The High Warren and the Dark Sea (ft. Leah McGrath Goodman) – Game Theory Today Podcast, S2, Ep6

this is the game theory today podcast and i’m eric garland this episode’s very special and is going to issue some of the headlines though there are so many right now i could do eight straight hours russians treason prosecutions financial crimes i mean the normal fodder for this podcast is ripe all over the place this episode features a one-hour interview with investigative journalist leah mcgrath goodman who has been studying the intersection of offshore tax havens and systematic abuse of children on the british channel island of jersey the bailiwick of jersey is five miles by nine miles closer to france than england books two trillion dollars of offshore wealth including that which belongs to queen elizabeth the monarch of the united kingdom in fact the island is a peculiar possession of the monarch herself a term that will be explained by miss goodman ms goodman is what i term , 1 seconda real journalist one who dives all the way into stories and doesn’t come out until the truth is able to be told to the public , 9 secondshere she has bitten off quite a bit to chew the story of jersey and its victorian era home for children known as odella , 17 secondsgarena is the intersection of vast amounts of the world’s power its most , 24 secondsinfluential figures and the discarded remains of abused children’s bodies scattered throughout the island , 34 secondsthis is not an easy story as we approach some major themes explored in this podcast , 41 secondstreason autocracy injustice and war just for starters you may find yourself asking who is , 48 secondsmaking the decisions that lead to the crimes and characters we encounter like many people in the world of intelligence i know that the real story , 56 secondscan often be a lot more brutal and unforgiving than most people are ready to hear , 4 secondsand yet it’s emerging whether we’re ready or not some people are decidedly not ready as , 11 secondsyou’ll hear in leah mcgrath goodman’s story of being targeted by some members of the british government for her work some are victims , 20 secondssome are bystanders some are complicit and some are more than just involved nobody , 28 secondsis comfortable with the totality of this story but as we learn what goes into controlling a world gone mad , 36 secondsour desire for comfort may be overtaken by the truth’s own need to be heard the story starts telling itself and with that here’s the game theory , 45 secondstoday podcast featuring liam mcgrath goodman , 54 secondsjoining us on this episode is author and investigative journalist leah mcgrath goodman she is the author of the asylum , 3 secondsthe renegades who hijacked the world’s oil market has written about uh the origins of bitcoin and her latest project , 11 secondsis uh a film called dark secrets of a trillion dollar island garden and the aeros the queen , 18 secondsand the trillion dollar tax shelter how are you doing leah i’m doing good how are you i’m lovely so , 27 secondswe seem to get into similar kinds of trouble you like to write about uh corruption fossil fuels and cryptocurrencies , 36 secondsand tax shelters and tax filters um so you’re like me but you don’t write in all caps with profanity on , 44 secondstwitter no i don’t but i do think in all caps and with profanity such are the topics okay so you you get , 53 secondsthe you get the uh the respectable professional credibility that you deserve and and then i get what i get so but otherwise well you channel our id is what i like to think of it as that seems to be what it comes out as um , 9 secondsso uh what got you into the business of uh causing trouble professionally i definitely never am looking to cause , 17 secondstrouble i’m usually looking to get a closer look at something that doesn’t make sense to me , 25 secondsand so every story i do starts with a question or a series of questions and they’re usually directed at something that doesn’t really add up on , 34 secondsthe surface and i’m trying to find out what’s actually going on got it so what took you in the direction of , 41 secondsbitcoin oh wow uh that was a conversation with my editor he sent me , 50 secondsan email early one morning and said i wonder if you can’t get to the bottom of these bitcoin women , 59 secondsand i wrote back bitcoin women bitcoin and he yeah and i wrote exactly what you just said , 7 secondsand he wrote i don’t know but that where there’s trouble there’s women and so i figured , 14 secondsa typical newsroom sexist joke which you get accustomed to over time and so i said right you know i’m not , 22 secondsthat into cryptocurrency but i will have a look and tell you what i think and a few hours later i came back to him and said , 30 secondsit doesn’t add up uh i don’t think that the official story and the real story match in any way shape or , 37 secondsform and that i wanted to look a little closer and that is how that started it was really just asking questions uh about the origins , 46 secondsthe intentions behind cryptocurrency specifically bitcoin and talking to the very earliest developers , 53 secondswho were directly in touch with satoshi nakamoto to try and determine what similarities across many of the developers are , 2 secondsinternationally based and as well as across the u.s and so talking to them and finding out what the consistencies were with this figure they , 11 secondswere dealing with um was the beginning of the work and the story just didn’t add up , 19 secondswell i didn’t think the official in public story which at the time the bitcoin foundation was saying things like we’re non-partisan this is a , 26 secondsnon-political project you know we know the genesis block of bitcoin contained newspaper article talking about you know , 33 secondsbanks getting bailed out the credit crisis what was going on at the time and uh nothing about the origins of bitcoin , 41 secondsdidn’t look politically motivated it looked very ideological and so this sort of whitewashed version of what this was about , 49 secondsthat was emerging when i looked at it and also who was involved right very few people want to actually talk , 58 secondsopenly about what was going on and how developing um unfolded and there was also quite a bit , 5 secondsof you know the different registrations for the website the original website you know they wept from you know , 12 secondsoriginally japan and then they went to panama and europe and back again panama you saw a lot of shifting yes , 20 secondsthere’s a lot of shifting of the early um early registrations and i was able to shed light on some of , 26 secondsthat but if you tracked it at that time which was quite some time ago right a lot of a lot of , 33 secondsblind alleys have now been inserted into what at the time was a pretty straightforward research process now if , 41 secondsi were to go in there there would be a whole lot of extra things to sort through it’d be hard to tell what was real what wasn’t real because , 48 secondsas the years have passed as we’ve seen there’ve been lots of people claiming different things and we’ll see things embedded , 56 secondsin code that weren’t there before you know i’ll look at i’ll look at even videos and someone will say right you know this person alleged this at this , 5 secondstime and you’re you have to tell them no that video has been backdated or it’s been front dated or you know a lot of things have now been meddled with to the , 12 secondsextent i could see why some people have a really hard time um disentangling themselves so basically if somebody has an if a , 21 secondsquote official story that doesn’t add up they’re going to end up in your crosshairs if it’s interesting enough yeah if it is interesting enough i , 29 secondsthere’s only one of me so of course i have a long list of things that i don’t get to look at day to day but i never run out of projects , 37 secondsnow um with your book the asylum looking at uh the the hijacking of the world’s oil market how did you get into , 44 secondsyou know uh fossil fuel markets i was um quite young and starting out at the wall street journal writing about , 52 secondscommodities and they put me on the energy beat and i just found it completely fascinating it was the futures markets were a world i’d never imagined and the people behind them were just these larger than life , 8 secondsreally amazing characters who when i first wrote about it my publisher sent me a note and said are these composites meaning like are , 16 secondsthese pieces of different people that you put together to make them sound more interesting and i said no these are real people , 25 secondsso i really enjoyed getting to know the traders and many of them really were able to sort of lift the lid on , 33 secondshow oil prices were set not only in our country but around the world as well as things like gasoline and , 40 secondsheating oil propane natural gas which is like the big table at the casino had some of the wildest price wings and so , 49 secondsi just got to know them that way and i found out that the original market for oil was actually potato trading , 57 secondsbut the uh the potato market fell on its own white due to corruption and so it was really those who kind of picked up the , 6 secondspieces and tried to create a new market that led them to energy but i loved that this original kind of like it was the corruption in the potato market , 14 secondsknew it yeah they were like hiding potatoes and potatoes were being hidden in train cars so they could create scarcities and there was a huge fight , 21 secondswith idaho and then it went it defaulted in 1976 just it was just this wild story and , 30 secondswhen i was coming in you know in my early 20s in the 1990s one of the market chairman said yeah right so they your predecessor at , 39 secondsthe journal used to always write about the potato default it was so aggravating they never would let it go and i said potatoes , 47 secondsand he said oh no now you’re going to write about it i said well i am curious , 52 seconds[Laughter] , 56 secondsit was a very interesting dive down a completely different rabbit hole but you know again i really like to hear the human stories , 4 secondsi like to hear people’s real stories about how they got involved in things that may or may not have ultimately led to corruption and a lot of people enter , 12 secondsthese environments organically there’s usually a social culture around it and you know if people aren’t being honest , 20 secondsit’s not as straightforward as let’s steal and make some money there’s often again like a very strong social network , 29 secondsand um professional networks surrounding it where people are really helping each other and boosting each other , 38 secondsand once you’re in it’s really hard to get out hmm so i mean there’s a larger there’s a larger philosophical question , 46 secondsthere is like where you know what is the root of corruption not you know perhaps not just the human nature but uh you’re saying that there’s , 54 secondsyou may not intend to get into uh the crook business but it just sort of socially pops up here and there i think a lot of corruption occurs , 3 secondsorganically and people don’t go in realizing how far it will go and then once it’s happened it’s not , 10 secondsthey’re already too involved to get out without getting implicated right uh there’s you know there is , 18 secondsi think a lot of people know with corruption you may not be the person directly involved but you might know about it you might have looked the other way a few , 26 secondstimes there are different levels of enabling versus participation but ultimately , 33 secondsany person who’s close to it or is aware of it may end up feeling like now they’re a part of the problem and so it’s complicated and it does , 41 secondsoften come down to human relationships where somebody says that’s my family member that’s my friend or i’ll ruin their lives if i say something , 49 secondsand so there’s there is an organic component to corruption and i really like to speak to people who can talk as , 57 secondsopenly as they can about how it all really went down the social component of um , 7 secondswhether you’re going to tell the truth or not yeah and the asylum was just a wonderful book because so many of these traitors , 16 secondstold me what really happened so it was really an oral history of the energy market and what happened , 22 secondsfrom its its inception to the present day , 26 seconds[Music] , 28 secondsso in your work you you you start digging out facts and then people start wanting to tell you the truth eventually , 36 secondsyeah i honestly am not a very judgmental person i don’t have any interest in morally judging the people i’m interviewing all , 43 secondsi want to know is what is the truth if you were an ex-murderer and i was investigating the axe murder i i would , 51 secondsdefinitely sit down and treat you like a human being while you told me what you did got it well so , 58 secondsyou know with with all that is without all those topics as uh as warm up you’re you’re in the thick of something pretty intense um and , 7 secondslooks like for almost 10 years you’ve been looking at the aisle of jersey um a lot of the the audience here isn’t going to really know much about the , 15 secondschannel islands could i mean could you do the basics down to even where these things are how big they how how where this island is how big it is how many , 23 secondspeople are on there and how you ended up being interested in everything that’s going on there yeah i didn’t know anything about the , 31 secondschannel islands not that long ago and i was on a flight from london when i was , 38 secondsliving in london right before the banking crisis the credit crisis that we all remember and i was flying back to new york and i , 47 secondsmet a young woman who was married to a man on the island of jersey and she just told me the most wild stories about this tiny island , 55 secondsand by the end of the trip i promised her i would go visit her and i said i don’t know when but before the year’s out i promise i’ll fly over and , 3 secondssee you and she’s like no one ever comes out here it’s just in the middle of nowhere and it’s a tiny island it’s five by nine , 11 secondsmiles it’s 12 miles off the coast of france it’s actually closer to france than england and when i first flew over , 18 secondsit’s just a puddle jump flight it really only takes about 25 minutes you fly out they give you your tea you drink two sips and they take your , 26 secondstea away because you’re landing and so that’s how i um first came to , 33 secondsjersey in 2007 and i really came to see friends and over the years a lot of my wall street hedge fund friends ended up relocating to , 42 secondsjersey because it has a very very friendly tax regime for businesses and for those in finance , 50 secondsand what years what years were people leaving new york city for one of the channel islands , 57 secondsi noticed a lot of people leaving after the credit crisis during and after and i actually spoke to one of my closer hedge fund sources on the island and asked , 6 secondswhy did you go to jersey and he said he said i’ve been in the u.s for years and creating jobs and paying my taxes , 14 secondsbut the irs just would constantly try to bear down on us and the paperwork got increasingly complicated and i felt like we were , 22 secondsalways arguing and he says somebody approached him from jersey and basically said right we can simplify the process , 29 secondswe’ll welcome you we’ll make this a warm relationship we welcome new business etc and he said , 37 secondsit was just such a revelation to have a tax system that treats you professionally and like they appreciate you being there , 45 secondsand he said for him it was just he just felt the u.s tax regime was archaic and brutal and punishing and , 53 secondsextremely unwelcoming to business and that was it for him he’s aware of the issues on the island of jersey which you and i are going to talk about but he , 1 secondjust felt for a business it was a much friendlier environment for him and and he runs a legitimate business i might add , 9 secondsi think that’s important to note when when you start talking about um finance and financial regimes that there’s just so much scummy stuff that’s , 18 secondsthat you can explore but that lots and lots of you know even offshore vehicles or delaware llc’s or whatnot , 26 secondsjust because it’s the same structure doesn’t mean that you’ve got completely illegitimate ends um , 34 secondsyou know there are you know i’ve worked with clients that have um operations all over the world and they’re like well where do we organize , 41 secondsyou know so we can pay tax and you know which you know we do business in seven countries you know not we sell stuff to , 48 secondsseven countries but you know our supply chains over here our intellectual property zone there you know what’s most what’s easiest what’s most , 55 secondsadvantageous and they’re not trying to avoid taxation necessarily they’re trying to figure out what’s you know ideal they don’t necessarily , 3 secondswant to be the least efficient i mean that’s you know very rosy way to describe it but it you know that does happen there’s also people who are , 11 secondstrying to not pay taxes and starve society um you know yeah and there’s also people who don’t care about paying taxes but , 20 secondsdon’t want anyone to know how they’re making their money and that’s why they’re going to a tax shelter they don’t want to have to say where it’s coming from yeah that’s right , 29 secondsyou know it’s like i’m i’d be willing to pay tax but not willing to say that i use slave labor to produce cotton or traffic , 38 secondsabsolutely i mean we live in a world where there’s a second economy underlying the official economy and a lot of that has to do with , 46 secondstrafficking and weapons and a number of things that are being fabricated and it’s , 54 secondsit’s making a lot of money and somebody needs to put a place uh and somebody needs to find a place to put it , 3 secondsand that amount of money is sometimes hard to hide so then that which starts as you know a friendly offshore uh you know well you could do , 11 secondsit here and you know we’d be easygoing ends up being the no-till motel for uranium and , 18 secondsyou know heroin and stuff like that no tell motel huh uh for money for money , 27 secondsso so you were asking how i got into jersey that was how i first started going over but then i mean time went on you met a , 34 secondsnice person and then you start hearing about more and more people going to this channel island that no one that that’s near cows you know in , 42 secondsthe cheese producing northern part of france and new york hedge fund dudes are moving there , 50 secondsyeah and i learned that there’s just i went online and looked at the registry of businesses in jersey and i found this , 57 secondsa to z list of just all the biggest banks every every bank you could name a lot of major hedge funds , 5 secondsreally really big companies as you mentioned like glencore and vtol and and some of these places that are glencore , 12 secondsyeah the swiss commodities trader that’s tied up with russia and all them um that going core , 20 secondsoh that glencore okay go on sorry and the more i looked at different operations on the island of jersey more , 28 secondsinterested i became because i never knew anything about jersey and of course know about new jersey but nobody growing up , 36 secondssays do you know there’s an old jersey of course we imagine there might be but no one knew or talked about it when i was growing up , 43 secondsyou know learning about geography channel islands were never mentioned and jersey was definitely never mentioned , 50 secondsand so i learned a lot very quickly as i started looking more closely at the island and its financial sector , 59 secondsbut finance is not the only thing you found there yeah it was during , 7 secondsoperation rectangle that i started becoming very interested in the island i was not reporting on the financial sector at first i was just interested , 16 secondsand i had a lot of sources located on the island it was during the dig at a children’s home called hot delega , 24 secondsin 2007-2008 and i was watching it unfold and that was when i started to see things i just , 31 secondshad never seen happen before in any investigation in in any investigation , 40 secondsyeah i remember thinking wow i ran the global desk for dow jones for years and you saw you watch crime all around , 48 secondsthe world like from an aerial view all around the world every continent i just had never seen any investigation particularly to do , 56 secondswith crimes against children where the police officers involved were being threatened and smeared and pushed , 3 secondsout of their jobs the health minister stewart seavray being pushed out of parliament who was , 10 secondstrying to defend survivors of abuse on the island watching the survivors themselves be threatened and silenced and told to just , 19 secondsstop talking um really heartbreaking to see and then most of all seeing that the evidence being found when they did the dig under , 27 secondsthe children’s home the children’s remains being literally described as as , 34 secondsthings that were not children’s remakes you know we heard about what we call jar six but it was initially described as a fragment of a , 42 secondschild’s skull the island immediately moved on to this idea that it was just a piece of coconut um you know shackles , 50 secondsso hold on they’re they’re looking into the abuse of children and you’re talking about they’re finding the remains of bodies in this , 59 secondsin this building they found children’s remains and a lot of them were fragments at that point because what they found was , 6 secondsa lot of it had been broken up and burned and so bodies would not be what i would , 13 secondsdescribe as what was found although the british press lost its mind and just wrote wild headlines about like eight more , 21 secondsbodies found six bodies being looked at or and it became like a mess because the press over did it , 28 secondsand then the island basically said there’s nothing here and so it became this i just had never seen such a mess and that was when i became more , 36 secondsinterested in how did how did the remains go from being remains to nothing here and how did all these people involved in , 44 secondsthe investigation get pushed out and what is going on that’s how i started to look more closely and what year was that , 53 secondsthat was uh in i mean the dig was 2007 2008 and the following summer i put all of my belongings into storage and just went over to the uk i had a uk visa um a work visa and i went over and just , 8 secondsstarted doing interviews and i thought i thought well it’s just a small island i’ll just do a few interviews i’ll have everything you , 16 secondsknow in a month or two it’ll be done and that’ll be that and here we are 10 years later wow , 25 secondsand you’re saying there there is a level of of resistance that as you point out there’s there’s corruption all over the place there’s , 32 secondsthings that are politically embarrassing but this this seems uh intense and coordinated , 39 secondsthere has been a problem where anyone who looks too closely at child abuse on the island seems to suddenly have a lot of problems , 48 secondsit will be maybe their job it will be the police will suddenly raid their homes it will be , 55 secondsthey get into trouble with a minor issue and then the government is taking them to court and they’re being bankrupted there doesn’t seem to be , 3 secondsa situation that i’ve seen where somebody’s trying to look at the child abuse on the island and they’re allowed to just ask questions and do their job i , 11 secondshave never seen anyone be able to to do that without having incredible institutional interference including me , 19 secondsso are we were we talking about um a few instances here or was this a short period of time or that , 26 secondsthese these alleged events took place or was it a longer period you mean um interference or you mean the , 34 secondscrimes against children crimes against children the the crimes against children appear , 41 secondsto date back to at least world war ii which um the island has already done an inquiry , 49 secondsled by a uk judge into crimes against children in government-run children’s homes on the island and that that , 56 secondsinquiry concluded in 2017 with the judge saying that she believes children on the island are still at risk and the island has an , 5 secondsissue with accountability and um and addressing these issues , 12 secondsall the way back to world war ii that’s the period they were looking at because that is the they went the , 19 secondsreports went back a few i think three or four decades of crimes against children went back that far , 26 secondsand hot delega in the children’s home and that’s a french that’s obviously a french name it was , 34 secondsit seemed to be the center of a lot of the violence that was being reported and abused that was being reported and as you and i talked about earlier which we , 43 secondswon’t repeat here the kinds of crimes against children the word abuse doesn’t even scratch the , 50 secondssurface of what was happening to these children the crimes against them were in to my mind on par with you know kind of , 58 secondsholocaust level torture like psychological torture physical torture you know almost , 5 secondsterrible behavior you know pitting brothers and sisters against each other and siblings friends it’s just awful i mean hearing about it , 13 secondsit’s very hard not to feel your heartbreak when you’re interviewing people who are subjected to the treatment they were subjected to on the , 21 secondsisland i mean you’re talking about you know finding the remains of children here this is not um this is this is not a , 30 secondsmortuary this was not there was no medical uh anything in this facility this wasn’t a , 37 secondsa cemetery this is this was a children’s home yeah it was a children’s home since victorian times , 45 secondsso so these would be major problems but the it sounds like the institutions are not just not interested in getting into it they’re , 53 secondsthey have an active immune response so that you know nobody talks about it i mean have you ever been targeted and , 1 secondfor your activities uh well in terms of trying to report out and do interviews um , 10 secondsinto uh abuse on the island just specifically related to hot delight yes um a year or two after i began , 18 secondsyou know investigating and initially i just would go to the island and meet with people pretty quietly but i ended up just , 26 secondsthe island is a very wealthy tax shelter and so the hotels are expensive over time so i decided well i’ll just get a flat , 36 secondsit’s a non-domiciled flat so it’s a flat that’s allowed for foreigners they have different classifications for that on the island let me guess you’re , 44 secondsnot allowed to have a bank account there um uh you are if you have a flat okay yeah , 52 secondsum you’d be amazed at how easy it is to set up an offshore bank account okay , 59 secondsthat being said when i was going through immigration to get my final approval they were like right that’s great you’re a journalist , 6 secondsyou’re going to be writing a book and what is the book about and i said i’m looking at hot delegan the children’s home , 14 secondsthe immigration officer turned white he left the room he brought his boss in , 21 secondsthis was while i was still on the island and they both shouted at me that i needed a writer’s visa if i , 29 secondswanted to write about anything on the island and i said just a minute ago you were approving my my flat and my work , 38 secondsi have a visa already i have a sufficient visa for what i’m doing um and they said no no , 45 secondsyou have to listen to us now and i said okay fine you know i’m gonna fly home i will check with the consulate , 52 secondsand um when i did i did exactly that i went to new york i checked with the conflict and they told me a writer’s visa was no longer available in the united kingdom that they didn’t do it and it had been discontinued so the only way you could write about this thing is if you obtained a , 8 secondsuh a bit of bureaucratic paperwork that no longer existed exactly so i got the business visa , 17 secondsyes so to make it very short i got a business visa which was approved by the consulate for what i was doing i flew back , 24 secondsand as i was flying back i was flying into heathrow airport it was september 2011 , 33 secondsand they just said ms goodman can we ask you some questions and i thought oh okay no that had never happened before , 40 secondsthey brought me into this was that heathrow or that jersey okay so heathrow is where you are brought in , 48 secondsto the quote-unquote realm there’s no further passport check so heathrow handles jersey immigration as well , 57 secondsuk yeah so i came in through heathrow they brought me into a little room in the basement they said they were going to ask me some questions , 5 secondsinstead they locked the door and started photographing me taking my fingerprints and i of course said what is going on , 14 secondswere you allowed to have an attorney present or no i wasn’t allowed to no no um did they tell you why they were , 22 secondskeeping you in a little room in the basement no they said they were gonna come back to me soon , 29 secondsand so i was left in this basement and it’s just this windowless basement there’s actually footage on my website , 37 secondsof my surveillance footage of me in this little room um you can find it on liam mcgrath goodman.com it’s if you scroll , 44 secondsin the pictures along the top of the website you’ll see it um yes so what ended up happening was they locked me up they let me sit there , 53 secondsfor i would say maybe nine hours it was awful i had no idea what was going on um i did ask for nine hours , 2 secondsyeah nine hours i did ask for an attorney i did ask to call my embassy they laughed and they said that you’re , 9 secondsthey said you don’t have rights because you’re not in the uk yet you’re on the border and i learned afterward that , 17 secondsuk border is a black site meaning , 20 seconds[Music] , 21 secondsthey can kind of do whatever they want , 23 seconds[Music] , 25 secondsso i waited because what else can i do and um they interrogated me about the island um what i found out was they were , 32 secondswaiting for instructions from jersey and the reason i found this out is because i filed i don’t know how many pieces of paperwork for every single piece of data , 40 secondsi could get about why i was being detained afterward and it shows communications between heathrow and jersey where heathrow’s like yeah we , 48 secondshave her what do you want us to ask and jersey’s you know scrambling because it’s a weekend and they don’t have anyone at the office and so they kept , 56 secondslike the government of like the regional actually what is is , 2 secondsis the is jersey a a territory a crown dependency uh or is just part of england what’s the , 10 secondsstatus there it’s a peculiar possession of the british crown so it is not part of the uk it is really like , 18 secondsit’s like a belonging of the queens in a very strange way which is why it’s called a peculiar , 26 secondspossession a peculiar possession that’s a very br okay so but it ha so these would be people who work for , 33 secondsthe queen of england who are deciding what to do with your case i suppose the lieutenant governor who is , 41 secondsthe queen’s representative on the island i did see he was involved so yes , 49 secondsum but but more to the point these poor officers in heathrow airport weren’t really on they weren’t really sure what they were doing with me and so it made , 57 secondsit very confusing for everyone involved including me but they they knew they had to do something yes but they didn’t know what it was , 5 secondsyeah and they didn’t know why and you didn’t have a chainsaw running you you didn’t you didn’t have , 12 secondsfour or five shoulder uh fired uh rocket propelled grenades in your bags or anything right no in fact um they searched my bags and , 20 secondsi i didn’t even have my notes with me on this trip um they searched my bags and i said i have books and shoes , 28 secondsit’s like nothing there’s nothing helpful in there so that took a long time no no meth no uranium no , 37 secondsno no children in the bags might have been easier if they had done something but there was nothing in it and it was quite boring they tried to , 45 secondsphotocopy everything i had including my address book which i which really upset me because those are friends and family um , 53 secondsand they kept calling my partner i i kept calling my partner interrogating , 2 secondsuh it was very strange and they weren’t even asking really very strategic questions you know they wanted to know where my flat was they want to know who , 9 secondsi was talking to on the island but overall it was just a fishing expedition and they didn’t have a whole lot of direction , 17 secondsuh in the end after 12 hours in the airport they finally released me a whole day passed a whole night no food no , 25 secondsaccess to sleep nothing and they then deported me back to the united states and said that they did not want me to return to the uk for two , 33 secondsyears i didn’t understand why since i had not violated anything and their official reason was well we , 41 secondsthink you might try to overstay your welcome um , 45 seconds[Music] , 46 secondsi said but on what basis would you think that since i’ve never done that or come close to it , 53 secondsand that that just never got an answer but i got an official letter telling me not to return and , 1 secondi fought it and there was a public campaign so there were journalists who wrote about it thank goodness uk parliament opposed it and members of , 10 secondsparliament on the island of jersey also stood up and opposed it and the only reason i got my visa back was that they did a very good job of , 19 secondsembarrassing the island into letting me have my views on that oh and they did and guess what they did , 29 secondsthey created the first writer’s visa in years which was very elaborate process with a , 36 secondslot of fighting a lot of waiting but they made the only writer’s visa in existence so that they did not have to admit there wasn’t one , 44 secondsi’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there’s a story there it was amazing and i was very proud of , 52 secondsit because i was like i have the only writer’s visa that’s been issued in like a decade i mean it’s not and it’s not like britain has lacked for stories or , 1 secondscandal or uh who’s that guy prince andrew or whatnot i mean yeah that yeah that dude , 9 secondsor um you know uh framing up some north northern irish terrorists are the things happen in britain it’s an empire there’s messy , 17 secondsstuff right there’s even some financial crimes in london right i looked it up i i you know i binged it one time , 25 secondsthere’s some stuff there’s also a few russian oligarchs running around but anyhow you you were png , 33 secondsand then eventually they give you the special , 37 seconds[Music] , 38 secondsliam mcgrath goodman official one of a kind yes yes and i still have it , 45 secondsand i got the call from jersey and it was uh first i got a note from the head of immigration , 54 secondsbegging for people to stop emailing him and can i tell people to stop sending him notes because um one of the members of parliament put up a change.org , 1 secondpetition which had like the direct email of one of the head of immigration and he he basically begged me to make it , 9 secondsstop and i said i don’t know what to tell you i mean this is a weird situation i can’t tell people not to , 15 secondsobject it is objectionable and then i got a call from jersey immigration and , 22 secondsand um the man said he said ms goodman you’re pushing on an open door we have no problem with you coming to the island , 30 secondsand i said well i have a letter from you saying i’m banned that could be confusing yes , 37 secondsit was confusing so they issued this visa i got it and then i was able to resume my work which i’ve been you know continued to write about jersey for , 45 secondsabout a decade and my focus has been on the child abuse issues as well as the financial corruption that we have seen taking , 53 secondsplace on the islands and there’s a lot there i find that the layers they don’t seem to have an end okay so , 2 secondsfar because i’m sort of tempted to like just dig right in what the hell is going on there that’s this none of this is normal i mean except in places where , 11 secondsyou’re over an enormous target and they are afraid bureaucracies of that size do not react , 19 secondsthat way and of course like i said it’s not like the uk ain’t got scandals that you could dig up of course they do , 29 secondswhat’s going on there i mean they seem very protected from what i it’s a it’s a two trillion dollar tax shelter with as we mentioned , 37 secondslike all these major banks all these large hedge funds all these really big firms could you see that number again i think people need to get that number , 45 secondsyeah two trillion dollars is the estimate that i’ve gotten um and so occasionally someone will say one to , 53 secondstwo trillion but you know we’re in the trillions and it’s a five by nine mile island so you do the math on what that is per , 1 secondsquare mile and what that means for the people who um have skin in that game that’s massive , 8 secondsi mean that’s more than the the uh the national gdp of italy on any given year i think i have not checked lately but i’m going , 17 secondsto take your word for that global economy 65 trillion united states is about 17 trillion of that depends that doesn’t of course include the second , 23 secondseconomy either way t’s t trillions are a lot so there’s two trillion flowing through , 31 secondsa five mile by nine mile stretch yeah and remember the money’s not actually even there it is booked there , 40 secondsyou know there’s very little actual investment on the island um it’s a very um idyllic beautiful island , 48 secondsum with a little capital city called st helier which is sort of thickly settled but everything else is these beautiful wide , 55 secondsopen spaces with manor houses and so you know it’s not like this deep thick city going on um it’s it’s it’s money , 4 secondsthat’s booked to the island it’s not singapore it’s um where at least it kind of looks like there’s a lot going on and there is um this is yeah , 13 secondsyeah so the city of london has long been understood to be really an amazing sort of engine for a lot of money that’s going , 21 secondsthrough um england and in addition jersey serves the middle east serves parts of europe um , 31 secondsany russians very out of curiosity any russia in there well most recently the story that uh you and i are going to talk about , 39 secondsthat i just published did have quite a few russian links so yes the answer is yes , 46 secondsand the queen of england owns us yeah the queen of england is understood to bank on the island um herself and so , 56 secondsyou repeat that again this is where she banks out of yeah so that island has um uh one of the , 4 secondsone of the banks on the island is is called kutz crown dependencies and the queen is known to keep her money there i have heard of this bank all right , 13 secondsum so that’s not the only offshore financial center the queen is known to bank on but jersey has long held a , 21 secondsspecial place in the queen’s heart according to many people i’ve interviewed on the island and just out of curiosity what are the , 28 secondsother places she tends to fancy in terms of i think the other major island that i’ve heard of where she has vehicles offshore , 37 secondsvehicles anyway it’s the british virgin islands huh and um british virgin islands is uh , 46 secondsdidn’t didn’t parliament in 2018 say that they have to start creating a record of uh the beneficial owners , 52 secondsof uh the corporate structures there i don’t know if i see that happening anytime , 2 secondsi mean that would be great right i believe i was just wondering if if they had asked for it officially not whether it was going to happen but , 11 secondsyeah i don’t know if i i think the quest has been made now many times so i i don’t i’m meaning here , 20 secondsthey did it in 2018 and it was supposed to like start at the end of this past year question is they gonna do it , 28 secondsi mean yeah i mean bvi isn’t a place that i have a lot of hope about personally and so i don’t i don’t , 36 secondsthink i don’t look at a request and say oh right it’s going to happen soon you know i just don’t think it’s going to happen starting to have some questions about , 44 secondsoffshore tax shelter places understood all right so so the queen’s out of the british virgin , 51 secondsislands and uh and jersey uh and and uh you know no doubt other places so all , 59 secondsright so you’re you’re you’re over two trillion dollars um who you know who are , 6 secondssupposed to to be the abusers uh at la garen yes sir the children’s , 16 secondsthe children’s home for the last and the children’s home was closed in 1986 we should just mention very bravely , 23 secondsthe children’s home was it started as an industrial school for boys in victorian times , 30 secondsand i believe it served continuously for children until 1986 with the exception of world war ii when the nazis used it as a , 38 secondssignal station hold on the nazis used the place yeah the children’s home was used by the , 45 secondsnazis as a signal station and then uh there’s even more there’s even more there’s more than that but uh we’ll we’ll dwell on that for a moment if you , 54 secondsif you have questions , 58 seconds[Music] , 59 secondswell we just we’re just throwing some nazis all right the the the so uh the nazis were preparing for the , 6 secondsfinal battle with great britain and they used jersey as one of their major bases in world war ii and so underneath the island is a network of tunnels that the , 16 secondsnazis created to travel without being seen and and doesn’t guaran already mean , 23 secondssomething similar to that in french i believe yeah so my understanding i’m not a french , 30 secondsspeaker but those on the island have told me hot delegate means top of the warren meaning a rabbit warren , 37 secondsand it got that name in 1960 i always wondered what warren it was referring to but when i heard about the , 44 secondsnazi tunnels i wondered how many tunnels may have led to hot delegan when it was still a signal station and , 53 secondsi don’t know if there’s an answer to that question right now because a lot of those tunnels were sealed and are now being re-opened slowly by historical societies on the island so there are bunkers nearby and we know , 9 secondsthere are some tunnels in that vicinity but children who suffered abuse have talked about being brought into the tunnels on , 17 secondsthe island from all sorts of areas including being brought in by boats into tunnels on the island , 25 secondsyeah this is leading to a lot of questions i mean and you’re saying you’re saying there’s still some tunnels that date from world war ii that ain’t , 34 secondsreopened yet since the nazis were chilling there well since they were sealed in the aftermath of liberation day when the war , 42 secondsended um so a lot of the towers there’s still many nazi towers on the island and those are sealed as well , 50 secondsum i kind of feel like there’s a metaphor somewhere in here for like the 20th century not being entirely over , 58 secondsum it’s a heavily layered history on the island and the original reason for the investigation into hot de la garan were , 6 secondsreports from the sea cadets on the island about abuse on boats of children , 13 secondsout into international waters which had been discussed for years before the investigation started in 2007 so , 22 secondsyou know this idea of children being brought into tunnels from boats or being brought out onto boats um children at the children’s home who reported being , 30 secondsput onto boats against their will and um and abused and so there seemed to be somewhat of an , 38 secondsactive environment for abuse of children on the island using any number of different ways to go about it for a long time , 48 secondsand then add a couple trillion yeah the development of the offshore tax shelter certainly didn’t help in that , 57 secondsthe focus was always on finance at a certain point really from the 1960s on there was much more of a focus , 4 secondson finance it really took off from what i understand in the 70s ted heath was a huge proponent of the , 12 secondsisland not being included in the eu being its own sort of autonomous entity to serve as a as a convenient offshore , 21 secondstax shelter to the wealthy um in england and teddy heath spent a lot of time on the island and he was even , 28 secondsaccused of engaging in abuse of children by a number of people i’ve interviewed on the island um one , 36 secondswoman who said she saw several children get onto his yacht and then less children come back which has been a report that’s really , 43 secondsdogged his legacy ever since he passed away who is this heath ted heath the former prime minister of , 50 secondsengland oh the former prime minister you would ask about powerful people who had been implicated in the island’s , 59 secondsabuse yeah so he might be maybe the highest level example um of somebody who is implicated in abuse i , 7 secondsforget what years was he um was he prime minister you know what hold on i will check because that was a little before my time , 15 secondsum so he was he passed away i also want to know when he passed away i want to get this right he was from , 23 seconds[Music] , 26 secondsthe years were 1970-1974 he was in office , 34 secondsand he died in july 2005.

according to the police on the island of jersey he spent so much time in jersey at the end of his life that the police had to , 42 secondscreate a special plan in case he died on the island because they didn’t have a contingency for what do you do if a prime minister dies , 51 secondson the island and has to be brought you know home to england huh there’s a there’s a lot going on in this story there’s too much going on obviously and it’s part of the reason i haven’t , 7 secondsfinished writing my book about jersey is there a lot of people still too afraid to speak , 14 secondsum and i do have a lot of people who who do speak to me but don’t want to speak on record and um some survivors who are also , 23 secondsbrought to the children’s home after it closed in 1986 and were continued to be abused multiple children multiple groups of people with , 31 secondshigh-level high-ranking people on the island and not just high-ranking people on the island involved but the island’s police , 39 secondsone woman told me her you know her own relative police officer was involved in in bringing children to the children’s , 47 secondshome including herself for abuse and there were several others that came forward about what happened to them at , 55 secondshot delegation after the home closed it seemed people were really attached to the idea of bringing children to this location , 3 secondsand engaging in crimes so leah you were saying that the the is a place that that people had , 10 secondscome back to to continue to commit these crimes yeah even after the children’s home , 18 secondsclosed survivors have told me about being brought there um against their well , 26 secondsin many cases they were drugged and brought there uh by high-ranking people or people in authority on the island like police officers , 34 secondsum or well-connected people for abuse inside the building and it’s a concern that people seem to be attached to the children’s home as a , 42 secondslocation for abuse it just seems that there still seems there appears to be a focus to encouraging children to use the building , 50 secondsand to be in the building um even to this day when the uk judge in 2017 , 57 secondsrecommended the building be demolished because of the way it had been used um to hurt children there was a huge , 4 secondscampaign to save the building and and the building has been preserved but they turned it into a youth hostel so now , 13 secondsthey’re continuing to have children yeah okay i didn’t i couldn’t believe it either i i out of all the things you , 22 secondscould do with a building why would you still have children going into a building where horrible crimes against children took place , 30 secondsit seems counterintuitive you know when you put it like that is there resolution here i know that’s , 38 secondsthat’s an unfair question given what you’ve just described and how how broad it is i mean if you’re talking about somewhere between somewhere between the , 46 secondsnazis industrial scale child abuse uh and two trillion dollars you know and and the monarchy and maybe , 55 secondssome russia there’s a lot to talk about but is uh are we getting to an inflection point , 2 secondshere or is this you know something’s up here are you know , 11 secondsyou know we’re gonna is the system ready for the truth about this to come out i guess is the question that i’m asking , 20 secondsthat’s a great question and i heard an interview recently where someone said and i thought this was very intuitive , 29 secondsthey said i’m not buying that that the reason why child abuse on the , 36 secondsisland was covered up for so long was simply to protect the island’s reputation and its tax shelter status right because , 44 secondshigh level wealthy clientele aren’t necessarily going to want to bring their money to a place known for child abuse it is , 52 secondscommon for officials on the island including in the film that i just worked on that was released this past month to say child abuse happens everywhere we’re no different than anywhere else and they try to first make a statement , 8 secondsthat normalizes child abuse by saying it happens everywhere which is concerning enough but the the big concern is if , 15 secondsthey really do accept that child abuse can happen and does happen in places around the world then they should be able to accept that just like , 24 secondsplaces around the world they can bring perpetrators to justice and that seems to be the area jersey struggles in and that is what makes them so noteworthy , 33 secondsis this stubbornness about actually bringing perpetrators to justice once they’ve identified them when you’ve had multiple children and , 41 secondssurvivors identifying the same people over and over again and nothing is done that does not make them like everywhere , 49 secondsit makes them very different and i think that is what’s caught a lot of people’s attention is what is the real reason , 58 secondsto not bring perpetrators to justice yes many of them are high level a lot of them are connected to the financial industry or other positions of , 6 secondspower and government or in other positions of authority however you can’t just hold it off forever , 15 secondsat the time of hot delega there were about 200 different survivors who came forward reporting over 150 different , 23 secondsperpetrators it’s a lot of people it’s also a lot of perpetrators per survivor an awful lot of people , 32 secondsso i think that it is true that there needs to be some soul-searching and as far as solution that’s what the fourth estate , 40 secondsis for i’m a journalist and so through my eyes reporting the truth is really one of the best solutions , 48 secondsand the film was to try to really bring a lot of that truth to light the film that you talked about at the beginning of this interview and to hear , 56 secondsfrom survivors directly let them tell their stories let their voices be heard because they’ve been silenced and so a , 4 secondsbig part of the solution is allowing them to speak so you’ve you’ve got a custom-made visa , 12 secondsjust for you and uh hundreds of at a minimum hundreds , 19 secondsof people that want to tell their story so yeah although i will say they took the visa away again as soon as the judge , 28 secondsfinished the child abuse inquiry in 2017.

, 31 secondsso my visa was up for renewal and they declined to renew it what year is that that they declined , 39 secondslet’s see that must have been the end of 2017 it was shortly after the inquiry had closed they were very nice to me during the inquiry because they , 47 secondsknew they were being watched the inquiry closed i went to renew it and they said they wanted to see a copy of my book draft , 56 secondsif i wanted to renew my visa which is as you know i’m an american journalist completely out of the question , 4 seconds[Music] , 5 secondsyeah that kind of that kind of editorial thing might go with your editor you know at the at the publisher and even then you might have , 13 secondsyou know some opinions but uh yeah also why would you need to read the draft of my book give me my visa renewal yeah why would , 21 secondsyou need to do that you you would not need to do that so there’s a for people who are interested in more and it looks like you , 29 secondscould go at every any angle but there’s a film right now available uh it’s on youtube isn’t it , 37 secondsit’s been up on youtube and down occasionally you can find this film on bbc storyville , 45 secondsif you just google bbc storybill and go to the bbc iplayer you can watch it there i think it will get wider circulation , 54 secondsbut right now you would if you were not in great britain you’d want to use it you’d want to view it through a vpn , 1 secondideally to see the film and that’s dark secrets of a trillion-dollar island geran yes yeah that’s the name of the film and , 11 secondsin addition um i just put out an article that looks at one of the largest document leaks we have seen , 18 secondson any tax shelter in a very long time on the island of jersey and the implications for that as well which have global implications because so many , 26 secondspeople were exposed by it and and how were how was that discovered um oh and i should mention the article , 34 secondsas an institutional investor so you can also see it on my website leahmcraftgoodman.com and what’s the name of the article , 43 secondsuh it is called uh the heiress the queen and the trillion dollar tax shelter , 50 secondsyes they’re very like you know they’re very bejeweled titles these films and these stories but it’s um about a couple that stumbled , 59 secondson this gigantic cache of documents on the island of jersey in a squash court of this huge manor , 7 secondshouse and they didn’t realize at first what they had stumbled onto but as they looked through the documents they realized that this was , 16 secondsthe private documents for a trust company that was um according to them laundering money for decades , 24 secondson the island for people all around the world well that’s not a big deal at all uh that won’t have uh global implications , 32 secondsall righty then um so uh so we got with the film dark secrets of a trillion dollar island , 40 secondsyour latest story an institutional investor the heiress the queen the trillion dollar tax shelter uh where can people find you on uh on the internet , 47 secondswebs and on the on the twitters on twitter i’m at truth underscore eater uh that’s my handle and , 56 secondsonline it’s leah mcgrathgoodman.com and i yeah i’m very interested in , 4 secondswriting about complicated issues especially when human rights are involved but my realm really is in the world of high , 11 secondsfinance and then how how how it affects you know regular people , 19 secondsum like the people on the island of jersey but um i do look at a lot of issues that affect regular people globally jersey just happens to be maybe , 27 secondsone of the more complex stories of my career i think it would be one of the most complex stories of anyone’s career , 36 secondsso thank you for sharing that with us uh and we look forward to following up on this , 44 secondsthank you thanks for having me