great skill. What can you share with?
Mark McGrath:us about the movie. What can you share with us about the? I don't know the schedule or the production.
Tom Wright:We have a, we have a great script and we are um, we're currently in script revision. So just getting it like um polished up and then we will go out and, uh, take it out to market and it's, it's um. It's a really great story because it encapsulates so many things, you know, not just the human stories of the characters, but also this military-industrial complex that we've talked about. That, you know, for the least from it's still obviously a huge thing, but from 2000 to 2020, during the wars, you know, the spending was so huge that I think leonard will very much be seen as a character of that era, as eric prince is. I'm not sure that kind of character is gonna gonna come again around again anytime soon. Maybe I'm wrong, but but I think that's that's why the movie will really resonate with people yeah, I think that emergent property is key.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Fat Leonard emerged out of that system we created, same with Eric Prince and others. And I haven't read your book on the billion-dollar well yet, but imagine the same thing.
Tom Wright:Well, you know the billion-dollar well story is like. You know, he was this guy, jolo, this Malaysian. Actually, he's from Penang Island, the same island as Leonard Francis, which is quite uncanny. But you know, this guy from Malaysia is able to tap into the world of sovereign wealth, which are these huge pots of money that governments run. He managed to persuade the prime minister of Malaysia to set up one and they just stole billions of dollars from it. And you know Goldman Sachs, which was coming off the back of the big short. You know the global housing crisis, thes housing crisis, in which it had done bad things, does another bad thing, which is it? You know it makes, you know, huge, huge profits dealing with this corrupt guy. And, um, like I said, that, this partner, tim leisner, who was a goldman partner. He's pleaded guilty to helping steal 200 million. He's still also not been sentenced.
Tom Wright:It takes a long time for these white-collar crimes. These things happen, these stories happen. You know, 15 years ago now, um, both fat leonard and fat leonard's a decade ago, the billion dollar well stories 15 years ago. And joe lowe, the fraudster, himself still on the run. He's, he's hiding out in china. Um, so, yeah, you don't get closure. These stories for a long time. Yeah, lots of lawyers.
Mark McGrath:Are there any other projects that you're working on now or looking into?
Tom Wright:Oh, yeah, so we did a podcast called Crypto Kingpins about Sam Bankman-Fried with Universal. That came out last year and we're adapting that. That's a great story. We actually got to know this guy, changping zhao, who was a chinese uh crypto guy, who was sam bankman freed's mentor, and then sam bankman free turns on him and he helps to bring him down. So that's a. That's a great two-hander. Um. And then, yeah, we've got many. We've got a show called crinna and the king, which is about the spanish royal family and the the way that the king uses the intelligence services of Spain against his lover. I think in all institutions with power and money.
Mark McGrath:The current king or the abdicated?
Tom Wright:No, the king who abdicated and is now living in the UAE. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, we specialize my company, project Raisin, that I founded with Bradley Hope, with whom I wrote Billion Dollar Whale. We specialize in. These kind of truth is stranger than fiction stories that we make as podcasts or books or, you know, magazine articles, and then the next step is to develop a TV show or a film off of that.
Mark McGrath:We're going to have to have you back on to talk about those for sure. Tv show or a film off of that? Oh, we're gonna have to have you back on to talk about those for sure. I um, I wanted to maybe finish with paunch's point about you know, fat leonard was emergent, and I think that's a critical thing to understand about when systems are created and systems are perpetuated. Jolo, fat leonard, nick leeson, go down right. These guys don't grow up. They don't just fall out of the tree or they don't just come up out of hell and then just appear out of nowhere. They're tapping into things that are already in existence. They could flourish inside of a system. All those sort of nodes and networks and things are there, already built for them to to do what they do. It's not some happy, mysterious accident that these guys just just appear out of nowhere 100.
Tom Wright:I mean jolo, you know, he could have been a very successful wall street banker, right, but he was just just wanted to do it supercharged. Uh, leonard leon, you know, could have continued to make money just being a contractor for the US Navy, within the bounds of just good money, right. But all of these things, yeah, they tap into a system. They see, they learn, they get experience in that system. They see there's no real limits to what they can do and it snowballs and it brings more and more people into it and yeah, the end is a big clusterfuck.
Mark McGrath:Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, go ahead, punch.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, I'm just thinking if you could give us an outside perspective. What's going on in the world right now. You're, you're, you're sitting outside the U? S, just you know what. What's it? Look, in the next 30, 40, 50, 60 days, what's your perspective? And it's a broad question. I just want to get some thoughts from you.
Tom Wright:Well, I mean, I'm very much involved in the projects that we're developing at Brazen, to be honest. So, you know, my journalistic side is still. I still read the news, but I'm not, you know, I think the relationship, I mean this is why Fat Leonard was the first show that we decided to make it. You know it's consequential. The stakes are very high because the relationship with China and the US is one of the most important. You know, there's obviously the war in Ukraine and Russia, but Russia's, you know, a much lesser power than China. So you know, you've got the US US elections, of course, which are hugely consequential, which I'm no expert on, but I'm keenly watching from overseas. But then the US relationship with China is crucial. And this whole idea of whether, you know, there's this Thucydides trap or not, is it possible for one country to rise without it being leading to a war with the incumbent superpower, the US in this case? So I think that's a hugely consequential story. The optimistic scenario is that everything is trade, is so intertwined between China and the US that this will act as a dampener on things.
Tom Wright:But yeah, I don't know, and it seems that Xi Jinping has sort of pulled back a little bit Some of the dangerous rhetoric, the South China Sea stuff, but I don't know. That's certainly something that I I mean personally. I used to live in Hong Kong and I moved to Singapore with my family because of the crackdown in Hong Kong that happened a couple of years ago the national security law my house had been bugged in Hong Kong by the Chinese government at the request of Jolo. We actually got documents so we knew about this. That's something we're always watching from a news perspective. But yeah, at Brazen we're much more sort of involved in finding unbelievable true stories. That, uh, that you know going to make people want to want to watch, listen and watch.
Mark McGrath:Well, I I highly recommend them. They're, they're worth the time. They uh, they're insightful, um, entertaining, not in a a diversionary way, but entertaining in the in a diversionary way, but entertaining in how informative they are and their tremendous discussion topics. Again, we've focused here on with Fat Leonard, but it is something that leaders should be extracting what happened and talk about it openly with their teams Because, as I think you've really brilliantly pointed out, I mean this can happen to anybody.
Mark McGrath:I mean these are not bad people per se that wind up doing very bad things, given the circumstances that they were put in and various pressures and other entrapments and enticements and things, because they're human. We're about human factors and human systems and helping humans become excellent and John Boyd gave a very clear. That's why those definitions of evil and corruptions are so important to really drill down and realize that evil and corruption are not out of reach of anybody to. You know again, horror movie figures that sit in a boardroom twiddling their mustaches or whatever. I mean these are real humans that were put in very human situations. So couldn't agree more.
Mark McGrath:Well, thanks for having me on.
