Sir William Browder ("Bill"), a financier turned justice advocate, is our guest for this episode of our ongoing series on extreme wealth. Bill has been the engine behind the Magnitsky Act, a law that for the past 12 years has empowered governments to seize the assets of foreign leaders who abuse human rights — a significant countermeasure against corruption and atrocity that has exasperated Vladimir Putin and oligarchs in Russia, where Bill was once a leading foreign investor. His experience working in (and subsequently abandoning) Russia allowed him to see inside that culture and economy, and have led him to conclude Putin's military conquests as a dictator's efforts to protect his unfathomable stolen wealth — and his own neck.

Bill Browder is the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, a firm that became the top foreign investor in post-Soviet Russia. For nearly 20 years he has been the target of Russian prosecution efforts that have drawn round condemnation from the international community, as he continues to promote the rule of law and denounce the regime of Vladimir Putin. He's the author of "Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice" and "Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, State-Sponsored Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath."

The author and philanthropist Jennifer Risher continues our series on extreme wealth by telling the story of her ear-popping rise from a middle-class Microsoft employee in the early '90s to an unexpected multimillionaire. The stock options she accrued with her husband, David — a fellow Microsoft employee who went on to join Amazon and who is now the CEO of Lyft — gave Jennifer immediate entry to a world of privilege that, as the child of a working-class household, she'd never expected to join. Her experience showed her the peculiar nature of personal wealth: an agent of tremendous power that, she finds, does more to amplify people's character than to alter it.

Jennifer Risher is the author of "We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth," which aims to illuminate discussions of money that are often cloaked in taboo, guilt, and secrecy. She and her husband founded the #HalfMyDAF movement, which seeks to encourage wealthy people to make greater charitable gifts in their lifetimes.

In this episode — another in our series on extreme wealth — the journalist Steve Fishman discusses his reporting on Bernie Madoff and the collapse of Madoff's $65 billion ponzi scheme. Steve doggedly pursued the story even after the financier was sent to a federal prison in North Carolina. Eventually the two men connected for a series of phone interviews that gave Steve a unique insight into the truths and lies that enabled Madoff to con investors at an industrial scale. Steve explains that greed was but one motivation for Madoff, an apex Manhattan insider who never forgot humiliations he suffered during his youth in Queens.

Steve Fishman is a longtime journalist who lives in Brooklyn. He covered Bernie Madoff first as a staff writer at New York magazine and later as the host and creator of the podcast Ponzi Supernova. His latest podcast series, The Burden, investigates decades of sketchy convictions won by Louis Scarcella, a formerly celebrated NYPD detective.

This week we debut a special project within Bribe, Swindle or Steal: single-topic episodes that focus on extreme wealth. For years Alexandra Wrage has worked on corporate compliance and anti-corruption efforts, a field that provides a front-row view into human corruptibility. In these episodes, she digs into the practical, philosophical, political, and even spiritual roots of why people risk everything—from scandal to criminal charges—for the allure of money, even when all of their material needs are more than covered. She will explore some surprising challenges of wealth alongside the ways in which greed changes people and extreme wealth changes the rules that we all live by.

Her first guest in this series is Clay Cockrell, a therapist in New York City whose Walk and Talk Therapy practice specializes in treating very wealthy clients. The problems they bring to therapy give him a unique insight into the privileges, the anxieties, and the perils exclusive to the 1%.

In this episode from 2020, Randall Eliason, law professor and former Assistant U.S. Attorney provides an excellent account of the days leading up to the sentencing of political operative Roger Stone. The Department of Justice's unprecedented interference in--and reversal of--its prosecutorial team's recommendation led to the resignation from the case of all four prosecutors. Over 2000 former DOJ officials called on Attorney General Barr to resign in the wake of his interference in the case.

This episode was originally published on 4 March 2020.