All right, let me have a sip of my tea. My delicious new tea. Boy, I wish I'd gotten in a tea habit many years ago, because I actually do like tea better than coffee. But I'm an american, so I have to drink coffee. Okay, we ready it? January 17, 2006. Victor's relaxing in his new home in the Bahamas, taking a nap. He's relocated. For once, he's got a lot of time on his hands. And his new home is huge. I mean, vast. It has hundreds of rooms, but alas, no mistress suite and no alligator skin couches. And there's no lion on the menu. And expensive cigars seem to be a little hard to find. Now, Victor doesn't own this place. He's a guest. A guest of none other than Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. That would account for all the rooms, right? Well, kinda, because Victor's not that kind of guest. Victor's in the slammer in the pokey? Yep. Victor's in prison. Her Majesty's prison in Nassau. Now, this place, it has a reputation, and it is not a good one. It's seriously overcrowded. The cells, they're tiny with buckets for toilets. There's disease, there's violence, and let's not even talk about the rats and the maggots.

A lawyer once said this prison could break even the toughest of men. You know what lawyer said? That? Victor's lawyer. So anyway, it's January. This is when things get serious. One prison officer is dead, two are injured. Four inmates have escaped. It's a prison break. An island wide manhunt is launched. All the escapees are eventually captured or killed. In the coroner's inquest that follows, a notorious drug kingpin is fingered for bankrolling the breakout. The plan was pretty audacious. Grab keys from the guards and unlock all the doors, then let everyone escape. But it didn't exactly work out like that. And get this. In a witness statement read at the inquest, someone else is fingered for helping bankroll this crazy idea. Someone from a very different background. Someone from one of the Bahamas most exclusive neighborhoods, a neighborhood you'll be very familiar with, because that someone, it's claimed, is a white boy from lifeord key. Now, just to be clear, there's no proof, no proof at all, that the white boy from liferd key was Victor Casini. This is the pirate of Prague, an apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House. I'm Jono. Sarah.

Chapter seven, the eight stages of grief. I think it's seven. Chapter seven, the seven stages of grief. So let's go back. That big SoCar privatization deal aimed at grabbing control of Azerbaijan's vast oil industry. It's gone bad. About as bad as a deal can go. After two years of waiting, two years of excitement, two years of eagerly anticipating sensational returns, it hasn't happened. And the Azeris have had the last laugh. Victor's investors, though, they are not laughing. They can't believe what's just happened. It's like a bereavement, denial, anger. Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. I think they're experiencing all five stages of grief, all at the same time. Well, apart from one stage, acceptance. No. Acceptance will prove very, very hard.

The firm lost well over $100 million. I've had losing investments, but nothing of this sort of magnitude. Very painful.

It was a big hit. Well, I was angry with myself. I was embarrassed making a bad decision. Am I angry that I lost money?

Yes.

Am I angry that I did it?

Yes.

Am I sorry I made the investment? You did. Right. I'm sorry I made the investment.

Then recrimination. Maybe that should be the 6th stage of grief.

Victor got screwed. His investors got screwed, and then there was infighting between them. When the show goes wrong, people start pulling out each other's hair.

But pretty soon, there's only one person whose hair they want to pull out, and that hair is ginger. Because while the other investors are down, way, way down on the deal, for some reason, Victor isn't. It certainly appears that way.

Anyway, it was very clear after a while that we were head.

Let's face it, Socar was never going to be privatized. Not now, not ever. But it seems Victor had planned for the worst. He had an insurance policy. Victor wasn't going to lose out like all the others. As I once heard someone say, a man's gotta have options. Well, Victor certainly had options. And Victor's options, it seems, were worth cold, hard cash.

He could buy options cheap and sell them dear and make a lot of money. And the flow of the money went from the victims to Kojani.

That's John Moscow. Back then, he was a top New York state criminal prosecutor, and he knew a lot about options and a lot about Victor. Peter. Peter, all this stuff about options. Help me unpack it.

Okay. So Victor told his investors that to use the vouchers to buy SOCaR, all the western investors would also need to buy options, and they'd need one option for every voucher.

So basically, just another piece of paper.

Yeah. And Victor agreed that when he bought these options on behalf of the investors, he would not make a penny of profit. He'd charge them just what he paid for them.

And of course, he kept his word, right?

Not exactly. So it later turned out that he charges investors $25 for options that he'd actually bought earlier for less than a dollar apiece. Allegedly, of course. And so Victor ended up pocketing nearly $100 million.

Allegedly.

That's right.

When Lee Cooperman and Victor's other investors found out, they hit the roof.

He should be in jail. He's a scumbag.

That was certainly Lee's view. Anyway.

He's a bad guy. I look like a schmuck.

After recrimination, retribution. Maybe that's the 7th stage of grief. Lee Cooperman was not the kind of guy to take this sort of thing lying down. And nor were most of the other investors. They wanted their money back. But how to get it? Well, remember all of Victor's humongous houses? The peak house in Aspen, scene of that million dollar party where this story all began? Then there was Victor's mansion in lifeord key in the Bahamas, with the massive pool. And all those neighbors with their nautical themed belts. And how about his 500 acre private island? And then there was another place that Victor had bought. A place we haven't mentioned before in London. Eaton Square, to be precise. And, boy, was this place fancy.

You're never going to guess who sold him the place, Joe.

Give me a clue.

Well, he's a big, big name in 20th century musical theater.

Oh, my God. I mean, you're kidding me. The great Steven Sondheim?

No, not your hero. It was Andrew Lloyd Weber. Lord Andrew Lloyd Weber.

The guy who wrote Phantom of the Opera and cats? That guy?

That's him.

Well, maybe Lord Lloyd Weber should write a musical about Victor someday.

I'd love to go see that.

If that ever happens, I'll buy us the best seats in the house, Peter. I promise. So, yeah, Victor had bought up Andrew Lloyd Weber's old place. And I gotta say, it was quite something. Six stories, an indoor pool and marble flooring throughout. This was one of London's finest houses. Or at least it was until Victor got his hands on it. According to british newspapers, Victor quickly gutted the place. The indoor pool gone. And all that beautiful marble flooring. It ended up in a dumpster. 40 dumpsters. Lord Lloyd Weber and his wife, who'd moved just around the corner. They were said to be horrified. And guess what Victor did to the house then. What does every self respecting multimillionaire need? Peter. Peter.

A nuclear bomb shelter? Joe.

That's right. Because let's face it, if there is Armageddon, there's at least two species that'll survive, right? Cockroaches and multi millionaires. Victor was remodeling the London house to live there with his third wife, Ludka, and their two daughters. Apparently, Luka Much preferred London to the Bahamas. But after all that effort, Victor never spent a single night there. By 2000, he and Lutka had split. Victor was young, free and single again. And he was young still, just 36. 36. And with all these fancy properties in London, the Bahamas and Aspen, not to mention all his other toys, the yacht, the plane, the island. But now Victor's investors wanted to get their hands on them. They were mad, remember? And they wanted their money back. And to get it, they'd need to go to court. And they did not hold back. They launched civil suits in not one, not two, not three, but four locations. The Bahamas, London, Colorado and the British Virgin islands. But as it turned out, all those civil suits were the least of Victor's worries. Victor was now also facing criminal investigations. And while the civil stuff can cost you money, criminal stuff can cost you your freedom.

For John Moscow and the Manhattan DA's office, whose jurisdiction included Wall street, financial crimes were their sweet spot.

Manhattan was the home of an awful lot of frauds. And I prosecuted pretty much anything that moved. I was like a kid in a candy store.

And Victor's case was unusually sweet.

We just started asking questions. Who is he? Where did he come from and what he do?

And after two years of asking questions, the Manhattan DA's office indicted Victor for grand larceny. They charged him with swindling Lee Cooperman and his big hedge fund clients out of $182,000,000. That is not chump changed. Not even for Lee Cooperman. And the Manhattan DA was not alone. The feds were hot on Victor's tail, too. That meant the US Justice Department and the FBI. Now, when it came to the DA's theft charges, Victor denied doing anything wrong. But with the feds, he took a very different approach, a very surprising approach. You might even say an astonishing approach. Yeah, Victor does something pretty audacious. In November 2000, he strolls into the US embassy in Nassau for a meeting with the feds, with prosecutors and an FBI agent, to be precise. And here's what he tells him. He tells him he's got information and he wants to share it. And Victor starts to talk. He starts to sing. In fact, he sings like a canary. Two whole days of singing. He tells the feds all about his oil deal in Azerbaijan. And brace yourself for this. He claims, in no uncertain terms, that he bribed azeri officials. And not just any azeri officials.

He claims that he bribed none other than the president of Azerbaijan himself, Hadar aliev Baba. Bribery. Now, that is a very serious crime indeed. Okay, so now you're thinking, why on earth would Victor admit to that? Why would the man at the center of the whole damn deal blow the whistle on himself? Well, that is a very good question. And the answer is surprisingly simple. It's because Victor thought he was beyond the reach of Uncle Sam. And beyond the reach of Uncle Sam's laws against foreign bribery. Untouchable, exempt, immune, because he. Well, maybe you got there already. Victor wasn't a us citizen. In which case, why did he say anything at all? Wouldn't it have been better just to keep his mouth shut? Well, there's a simple answer to that, too, because Victor's a pirate, remember? And his cutlass is drawn. He's doing it to cut down his investors, all those investors who are coming after him. So here's what he tells the feds, and it's good.

Cozaney's response was kind of tit for tat.

That's Rob park, then a prosecutor with the US Department of Justice.

His response was to go and say, well, I'm going to let everybody know that all of the US investors knew full well what I was doing.

So, yeah, this is what Victor tells the feds. Sure, I bribed azeria officials. I hold my hands up. It was me. I did it. But you can't touch me because I'm not an american citizen. But all my investors, they're Americans, and they knew all about it. So if true, Victor's allegations put all those investors at serious risk of prosecution for a very serious crime. Some way of fighting back, eh? But it turns out Victor has miscalculated. Peter, enlighten me.

Well, here's the thing. U. S. Prosecutors don't agree with Victor, that he's immune from prosecution. Not at all. So they're going to keep going after him. His story about bribing azeri government officials makes the case even more tantalizing.

And prosecutor Rob park was totally tantalized.

He was the principal, the lead, and the instigator of the scheme. It was his idea. He implemented it, managed it, developed it, and he solicited the investors. So there was never a view that he was anything other than the hub of the wheel with the spokes that went out to the investors and the hub of the criminal misconduct.

So, Peter, what kind of bribery are we talking about here?

All kinds. Allegedly, of course.

Yes, we mustn't forget allegedly.

So, first, there were some serious birthday presents for President Aliev. To celebrate Baba's 75th birthday, Victor sent a representative from Asprey.

That's the ritzy London jeweler.

Yeah. Victor sent someone from Asprey all the way to Baku with some very generous birthday gifts.

Let's hear them.

Well, there was a diamond studded box, a monogrammed alligator desk set, and a fabrice bell push for summoning servants covered with gold, jade and rubies.

And how much did all of that cost?

Grand total, around $630,000.

Whoa. So that was it for the bribes, right?

No, that was just the start. According to the US prosecutors, there were also cash drops and wire transfers. More than $11 million paid to four Tapazeri officials and their family members. Victor's right hand man in Baku would later describe in court how he delivered a duffel bag containing millions of dollars in cash to a tap Azuri official. And then there was another $1 million to fund a London shopping spree for President aliev's daughter.

Okay, so now we've got jewelry, we've got cash drops, we've got wire transfers. There wasn't anything else, was there?

Oh, there was. And here's the really big one, Joe. Victor claims he gave the Azeris a huge piece of the soCaR deal as an inducement for privatizing Sokar. He says he agreed to give the Azeri officials, including President Aliyev and his son, who ran socar, two thirds of the profits from the deal.

Two thirds?

Two thirds. If Sokar was privatized, according to the feds, this would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Holy moly. Now, what did the Azeris say about this?

Really good point. The Azeris deny taking any bribes.

So the Azeris deny it all?

Yes, they've denied accepting any bribes. They've denied any kind of government corruption.

But that's absolutely what the feds alleged, right? Conspiring to bribe azeri officials?

Absolutely. And that's what key witnesses would later swear to in court. And, of course, it's also what Victor told prosecutors and what he told reporters like me, too. First, that he had bribed certain Azeris. Second, that his investors knew that those Azeris were on the take. And also that those investors understood full well that this deal would never happen without it.

Now, if all that's true, did the investors really know that is a big question, and it's one that different prosecutors disagreed over. John Moscow in the Manhattan DA's office took one view.

I don't think that most of them actually knew it.

Whereas Rob park with the feds, he took a different view.

Many, if not most of the investors had to have some knowledge or had to have their head stuck in the sand. But there's a long way between that view and sufficient hard evidence to support an indictment and proceeding to trial.

Well, here's an idea. Why don't we just ask the investors? Hey, Aaron Fleck.

Did you know when I invested in this, I told Victor, Victor, if you're doing anything illegal, I don't want to be involved. I don't care how much money you can make. I didn't want anything with foreign bribes. I asked in that two or three times. Victor, you told me, you're not doing anything illegal. No bribes, he said. Aaron, I would not bribe Lee Cooperman.

Did you know?

I had no knowledge of that.

But Victor was adamant that you and all the other investors knew all about it.

He's a liar. He's a liar.

The who knew question becomes a big deal in the federal investigation. But maybe there's another way of looking at this. What do you think, John Moscow.

They should have known it. In most deals, they would apply their brain before they opened their pocket. But here, the rewards were so great that they just jumped in without thinking. They didn't want to ask questions about it.

But here's my question. Why do you think they invested in the first place? Why did they invest? They believed the story that Victor was telling. People like to believe these stories. It's human nature.

I really had trouble accepting that people bought into this stuff, but they did.

What he did was just remarkable. He studied them and he seduced them. He found their weaknesses and just brought them along, which, for a czech kid with an undergrad degree, was actually kind of impressive.

People gravitate to quick, easy money, man.

And it's supposed to be some of.

The smartest people in the world.

But greed has a way.

Victor was a student, is a student of greed.

I guess when you get enough dollar signs in front of your eyes, it clouds your reason. So when you see that your buddy down the street, who's also a multimillionaire and has a huge home in Aspen, decides to invest, then you want to invest. You don't want to get left out of the deal of the century. And I think a lot of big investors are like that. It becomes catchy you're pushing all those.

Buttons that fire human emotion, greed. I want to make my dollar into $2. Fear. Fear of losing out.

I think it's a combination of naivete and greed, which is a perfect combination for losing your shirt.

You would think that the sophisticated investors would have a whole different approach. But I think greed is greed. And the secret to any of these scam deals is appeal to the marks. Greed. And to me, anyway, that's obviously what happened. I suppose if any of them were sitting here, they would argue with that.

Well, one of them is sitting here.

Lee, I'm the least greedy guy. You know. I don't care about money. Greed didn't motivate. Ain't me.

Well, wait, hold on a second here. I mean, all this talk of greed, like, isn't capitalism built on greed? Isn't that the impulse, the motor that powers the whole system? People want to make money, right? Then they want to make more money, and money makes money. It was the deal of the decade, right? The deal of the century. A national oil company for sale, for cheap. Was it too good to be true? It certainly seems like it now. But who hasn't fallen for something that seemed too good to be true? I mean, aren't you kind of heartened, at least a little bit, that this bunch of smart investors could be had just like the rest of us? Anyway, back to all those investigations. Remember Victor had strolled into the US embassy in the Bahamas and admitted to bribery. I mean, for your average prosecutor, isn't that like, all your christmases coming at once? Well, yes and no, because these prosecutors believe that what Victor had admitted to was just the tip of the iceberg. It could be all their christmases and birthdays coming all at once, but they needed much more evidence. And in a case like this, there's one surefire way to get it.

There's never a corruption case or a terrorism case or even, for that matter, a mafia case that doesn't have cooperators. The government needs cooperators to make those kinds of difficult cases.

That's Sheera Schindlen, and she should know. She served for 22 years as a federal judge in the southern district of New York and presided over most of the criminal matters involving Victor.

In these kinds of cases, you always need to flip somebody down the chain, somebody less culpable, lower level people, because they have to make those deals to convict the people higher up.

And that's exactly what the feds do. They start making deals. So, Peter, who do they make deals with?

They make deals with three key players in this story. First, there's Victor's right hand man in Baku. He was a key part of the whole operation there. He was the guy who led the team of Russians buying up vouchers on the street. And he told prosecutors about delivering that duffel bag full of cash to the Azeria official.

Okay, so the feds make a deal with him. Who else?

The second guy is Victor's lawyer in Zurich. This guy handled a bunch of Victor's shady financial transactions, and he described to the feds how he set up overseas accounts for payments to the Azeris.

So now we've got Victor's right hand man in Baku and his lawyer in Switzerland. So who's the third?

The third is Clayton Lewis. He's the Wiz kid from Lee Cooperman's omega hedge fund. It was Lewis who persuaded Cooperman to jump into Victor's deal. And Lewis also later admitted that he'd promoted the big Omega investment. Only after Victor told him the Azeris were on the take.

So these three guys, they all made deals with the feds? And I'm guessing the reason they did that is because they're trying to avoid the slammer.

Exactly right. If they admit to what they've done and give evidence against Victor and others, they might get away with just a slap on the wrist.

The deals work like a charm. Well, more or less. The feds believe they have enough evidence to indict Victor. In May 2005, they charge him on a total of, get this, 26 criminal counts. 26. And while we're crunching the numbers, Victor is facing a maximum sentence of 200 years. Now pay attention. This bit is important. Really important. While the Manhattan DA has charged Victor with plain old theft, stealing his investors money, the feds have charged him under something called the Foreign Corrupt Practices act. Write that down because that's going to become a big snafu. Foreign Corrupt practices act. We'll come back to that later. So now everyone's after Victor. The feds are after him. The Manhattan DA is after him. The investors are after him. And guess what? Now even the checks are after him. They have not forgotten Victor's exploits back in the early 90s. Remember those heady days when Victor bought up all those vouchers from hundreds of thousands of ordinary people and grabbed a big chunk of the nation's economy? Victor was wheeling and dealing like there was no tomorrow. Now the czech prosecutors are investigating him for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from his humble investors.

The criminal charges they're pursuing could also land Victor in jail for a very long time. The checks, the DA, the feds, they're all after him. He's being hunted. Surely Victor can't outrun them all, can he? Well, maybe he can, because they all have a problem, the same problem. None of them can get at him. And the reason for that is very, very simple. Victor is back in the Bahamas. Now, the feds, they've made life kind of hard for themselves because they charge Victor under that rather unusual U. S. Law. You wrote it down, right? The Foreign Corrupt Practices act. The law was designed to stop people from bribing foreign officials. The problem is this, and it's a big one. The Bahamas didn't have a similar law, and that was going to make getting Victor out of the Bahamas pretty tough. Rob park was preparing himself for the long haul.

We just knew that we would have a lengthy extradition process in the Bahamas.

So things are not looking too good. At first, Rob park and his FBI colleagues simply try to wait him out, wait for Victor to get itchy feet and leave the Bahamas for somewhere they can well just nab him. And hoping that might happen, they keep their indictment of Victor hush hush, top secret, under seal.

I think he was pretty acutely aware that people were looking for him. So we were at least trying to see if he could somehow be lured out. And we also thought that he might come to the US. He had a house in the US. He had long interests.

Now, remember, Victor was used to just going wherever the hell he pleased, whenever the hell he pleased, on a whim. Am I right, Peter?

You're right, Joe. Remember back in 1999 when I first started writing about Victor?

Yes.

I spent some quality time with him in the Bahamas.

That all expenses trip we sent you on, I have not forgotten it.

Yeah, I haven't either. So one morning when I was there, I got a call from his assistant. She told me that Victor was on his way to pick me up and to make sure that I had my passport.

Sounds kind of exciting.

Yeah. And sure enough, Victor turns up in a gold cadillac.

It's so Victor. I mean, you just can't make this stuff up.

You really can't, Joe. So Victor drove us to the airport in this gold cadillac, and he led me to a small plane. And it turned out that we were going to fly to the Turks and Caicos for lunch.

And Victor was the pilot.

Victor was the pilot. And I was right next to him in the co pilot seat.

You are a brave man, Peter Alkind. So Rob park was hoping that Victor's old wanderlust would sooner or later get the better of him.

It's surprising over time how many individuals have been arrested going to a third country because they just got tired of feeling like they were stuck.

But Victor was patient. He was playing a long game. And, I mean, the Bahamas isn't exactly the worst place in the world to evade justice. But the feds were patient, too. And they hadn't just been playing a waiting game. They'd been busy in the Bahamas courts working to get Victor arrested and extradited. And they felt they had a strong case against our guy. So they finally decided to make their move. October 5, 2005. Midday. Victor's returning home from lunch at the club in Lifert key. Can you picture the scene? Victor's in his shorts, his angora sweater draped over his shoulders. I don't need to tell you the wine he's drinking. Maybe he's looking forward to a massage later on from big George. But there won't be any massage today. In fact, there won't be any massages for quite a while because today is a very big day for Victor. I mean, think about it all just for a minute. This was a kid who came to Albuquerque with nothing but his own guile and chutzpah who returned to Prague as a man with a Harvard degree. A man with a Harvard degree who was almost penniless, who then seized the moment and transformed himself into a multimillionaire.

And not just any old multi millionaire. A multimillionaire who owned a big chunk of the czech economy. But for this man, even that wasn't enough. This man then conjured up an opportunity, an unbelievable opportunity. An opportunity that hooked in some of the smartest investors in the world. One guy did all that, and he did it all by the age of just 35. I mean, holy crap, that is one hell of a ride. But finally, finally, the law has closed in on Victor. The FBI and the bahamian police are waiting for him.

The Pirate of Prague, an apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House and hosted by me, Joe no Serra. The producer is Ben Crichton. The associate producer is Peter Elkind. The writers are Lawrence Grisell, Ben Crichton, and me, Joan O'Sera. Music is by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nankmannell, and Toby Matamong. Sound design and engineering by Vulcan Kiseltog. Our managing producer is Amika Shortino Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie PI. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Grisell. Buddha messing picnic, Budy bucket.