Hot Money Season 2: the New Narcos
Financial Times with Pushkin
The story came to light due to the murder of a man in the Netherlands that was eventually found by the Dutch government to have been ordered by Iran as a state-sponsored assassination.
It later emerged that the agents used to murder the man were part of a large international cocaine cartel based out of Dubai, prompting our reporter Miles Johnson’s investigation into what connected a hostile regime and organised criminals.
While previous reporting on the global drugs trade has largely focused on the connection between Latin American suppliers and consumers in the United States, Hot Money: The New Narcos joins up the dots to explain what had become a truly global story.
The podcast, jointly produced by the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, shifts the focus to the exploding cocaine market in Europe, which is close to overtaking that of the US in revenues, as a new and destabilising force that is still poorly understood by international policy makers.
Its investigative findings about the growing connections between organised criminal groups and sanctioned governments illuminate normally hidden geopolitical forces shaping the world around us.
By its nature an investigation into the connections between transnational criminals and hostile foreign intelligence agencies presented a significant journalistic challenge.
The podcast features on the record interviews with some key law enforcement officials for the first time–including undercover DEA agents– as well as interviews with people living under police protection, or in fear for their lives. The investigation also required working in multiple countries and languages, and weaving out findings about a complex subject matter into a comprehensible and compelling narrative.
Since the podcast was released in December 2023 a series of global law enforcement actions have confirmed for the first time the investigative finding of Hot Money: The New Narcos - namely that international drug cartels were working in the service of sanctioned regimes such as Iran.
In January this year the US and UK governments issued joint economic sanctions accusing Iran’s intelligence agencies of using organised criminal gangs and drug traffickers to target dissidents living abroad for murder, as well as a US Department of Justice indictment of a murder plot in the United States.
The series was downloaded over two million times in its first three months of release, hitting number 1 in the US business podcast charts and number one overall in Ireland and other European countries.