Kilian Kleinschmidt
Very fast, actually. He started then talking about his experience in Syria, facilitated by the boys just after the recapture of the city of Palmyra from Isis.
It’s fucking massive. Yeah, so we’re stood outside Prinzregentenstrasse, well, the house on Prinzregentenstrasse that belongs to Jan Marsalek. It’s tall, it’s snowing slowly through trees without leaves. There’s a very high fence, which is like a wrought iron fence that’s thickly covered with ivy.
In February, my producer Peggy and I went to Jan Marsalek’s former residence in Munich, a place he’d kept almost entirely secret. It’s where he ran his shadow life, his extracurricular world outside of Wirecard — 61 Prinzregentenstrasse. Marsalek rented it for €680,000 a year.
Here he was occupying one of the grandest residential buildings in Munich, which is the wealthiest city in Germany and therefore possibly one of the wealthiest cities in all of Europe.
From the moment I first became drawn into Jan Marsalek’s world, there’s been this huge paradox. And coming back to Munich, I’m hit by it full force.
We’re on a street, he’s opposite the Russian consulate, and down the road are various embassies and other grand residences. And I suppose insofar as you would assume that one of the prime objectives of most people working in intelligence is discretion and to remain hidden, then one wonders why he chose here.
A villa opposite the Russian consulate, giving Paul those novichok documents, boasting about your relationships with Russian mercenaries. How can you function as a spy, a good spy, if you’re compelled to drop hints about being one all the time?
I don’t know, it’s a kind of almost like a Sharon Stone moment from Basic Instinct, you know? The plot of Basic Instinct where she murders her husband, but that’s also the plot of the book she’s written, so it couldn’t possibly be true.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
One of my favourite books about espionage is John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy. MI6, aka the Circus, pick up clues about Russian master spy Karla by looking back in time. Through looking more closely at how they were misled and at the wreckage, the Circus find the traces of something, a thread on which to pull. Le Carré calls it taking backbearings. And it feels to me like we need to do something similar. So far I’ve heard about three radically different Jan Marsaleks: the corporate high flyer, the fraudster, and now the Russian agent. And yet, even with that, I have very little sense of who Jan Marsalek really is behind these identities. What makes up the substance of his character? What motivates him? Motive, I think, is the holy grail in this story. Not only for what it reveals about one man psychologically, but also what it might help us glimpse about a whole world view and those who pursue it. And so, in this episode, I tracked down people who knew Marsalek well, worked with him closely, grew up with him in his hometown, all to gather clues.
My name is Sam Jones. From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money Season 3: Agent of Chaos, Episode 4 — Backbearings.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Jan Marsalek vanished five years ago, after Wirecard was exposed as a massive fraud. He hasn’t been seen in public since, at least not under his real name. At first, everyone thought Marsalek had gone to the Philippines. He told colleagues he was going to find Wirecard’s missing billions. But then the trail in Manila went cold. People wondered whether he’d absconded to China. Rumours swirled about his connections to Germany’s intelligence services, to the Austrians, to Israel. Perhaps he’d been taken into protective custody. But these were all trails that Marsalek himself had quite deliberately left behind.
In reality, he’d taken a car over the Alps to a village outside Vienna. Travel records show he’d hopped on a plane to Minsk, and from there had gone on to Moscow. But even the people close to him didn’t know where he ended up. They were left to figure things out for themselves.
Just talk us through when you then go into Prinzregentenstrasse. What was it like inside and what was going through your head?
“Mr Samt”
I was scared like hell. I haven’t told my wife, I’ve told other people that I’m going there, where I am.
Sam Jones
It’s two months after Jan Marsalek’s disappearance, and this man — we’re going to call him Mr Samt — has gained access to his house.
“Mr Samt”
I had a phone in my socks. I did not know what to expect.
Sam Jones
Mr Samt has asked that we don’t reveal his real name as a condition of speaking with us, for professional reasons. What I can tell you is that he’s a high-level PR consultant, hired by companies when they’re in crisis. Samt, in German, means velvet. It’s the alias he has chosen for himself. That day, Samt is with an ex-business partner of Marsalek’s who knew about this place, who was in fact a regular visitor. They’ve snuck into the house because, well, they both have questions. I mean, who doesn’t?
“Mr Samt”
So, and then we walked around and . . . unbelievable. You walk around and you see a parallel world. Yeah, this room is soundproof. This room has got searched every other week by a specialist for microphones and surveillance stuff. And you walk around. And wow. And then you see his bedroom, which was a black-and-white-painted room like a zebra, with a mattress on the floor and black and white bedsheets. Not like a cosy bedroom.
Sam Jones
The house is almost entirely empty, which is strange, because when Marsalek fled, all he had with him were two pieces of luggage. Someone must have cleared the house out afterwards. There are just a few striking artefacts left behind.
“Mr Samt”
I was impressed by his medical cabinet. It was a normal door, looked in and out. Beyond the door was . . . 40cm deep in shelves, full of medical stuff. And because we were in Covid at that time, everything to fight a virus was there. This is a sedative, this is virus, this is the flu, and one was for diabetes.
Sam Jones
It sounds to me like the private stash of someone who never wanted to depend on public healthcare services, or perhaps someone who never wanted to have to take out a prescription in his own name. There are bottles and bottles of Russian medicines.
Samt’s heart is still racing, and he’s scared for a reason. As he looks out the window from the room he was told was Marsalek’s office, there directly opposite the house is the Russian consulate. And he’s thinking, Jesus, could there even be a tunnel between these buildings?
Apart from Kilian Kleinschmidt, who you heard from in the last episode, Samt is the only person I’ve met who’s been inside the Prinzregentenstrasse house. He knew Jan Marsalek for about 18 months. But he knew him very well. Or at least he knew one side of him. And he knew him under pressure.
“Mr Samt”
I’m hired sometimes when there’s something smelly going on and how to, not avoid, but how to go through with it and don’t have too much damage.
Sam Jones
Wirecard hired Samt in 2019, when my FT colleagues Dan and Paul were beginning to reveal to the world that the company was a fraud. Within days of joining, Samt began working closely with Jan Marsalek. Samt prides himself on his ability to read people, to watch them, and, to a certain extent, to be immune to their charms.
Can you describe him for us?
“Mr Samt”
I noticed his friendliness. Do you want to drink something? And I said, yeah, I’ll grab a Coke. Oh, no, please allow me to give you a Coke, in very formal, polite German.
“Mr Samt”
With your kind indulgence you allow me to hand you a Coke. You know, those head waiters in Austrian restaurants?
Sam Jones
When I think of an Austrian Oberkellner, I have a specific thing in mind — formal, sometimes stiffly so, maybe even outwardly obsequious, but people totally in control of their own worlds. In a Viennese Kaffeehaus, you are a guest of the head waiter.
Samt soon found himself getting close to Marsalek. He noticed his quirks. Marsalek ate chocolate constantly. He kept a big box of Lindt Carrés, little individually wrapped chocolate squares, in his office. The bin was always full of wrappers. And Samt, he would often bring him chocolate, or sweets. On those visits, Samt clocked the curious collection of objects in Marsalek’s office, like a life-size Donald Trump cardboard cut-out, for example. One day, he asked another senior Wirecard executive . . .
Sam Jones
He also noticed that while so much of Marsalek’s world at work seemed neat, precise, there was also chaos kind of hidden away.
“Mr Samt”
He put all the dirty cappuccino and all the dirty china, he put it in the cupboard in his conference room.
Sam Jones
Not just a few cups. Weeks and weeks and weeks worth of cups.
Because he didn’t want to see it, he didn’t wanna see the mess?
“Mr Samt”
Yes. And it was summer. So that was a biotope after a while. (Laughter) And the cleaning woman found it by accident, because they were missing so much china. And he just put it . . . messy, like, in this cupboard and in the back it was already growing.
Sam Jones
There were also times when Samt would catch glimpses of Marsalek’s personal life. Like one night, when it was quite late, and Marsalek had kept him waiting for a long time. So long that Samt had had time to go out to a nearby toy shop and buy him a present — a Lego Batmobile.
“Mr Samt”
I like to play and build Lego. Who does not? And so I bought it and gave it to him as a gift and said, here, that reminds me of you. And he looked, oh, Batman? I said, no, the Joker.
Sam Jones
Marsalek brushes off the jibe and eagerly opens the box.
“Mr Samt”
We started building and during that building, he received like 15, 10, 15 phone calls from his girlfriend and his father who were in town and who were waiting for him for dinner. But he didn’t want to go. He was sitting there with me. We were talking business and he was building this Batmobile. And then he said, yeah, I’ll come later and I’ll join you later. And we were sitting there. I was sitting on one end of the conference table. He was sitting on the other, and we were rolling the car.
Sam Jones
But he clearly didn’t want to go and spend time with his family.
“Mr Samt”
He clearly didn’t want to go and I had a feeling that it was a difficult relationship.
Sam Jones
And then, there was the money.
“Mr Samt”
I remember one time we went into a restaurant here in Munich, and I had a carpaccio with cauliflower, two or three Coke Zero. And so my bill was less than €50, probably. The whole bill was €700-something. Marsalek started with caviar, he had all the classic — oyster, whatever, beef steak Fiorentina and this bottle of sparkling wine. And it was a €720 bill and he gave €900. He tried to be humble or to give the picture of being a humble person devoted to his job. On the other hand, paying everything cash and living a life that is in the high 1 per cent of Munich. Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself.
Sam Jones
Possibly, thought Samt, the early days of Wirecard had seen the company pay its executives huge bonuses before it listed. But even that didn’t quite account for Marsalek’s apparent wealth, because it wasn’t just flashy dinners.
“Mr Samt”
He was invested with $7mn into Telegram.
Sam Jones
The messaging app, founded in Russia. Marsalek was an early shareholder.
“Mr Samt”
But when you only make a million before tax at Wirecard, you have to work 15 years and eat ravioli from cans and live in a very reduced lifestyle to save up the money to invest like that in one single direct investment.
Sam Jones
And of course, Samt didn’t even know at this point about the palatial property on Prinzregentenstrasse. That, he found out two months later, after Wirecard blew up, even though they would often meet at a restaurant very close by.
“Mr Samt”
I could have beaten myself. There’s Käfer, the restaurant in Munich, and we met very often at the Käfer restaurant. And his secret office was like 500 metres or less than 500 metres down the road.
Sam Jones
After the day he’d poked around the villa, Samt realises that really, whatever he thought he confidently knew about Jan Marsalek is barely anything substantial at all, and that in the 18 months they worked together, Marsalek’s entire persona at Wirecard was effectively a lie. I needed to talk to someone who’d known him for longer than Samt. That’s coming up after the break.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Martin Osterloh first met Jan Marsalek when he joined Wirecard almost 16 years ago.
Martin Osterloh
Young guy, at the time he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Had an impressive charisma about him, but you never would have thought that this guy would be managing the whole company very quickly at the time.
Sam Jones
Back then, in 2005, Marsalek was just 25. He hadn’t been to university, he hadn’t even finished school. After joining the company five years earlier in 2000, he’d been quickly promoted, and by the time Martin arrived at Wirecard, Marsalek was head of IT.
Martin Osterloh
Rhetorically, I already realised at that stage that he was very, very good. He was like a Hoover, he could take information extremely quickly and formulate a summary almost in a fashion where you would lick your lips. You’d love to have that ability to quickly take something on board and be able to express it in a form that seemed on the one hand smart, but still very, very understandable for a broad audience.
Sam Jones
Martin says that Jan worked his way up the company by bringing order and structure to what was otherwise a chaotic, fast-growing start-up.
Martin Osterloh
If you were the type of guy or girl to say, there’s no structure to this, I can’t do this, you were out of the door very, very quickly. If you went in and said, I can’t do this yet, how do I do it, take ownership and do it yourself, those people excelled at Wirecard in the early days. That’s why probably Jan Marsalek had an easy-to-climb ladder because he was a doer.
Sam Jones
And one thing he was particularly good at was charming people. Sometimes it almost seemed like he was setting himself a challenge to win someone to his side by doing something like deliberately turning up late.
Martin Osterloh
We had CEOs of very important companies and he would just come 20 minutes late and still charm this individual that they seemed like the best friends afterwards, where you would think that would be inexcusable but Jan had the ability to turn things around. I think that really there are traits that I have had strong envy for, but I envied Jan so much because it seemed so damn simple for him. He really mastered giving you the feeling that you’re important despite the fact that you could figure out over many, many years that it was a routine.
Sam Jones
With his people skills, Jan was a good manager. He became Martin’s boss. And as you can hear, Martin really liked him.
Martin Osterloh
Jan had a broad spectrum of friendly to formally friendly. So when, for example, when you went to Jan and said, do you have a minute, do you have a second, he would always say, for you always.
Sam Jones
Which wasn’t to say he didn’t have edges.
Martin Osterloh
I did have the feeling that he liked people or didn’t like people. In cases when people got on his bad side or showed him that they didn’t like him, he could be extremely . . . Ruthless is the only word I find.
Sam Jones
Over time, Martin noticed that to get on with him, you needed ultimately not to take things too seriously. Marsalek liked to test people, to see if they could hold their own against him.
Martin Osterloh
He did say things to shock and provoke people here and there. He had a Wiener Schmäh, sort of the Vienna joking . . .
Sam Jones
A playfulness.
Martin Osterloh
Playfulness. So he could get away with murder saying certain things. And you also have to understand that he was in a circle of management where making politically incorrect jokes was in fashion. I think Jan, he’d enjoy walking on a ledge and some people falling down.
Sam Jones
So by the early 2010s, Jan Marsalek is a hugely successful young corporate executive. He’s basically the man running this fast-growing German company, which is on its way to a main market listing. He’s a bit of a maverick and prefers action over rules. But whatever is striking or unusual about Jan, it tends to get masked by the fact that Wirecard is also an unusual company. It primarily processed payments for high-risk industries — the businesses other payment processing companies and banks were hesitant to get wrapped up in — like gaming, gambling and porn, although Wirecard had a different way of describing that.
Martin Osterloh
Adult content or emotional content, as we would call it.
Sam Jones
And over the coming years, Wirecard’s appetite for risk also took it to countries where the rules of business were more ambiguous.
Martin Osterloh
That was four or five years, maybe three to five years before Wirecard collapsed.
Sam Jones
So sort of 2015, 2014, ’15, ’16, around that . . .
Martin Osterloh
A bit later. Yeah, yeah, ’15, ’16, yeah. But of course we did build up Wirecard Russia in that time as well, so . . . it wasn’t so surprising?
Sam Jones
Just weeks before Wirecard collapsed, something surprising did happen, and it chilled Martin. Marsalek wanted to invest money in a new company that was issuing credit cards. He needed the board’s approval. Martin and another colleague had run the numbers on this company, and they knew this investment was a bad idea. Right ahead of the crucial board meeting, they told Marsalek that explicitly. They gave him the figures on the returns Wirecard could expect. Martin remembers specifically what he said.
Martin Osterloh
Long-term, the card project over the next decade, if it runs a decade, then it would potentially cover 1.25mn.
Sam Jones
Jan took it all on board. There’s no way he didn’t know the numbers, Martin says.
Martin Osterloh
Jan was very, very quick in understanding. And an hour later, we are sitting in the meeting and he simply ignored what we said. He said, the card project alone in the first year will cover the 1.5mn.
Sam Jones
With you in the room.
Martin Osterloh
With us in the video conference. So he just ignored what we discussed . . .
Sam Jones
It’s a very curious kind of game. You know, you’re watching him do this and obviously it’s clear based on everything you understand about him until now that he is not stupid, he didn’t mishear you, he didn’t, you know, lose the facts.
Martin Osterloh
We were flabbergasted. We were speechless. It had never happened like that. I mean, we were all important people in the company. It was like a punch in the face.
Sam Jones
What really comes across as Martin recounts this is just how effortlessly and easily Marsalek lied, how confidently. It’s like he knew he had Martin and his colleague under his thumb and they wouldn’t raise an objection. And I think that’s what made it so shocking for Martin, because it obviously raised the question, what else had Marsalek lied so bloodlessly about?
Today, I think Martin is actually quite bemused by everything that has happened. He tells me that part of the reason he decided to talk to me is that it’s a kind of coping mechanism, which I think hints at how deeply the whole experience has affected him. The collapse of Wirecard and the revelations that Marsalek was a spy, they don’t anger him. They sadden him.
Martin Osterloh
I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Marsalek is he probably could have earned millions, gazillions with his charm and his wit and his business acumen and his skills, that he didn’t need to be what he turned out to be. That is really something that most people who worked at Wirecard or witnessed him, when discussing it afterwards, we all come to that point.
Sam Jones
When Marsalek’s fraud at Wirecard was discovered, the company’s stock went to zero and Martin’s life savings were basically wiped out. For me, the remarkable thing is that despite that, Martin evidently still holds quite a lot of affection for his former boss.
Martin Osterloh
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all? And how much of it was an act? How much was genius? How much was in between? How much was learned? How much was instinctive? All these questions, I really can’t answer. I also ask myself, when Jan wakes up in the morning, what he thinks now of all the contacts, of all the employees. Was that all just a lie? At what stage was it a lie? What was the turning point?
Sam Jones
If it was possible to wave a magic wand or whatever, could you imagine going for a drink with him or dinner with him now and being friendly with him?
Martin Osterloh
Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, actually, I think I would love to do that. Actually, I’ve thought about getting into Moscow and seeing if I could organise it. I was thinking one could try that.
Sam Jones
Why haven’t you?
Martin Osterloh
(Stutters) The honest truth is, would you have the balls to actually go to Moscow, and I feel that, you know, endangering yourself and your family, that probably, if I had a guarantee that I would not be touched, I’d love to get his side on this.
Sam Jones
Martin says he feels certain there must have been a point where something in Marsalek’s life went quite wrong to set him on the path he took. But when he thinks back, he really can’t say exactly when that might have been. Martin realises that Marsalek could talk, he could charm, he could hold court, he could make you feel like you were his close friend. But actually, he almost never revealed anything about his life directly, at all — what he did at home, or where he had come from.
Martin Osterloh
His whole youth is a complete blank. He never spoke of that, nor did he speak of Vienna in his youth, which is quite remarkable because I mean, I would have felt like I’d had a lot of personal talks with him. But only later did I realise he said a lot, but he didn’t really give an insight of his past at all.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Sam Jones
A few months ago, I travelled to a small Austrian town called Klosterneuburg. It’s just outside Vienna. Klosterneuburg is dominated by a huge monastery on a hill at its centre. It’s home to about 28,000 people. And it’s the place where Jan Marsalek grew up.
[CLIP PLAYING]
In the town hall café, I meet up with four people who knew Jan as a child. Rudolf Koch rustles up some Verlängerter, black coffees. He used to be the headmaster of the local secondary school — Marsalek’s school — and he’s brought along another teacher, Bruno, and two of Marsalek’s classmates, Verena and Philip. We all sit down around the table together. I hope they might be able to tell me something about Jan Marsalek before Wirecard, about the experiences that formed him as an adult. This is the first time that Philip, Rudolf and Bruno have spoken to the press about Marsalek. When Wirecard went down and Marsalek went on the run, it was a shock.
[CLIP OF THE CONVERSATION PLAYING]
Sam Jones
As Philip runs down the list of Jan’s exploits, he says it sounds like a bad James Bond plot. [Philip speaking German] Rudolf shows me and my producer, Peggy, an old school yearbook.
In the picture, Jan is in the front row, crouched down, almost ready to spring up again. He’s looking directly at the camera, arm resting on one knee, fingers laced together. There’s maybe 20 other students in the class. They all look like classic teenagers, awkward in their own bodies. Jan, though, he looks very at ease. It would of course be totally stupid to expect to see signs of a criminal, treasonous future in an old school photo. But this . . . this isn’t exactly what I expected either.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I learned Jan actually began his schooling at the Lycée in Vienna, a French private school, before moving back to the local school in Klosterneuburg when he was 12. And because of his time at the Lycée, Jan was fluent in French. Philip, his former classmate, remembers a time when their French class was being taught by a supply teacher, a sub, and Jan just stood up and said he was leaving. The teacher was of course totally taken aback. But when they tried to put him in his place, Jan answered with a five-minute monologue in flawless French.
Philip
[Speaking in German] . . . totally baffled.
Sam Jones
Jan must have gone to the place he always went whenever he could skip a lesson. In fact, where he went even in the minutes between lessons. To the library. And that’s where he got to know Bruno.
Bruno
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
Bruno taught history, German, and philosophy, and he also looked after the school library. Soon after Jan joined the school, the head of IT told Bruno that Marsalek was his star pupil and suggested he could help with the new computer system the library had got. So Jan became Bruno’s helper. Bruno says that it couldn’t have run smoothly without him.
Bruno
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
In fact, when everyone here thinks of Jan back then, they picture him sat in front of the computer in the library. He was obsessed with it and with learning about this new thing called the internet. Jan was certainly different from other 15-year-olds who were more likely to be skateboarding or playing football outside.
Philip
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
Philip says it was like they were all still children and Jan was somehow not. He seemed more like a fully grown adult already.
Sam Jones
Yet other kids admired him, and the teachers, well, the thing Philip remembers them saying is be more like Jan.
Philip
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
I wonder if his teachers knew about his strategy to avoid washing his socks.
Philip
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
Philip says that one day Jan announced he had done a cost-benefit analysis and he would never wash a pair of socks again. Calculating the value of his labour and time in washing, drying and folding the socks, he’d decided it was cheaper just to take out a subscription and have new pairs constantly delivered. It sounds almost like Jan enjoyed being unconventional in making decisions, and crucially for me, telling people about those decisions, that seemed to expose or undermine the sense of what others thought of as being normal. If Jan liked computers and enjoyed being atypical, he wasn’t a loner though, says Verena. Far from it. He had a wide group of friends, and she was part of it. And yet she also remembers that Jan never socialised outside of school. He never took friends home. He had a very private side to his life.
Verena
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
Verena uses this German word schräg to describe him, which we might say means askew, set at a different angle to the rest of the world. Jan was a straight-A student, but in his last year, two weeks before he was due to sit his final high school exams, he received a job offer from a tech company in Vienna. He accepted, and he told his schoolmates he was leaving immediately. He wasn’t going to bother with the exams.
Verena
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
Everyone thinks he’s daft, leaving at the eleventh hour. You’ve got to have a lot of self-belief, or maybe self-delusion, to do something like that aged 17. Think back to how important exam results seemed to you at that age. I can remember believing my whole future depended on them. Rudolf jumps in to offer an explanation.
Rudolf
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
He says that the job offer was very, very lucrative. But all four of them also suggest another possible reason why Jan was so keen to leave Klosterneuburg. I asked about Jan’s family. He has a younger sister and a brother, both of whom seem to lead perfectly ordinary lives. No one really remembers anything about his father. Either way, the father had left the family by the time Jan was going to the local school. But everyone remembers his mother.
Rudolf
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
Rudolf, the headmaster, describes Marsalek’s mother as combative. But it’s obvious from his body language and the way he raises his eyebrows as he carefully pronounces the word that he wants me to know it’s a bit of a euphemism.
Verena
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
Verena agrees with Rudolf’s assessment. She now works for the town council and she knows Frau Marsalek as a conspicuous woman. Verena says Jan’s mother used to be regularly upset about one thing or another. She campaigned against a 5G mast being put up in Klosterneuburg and against a development that would have threatened a nature reserve. She says she’s very leftwing. Everyone thinks Jan had a hard time with his mother, that it was a difficult relationship, to the point where Jan, he did whatever he could to get away from home.
I got in touch with Jan’s mother, and to my surprise, she replied. I got an email from her. She said she has, quote, no interest in giving us an interview because she has neither the desire, nerves, or time to rake over, quote, an extremely unpleasant period of my life. She has asked that we don’t reveal her name here. She said it’s unfair to label her as combative, and said it is a shame for her campaigning efforts in town to get dismissed as leftwing and disruptive. She did say that her relationship with her son, quote, changed massively the year before he left home. She says it broke down because she, quote, didn’t let him get away with everything and, quote, didn’t let him wrap me around his little finger. She tried to involve a psychologist to mediate between them. It didn’t work. Jan, she implies, had his teachers charmed, but she was resistant. Since then, she says she’s only tried to make contact with her son once, in 25 years.
The email she sent me had a whole load of attachments, 18 documents concerning all kinds of things to do with Jan. Some are press releases from as far back as 2000. And they make me think that, despite their estrangement, she has been tracking her son’s career. She’s read, it would seem, almost all of the books and materials that have been published about the Wirecard fraud. A lot of the attachments she’s sent me, though, are all about the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society, and she urges me to look more into it. It’s the organisation in Vienna that Wirecard sponsored. From Marsalek’s mother’s response, and from what we’ve heard from others, it’s clear that she and her son had a deeply troubled and painful relationship.
Whatever happened when he left home, Verena says, seems significant, because when she next saw Jan after the exams, he appeared to be a changed person. It was at a reunion after everyone else had graduated. They were around 19 years old. She says he boasted that he now knew how the world worked. That money could buy him whatever he wanted. Even sex. Even, he implied, sex with her. Incredulous, she told him he was stupid. When Verena told this story, everyone around the table seemed shocked. It sounded so unlike the Jan they knew, like he’d somehow come off the rails a bit.
Verena
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
Before everyone gets up to leave, to pick up their children from nursery, to go back to work, Philip tells me why he agreed to speak with us.
Philip
[Speaking in German]
Sam Jones
He says he’s speaking with us because he wants people to understand that Jan, though he had a difficult childhood, ended up where he did because he was vulnerable. He wasn’t destined to become a fugitive. And it’s deeply sad that he did.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I’ve always believed that people are much more malleable things than we realise, capable of extremes. We have a tendency to see those who end up at the fringes as somehow radically different to us — broken, evil. The reality, though, is that with the right pressures, the right challenges, the right circumstances, or all the wrong ones, people can be warped into the strangest shapes and situations. When you want to recruit someone as a spy, if you’re good at it, you understand something of that. You look for the parts of a person’s life, their personality, their needs that you can work with, bend, change, use, their history. But not everyone with a difficult childhood becomes a spy. So, how did Jan Marsalek get drawn into it? Why did he end up working with the Russians? And what did he actually do?
Coming up on Hot Money . . .
Unidentified speaker
If Moscow decides — and it is always Moscow who decides — if Moscow decides that this person can be and should be recruited, then they work out ways of how to recruit this person.
Unidentified speaker
This is a dangerous situation because those spies tend to be the better ones. Better than the guys who do it solely for money.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Sam Jones
Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones. The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton. Our producer is Izii Carter. Our researcher is Maureen Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shakerdge. Fact-checking by Kira Levine. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo de Oliveira, with additional sound design by Izii Carter. Original music from Matthias Bossi and Jon Evans of Stellwagen Symphonette. Our show art is by Shawn Carney.
Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines McQuade and Matthew Garrahan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to Roula Khalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clarke, Alastair Mackie, Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hanson, Viki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagin, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Gretta Cohn. I’m Sam Jones.
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