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Though the con remained largely unnoticed by the outside world, observers in Malaysia began to raise questions about the fund’s operations as early as 2010. As one of the few Malaysian news outlets not controlled by Najib cautiously hinted, regarding Low’s initial deal, “Some critics have suggested that certain intermediaries had pocketed a hefty profit from the [pre-Goldman] bond issue.” But the story did not take on an international life until several years later, when an attentive British journalist received a tip.

Clare Rewcastle Brown, sister-in-law of former British prime minister Gordon Brown, spent her early childhood in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo that was then a British colony. In 2009, working as a journalist in London, she revisited Sarawak and learned of corrupt government lumber deals that were stripping the land of its forests and replacing them with destructive palm-oil plantations that impoverished the local population. As she investigated further, she received the first of many death threats and was banned from Sarawak. Undeterred, she launched a blog, Sarawak Report, and began detailing governmental corruption in a way that the generally muzzled Malaysian press could not. In July 2013, a source slipped her inside details of the Goldman bond deals, and she posted a series of articles questioning the outrageous fees and interest on the loans. Later that year, she followed up with a report detailing the curious involvement of Najib’s stepson, Riza Aziz, in the financing of The Wolf of Wall Street. “If the money is Najib’s,” asked Rewcastle Brown, “how did the PM get to be so rich?” Subsequent posts highlighted Low’s partnership with Aziz in film financing and the latter’s high-priced property acquisitions, including a $35 million Manhattan condominium.

These revelations spurred a growing outcry within Malaysia and in the international business press. Less so, it seemed, in Washington, where for years Najib’s underlings had made efforts to garner high-level goodwill. Frank White is a case in point. White was the national vice chair of President Obama’s reelection campaign, raising at least $500,000 for the race, and he went on to serve as a cochair of Obama’s Inaugural Committee. In 2012, he received a $10 million “consulting” payment from a firm owned by one of Low’s business partners, one who had played an integral role in the Goldman-brokered bond deals. Additional millions were channeled from the fund into DuSable Capital, an “energy and infrastructure firm” co-owned by White and Pras Michel, a former member of the hip-hop group Fugees whom Low had met on the party circuit. (According to a 2019 federal indictment, Low sent Michel $21 million, much of it to be laundered into a number of Democratic campaigns. Among Michel’s initiatives was Black Men Vote, a super PAC funded with illegal, foreign money.)

Shortly after DuSable was founded, and despite the absence of any track record, the company announced it had raised an impressive $505 million from a private equity firm, some of which came from the chief executive of the same United Arab Emirates fund that had been so helpful in the Goldman deals. In short order, DuSable partnered with 1MDB to build a $300 million solar plant in Malaysia, for which White received a fee of $506,000. By October 2014, there was little sign of construction on the solar plant, but 1MDB nonetheless paid DuSable a handsome $69 million for its 49 percent share in the project.

Najib and Low must have thought their money well spent. On December 18, 2013, White escorted Riza Aziz and other members of the Najib family, along with Leonardo DiCaprio, to a private Oval Office visit with Obama, at which they gave the president a Wolf of Wall Street DVD. Four months later, Obama made the first visit to Malaysia by an American president in fifty years. Eight months after that, on Christmas Eve, he hosted Najib for a round of golf in Hawaii. As reported in Billion Dollar Whale, the administration cherished Malaysia as a key component in its projected “pivot” to Asia and as an impediment to Chinese expansionism. In a September 2014 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Obama hailed Malaysia’s culture of “vibrant entrepreneurship,” which was “propelling a former colony into the ranks of advanced economies.”

It seems that the conspirators found such high-level lobbying to be both worthwhile and increasingly important as more and more of the grimy truth regarding 1MDB’s operations leaked out. In February 2015, Rewcastle Brown published a plethora of compromising emails between the Malaysians and the Saudis, revealing for the first time how the original scam had worked. Major American newspapers began covering the story, drawing heavily on Rewcastle Brown’s reporting, often without credit. That summer, Malaysian anti-corruption investigators discovered evidence of the $681 million wired into Najib’s personal bank account ahead of the 2013 election. Federal investigators in Washington, including the FBI, were also on the case. Starting in July 2016, the DOJ moved to seize $1 billion worth of assets (including the $250 million yacht), artworks (including a Picasso and a Basquiat), profit rights (including those to The Wolf of Wall Street and Dumb and Dumber To), and other investments owned by Low and his fellow collaborators.

As the investigations continued into 2017 and Donald Trump moved into the White House, Low mounted a determined effort to retrieve the $1 billion worth of laundered plunder that had been targeted by the DOJ. Again the conspirators chose the tried and trusted route of political “contributions.” This time their conduit was Elliott Broidy, a Los Angeles–based defense contractor who had been convicted of bribing New York State pension officials in 2009. (His charge was reduced to a misdemeanor after he informed on others involved in the scheme.) Since then, Broidy had secured Trump’s affections by helping to raise $108 million for his campaign, eventually becoming vice chairman within that organization, and later serving in a senior role on Trump’s Inaugural Committee. (The two even shared the same fixer in matters of the heart: Michael Cohen, the go-between for Trump’s settlement with Stormy Daniels, who performed a similar service in negotiating a $1.6 million payoff to a Playboy Playmate whom Broidy had impregnated.)

As with the efforts to buy influence with the Obama Administration, Low funneled tens of millions of dollars to Michel, who was then to get it to Broidy, thus, according to another participant’s plea agreement, resolving Low’s “issues surrounding the 1MDB forfeiture matters and the DOJ’s investigations thereof.” The parties drew up a draft agreement to regularize the arrangement: Low would pay $8 million up front. Success in “settling the Matter”—the DOJ investigation—within a year would earn Broidy a $50 million fee. If he worked fast and got things sorted in less than 180 days, there would be a handsome $25 million bonus.

On September 12, 2017, three months after DOJ prosecutors filed a formal 251-page complaint detailing the progress and scope of the entire fraud, Najib returned to the Oval Office. In preparation for the visit, Broidy had sent a colleague an email with the subject line “Malaysia talking points *Final*,” recommending that Najib emphasize to Trump that “Malaysia fully backed U.S. efforts to isolate North Korea.” Before the two leaders sat down for their private meeting, Trump remarked publicly that Najib “does not do business with North Korea any longer. We find that to be very important.” Trump also praised his visitor’s commitment to fighting terrorism—a point that surely gratified the 1MDB chief, given that Najib was claiming this as the very reason he had received a cool $681 million as a present from the Saudis. One month later, Michel sent Broidy at least $6 million from an account controlled by Low, using George Higginbotham, a DOJ attorney moonlighting as a money launderer, as the conduit.

In May 2018, the cascade of corruption reports regarding 1MDB finally caught up with Najib, and Malaysians voted him out of power. Arrested two months later, he has been fighting charges of money laundering and abuse of power ever since. In February, in the first of what will likely be several trials, he finally dropped his long-held pretense that the fund was legitimate, instead opting to blame everything on Low. “He must have thought that if he didn’t continue to make sure donations flow into my account, it would have affected his relationship with me,” testified Najib, “and this would lead me to uncover the scams.” Should he be found guilty, appeals will likely keep the disgraced former prime minister out of prison for years, unless the murder of Altantuya puts him behind bars first.

The Malaysian people, meanwhile, will be paying for Najib’s crimes for decades to come. The government will be spending almost half a billion dollars a year in interest and principal on 1MDB’s debt—which includes the bonds sold by Goldman—until 2039. “Worst of all,” Tony Pua, an opposition politician, told me, because most of the money was stolen, “there is nothing to show for the large debt burden.” As for the bankers, lawyers, and other professionals who enabled the scam, Pua said, “Many of them knew it was wrong, or at the very least knew it was suspicious, yet they turned a blind eye and went through with it anyway.”

So far, few of these parties have paid much of a price, let alone seen the inside of a jail cell. Two Emirati officials in Abu Dhabi were jailed for their role in the fraud, as were two non-Goldman bankers in Singapore, and both Roger Ng and Pras Michel are awaiting trial in the United States. Andrea Vella was placed on administrative leave by Goldman and later resigned, while Leissner and Higginbotham remain free on bail until their sentencing.

Jho Low is reportedly somewhere in China, where authorities apparently feel little obligation to surrender him to Malaysia. The country’s inspector general of police recently claimed that he had been informed that Low had surgically altered his appearance and now “looked like a bear.” Whether that’s true or not, Low maintains a tastefully designed website promoting the message that he was merely a pawn in the scheme. Having apparently anticipated the possibility of eventual attention from law enforcement, he acquired Cypriot citizenship in 2015. According to an investigation done by a Cypriot newspaper, this was managed courtesy of Henley & Partners, a British firm that advertises itself as “a global leader in citizenship and residence planning” for clients with a lot of money and a desire to sink below the radar—one more service on offer in the world of 1MDB. (Henley denies that Low was ever a client.)

Although Low is still wanted in the United States for making illegal contributions to the 2012 Obama campaign, as well as on bribery and money-laundering charges, he has held his own on other fronts. He fought a legal battle to recover his share of the $1 billion in loot seized by U.S. authorities in 2016, an effort that seemed to take a turn in his favor when he added former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Kasowitz Benson Torres—a New York law firm with close ties to Donald Trump—to his legal team. In November, this high-powered defense negotiated a settlement with the DOJ in which Low agreed to abandon claims to the seized property. Low himself, who was not required to admit guilt, certainly seemed happy with the deal. In an amiable interview conducted online with a Singaporean newspaper, he called it a “historic agreement,” and “the result of a multiyear, collaborative effort between the U.S. government and my team of advisers and lawyers. I am appreciative to all parties for their hard work.” Indeed, it was undeniably historic that the government allowed Low to use $15 million of the money he had stolen to pay his lawyers and publicists. Today, Low is represented by Schillings, a British firm of lawyers and intelligence professionals who specialize in deterring publicity unwelcome to wealthy clients. “We understand your world,” proclaims Schillings’s website. “We will be your best advocate.” Legal threats from this same firm had earlier dissuaded Rewcastle Brown’s publisher from releasing her book on the scandal, whereupon she founded her own press and published it herself.

As for Goldman Sachs, when revelations regarding 1MDB began to sap its reputation—not to mention its stock price—top executives in New York sought to pin all responsibility on Leissner and other colleagues in Asia, a charge that many analysts find unconvincing. In the derisive words of Kelleher, the Better Markets CEO, “Goldman’s position is that a ‘rogue’ banker lied and fooled all of the smartest, highest-paid bankers in the world; all of Goldman’s risk, compliance, legal, and audit systems and controls; and all of Goldman’s management.” So far as Kelleher is concerned, “the thirty senior Goldman executives who were witting of what went on should forfeit every penny they took home during the time they were assisting in this crime.”

Nevertheless, Goldman has stoutly maintained its institutional innocence. Just this January, the company filed a motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit brought by stockholders seeking damages inflicted on the plaintiffs’ holdings as a result of the revelations surrounding 1MDB. Goldman’s motion asserts that Blankfein and company were kept ignorant of criminal goings-on by their subordinates, and disputes any direct correlation between the scandal and the bank’s stock price, which has performed poorly of late relative to Wall Street competitors. Meanwhile, the Malaysian government has charged the bank and seventeen current and former directors with criminal activities, and is aggressively seeking as much as $7.5 billion in punitive damages, a potent threat to the bank’s already battered reputation, not to mention its bottom line.

More immediately, the Justice Department is mulling a deal with Goldman in which the company would issue a guilty plea and pay a fine for its behavior. Initially, the projected penalty was reported to reach as much as $6 billion, but more recent accounts suggest that the figure may be far lower—under $2 billion. (The bank has already set aside $1.1 billion for “litigation expenses.”) Such comparative leniency might be due to the presence of friendly faces around the bargaining table, where Goldman is represented by the powerful firm of Kirkland & Ellis and the government side is headed by Attorney General William Barr, himself a former Kirkland partner, who is said to be “directly immersed” in the negotiations. Barr obtained an ethical waiver permitting him to proceed with his involvement, as did Brian Benczkowski, head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, another Kirkland alum and a close friend of his former boss at the DOJ, Mark Filip, who also joined the Goldman team.

“Everyone has always told me,” Rewcastle Brown remarked when we spoke, “that there’ll never be any action taken against Goldman Sachs. I would find that sickening, because it proves the corruption in America is every bit as bad as what I was sneering at in covering Najib.” The 1MDB criminals who poured so many millions into totemic American institutions, from Hollywood to Wall Street to the White House, evidently came to the same conclusion. It’s a big swamp.