With the holiday travel season approaching, we're revisiting a podcast episode featuring Paul Radu, the co-founder and co-executive director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Paul describes his team's work in uncovering an international team of cash machine skimmers that ultimately skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars, largely from tourist hot spots. Travelers often don't realize their accounts are being drained until after they return home.

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This episode was originally published on 9 June 2020.

Walt Pavlo went to work at MCI at a time when telecoms were hungry for go-getters. It was the early 2000s, and Walt enjoyed the freedom and aggressive nature of a recently deregulated industry. But soon he realized that MCI's most lucrative customers were also its flakiest, and the pressure was on to manage millions of bad debt that accumulated on the books. In this episode, Walt explains how he concocted a fake-loan scheme that netted him money far beyond his dreams — and yet how hollow it felt, right up until the moment it all came crashing down.

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Walt Pavlo is a nationally recognized speaker who writes for Forbes and NYU Law School on white-collar crime and criminal justice. He founded the firm Prisonology in 2014 as a consulting firm to support federal criminal defense attorneys by providing experts who have retired from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He is the co-author of "Stolen Without a Gun: Confessions from Inside History's Biggest Accounting Fraud, the Collapse of MCI WorldCom," which covers his stint working in the company's billing department and committing fraud.

In his mid-20s, Chuck Collins made a fateful choice. The great-grandson of Oscar Meyer, and thus an heir to part of the meatpacker's family fortune, Chuck was skeptical of the riches (some $500,000 in 1986 dollars). He didn't want to perpetuate the imbalances he saw dynastic wealth creating in society. Rather than live off the interest, or to give a portion to charity, Chuck gave away the entire inheritance, and thus embarked on a most unusual sort of normal life.

In this episode, Chuck explains what reverberations his decision to give away his inheritance had on his family and in his career, and he lays out his case to other similarly privileged Americans: Why life is better without the insulation that great wealth provides, and how billionaires can rejoin American life.

Chuck Collins is the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he edits Inequality.org. He is also a founding member of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of high-net-worth Americans who advocate for public policies — including higher taxes on the wealthy — meant to rein in the political power of the richest Americans. His prolific writings focus on inequality, the racial wealth divide, philanthropy, the climate crisis, and billionaire wealth dynasties. His forthcoming book "Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power and Ruining Our Lives and Planet" will be published in 2025.

The sudden ascent of Mohammed bin Salman from an obscure royal heir to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia — the country's de facto ruler — has fascinated Jonathan Rugman, an author and longtime correspondent in the Middle East. Jonathan's latest BBC documentary, "The Kingdom," traces MBS's life from an unruly youth to a series of Machiavellian maneuvers to cut ahead of cousins and uncles in the line of royal succession. Jonathan's reporting illuminates a brash but secretive young autocrat whose wealth and power have few equals anywhere on the planet. After years of high-profile murder, jailings, and crackdowns, a formidable question remains: What more does MBS want?

Jonathan Rugman is a Visiting Lecturer in the journalism department at City, University of London, who has reported from some 50 countries during his 30-year journalism career. He is the author of "Ataturk's Children – Turkey and the Kurds" and "The Killing in the Consulate," in which he investigated the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. His numerous awards include a BAFTA for his coverage of the Paris terror attacks of 2015.

For more than 20 years, Paul Schervish surveyed many of the richest people in America for a long-running study on how the wealthy view the world and themselves. In this episode, another in our series on extreme wealth, Paul explains how his research and his early years spent as a priest inform his understanding of wealth and its potential to improve the world. Applying sociological and religious scholarship to the question of how what to do with money — and by extension, what to do with the rich — he invites haves and have-nots alike to consider the roles that God, human agency, and spiritual fulfillment play in our material lives.

Paul Schervish is a former Jesuit priest and a professor emeritus at Boston College, where he directed the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. A prolific scholar and author, his books include "The Structural Determinants of Unemployment," "Wealth in Western Thought: The Case for and Against Riches," "Gospels of Wealth: How the Rich Portray their Lives," and "The Will of God and Wealth: Discerning the Use of Riches in the Service of Ultimate Purpose."