Review by Booklist Review
Countless numbers of petty autocrats (or kleptocrats, as it were) routinely bilk their local populations of billions of dollars, as well as pocket more billions in bribes from unscrupulous agencies seeking to do business in these various foreign lands. The fact of widespread corruption won't be news to most readers. What author Michel does reveal in painstaking detail is that, when those autocrats start looking for ways to protect their ill-gotten gains from the forces of international justice, they almost always look toward the United States. Americans often play fast and loose with ethics and legality when there is profit to be had, and there is lots of profit to be had laundering criminally acquired fortunes. This corruption grew to absurd levels during the Trump years, but as detailed in the book's final chapter, the incoming Biden administration is seeking to eliminate the financial loopholes that make America such an attractive partner in corruption. Michel's clear prose helps make a complicated subject comprehensible, and leaves readers with some hope that financial corruption may not be so inevitable after all.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Michel debuts with a blistering account of how greed, deregulation, and deliberate avoidance have enabled dictators and drug cartels to launder their illicit profits in the U.S. He documents the profligate spending and sadistic violence of corrupt rulers including Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his son, Teodorin, and explains how Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who is believed to have "run one of the largest Ponzi schemes the world had ever seen," laundered money through Rust Belt steel mills and Cleveland real estate. The roots of the problem, according to Michel, go back to Delaware's campaign in the 1980s to attract capital by offering anonymity to companies registered in the state. Other states soon followed suit; in Nevada, Michel contends, it's easier to form an anonymous shell company than to get a library card, while an estimated $900 billion is held in anonymous South Dakota trusts. Efforts to increase accountability have been resisted by business leaders and politicians including Donald Trump, who sought to abolish the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by executive order. Through rigorous research and cogent prose, Michel builds a persuasive case that the influx of unregulated money decimates America's industrial regions and poses a grave threat to democracy. This is a stunning portrait of avarice run amok. (Nov.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Michel (Hudson Inst. Kleptocracy Initiative), who reports on illicit activities in finance for publications like Foreign Affairs and the Atlantic, is a masterful storyteller who grips readers with truthful and disturbing accounts of outlandish schemes. In this book, he argues that the United States is a global haven for illicit money laundering schemes that are infiltrating industries like real estate, finance, and luxury goods; wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy and national security; and creating opportunities for terrorist networks to gain footholds. This eye-opening and comprehensive analysis explains how global criminals anonymously hide ill-gotten money all over the United States and then clean and legitimize these funds. Often these individuals are able to set up shell companies with little regulatory oversight and then secretly engage in corrupt activities. Michel suggests reforms, including making business operations transparent by establishing a federal registry of businesses. VERDICT Recommended for general readers who want to understand how kleptocracy is rooted in American politics and policy-making.--Caroline Geck, Somerset, NJ
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A revealing look at the web of financial chicanery that puts the U.S. at the head of places in which to hide ill-gotten gains. Where to go when you've robbed your citizens blind or sold a boatload of Fentanyl? Not Turks and Caicos or Liberia or Bermuda: No, the thing to do is cultivate the right kinds of allies, financial and political, in the U.S., and voilà, money laundered and riches secured. Financial journalist Michel serves up his first exhibit: Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue, a son of the murderous Equatorial Guinean dictator, who spent mountains of his compatriots' money on mansions and, in time, Michael Jackson collectibles even as those compatriots starved. His vast fortune was not technically illegal, owing to laws his father promulgated. As Michel chronicles, to protect it, Teodorin went to "a country that had perfected the biggest system of transforming dirty, suspect money into perfectly legitimate finances and assets, obscuring its illicit origins in the process." That'd be the U.S., where Ukrainian crime lords, Colombian cartel leaders, and their ilk have found a welcome haven. Criminal cash was ever more welcome with the presidency of Donald Trump, whose "efforts to dismantle America's anticorruption program took place almost as soon as he entered the White House." The author shows how Trump figured out all kinds of ways to skim the flood of illegal cash that flowed into the country--e.g., selling one of his Trump Tower apartments to the daughter of another African dictator who, like most of Trump's business associates, operated behind a shell corporation. Michel's diligent dissection is maddening to read, all the more so when he recounts how nonprofits and universities flock to accept dirty money in exchange for bestowing legitimacy on donors. Happily, since Biden came into office, the tide has turned, but the kleptocracy of which Michel writes, which "can be understood…as capitalism as its worst," will be difficult to uproot. A capable, eye-opening account of laissez faire financial laws and practices that serve the interest of criminals alone. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
