Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

In this shocking, meticulously reported work of narrative nonfiction, an award-winning investigative journalist exposes “capitalism’s monster”—global kleptocracy—and reveals how it is corrupting the world around us.

Financial Times reporter Tom Burgis has spent fifteen years reporting from five continents on conflict, corruption, globalization and organized crime. In pursuit of the networks that underpin the new global order, he has traveled to the killing fields of eastern Congo and to a Ukraine riven by Russian occupation and delved into the hidden corners of the great repositories of stolen wealth in New York and London. He has interviewed the boss of the Moscow mafia as well as hundreds of middlemen, moneymen, bagmen, frontmen and other denizens of the game of secrets that defines contemporary geopolitics. Glimpses of this shadowy world have emerged over the years. In Kleptopia, Burgis connects the dots.

This riveting narrative follows four characters—a subversive British banker, a well-connected Brooklyn gangster, a liberal Canadian lawyer, and an obscure Central Asian businessman turned billionaire—whose stories converge to expose the secrets networks that fuse political power, organized crime and grand corruption. Kleptopia makes clear the dire implications of this dirty money machine: how those who have established control over lawless lands have learned, with the energetic assistance of well-rewarded lawyers, accountants and lobbyists, to translate that power into access and influence in the remaining democracies.