American Kleptocracy
How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
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A remarkable debut by one of America's premier young reporters on financial corruption, Casey Michel's American Kleptocracy offers an explosive investigation into how the United States of America built the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known.
"An indefatigable young American journalist who has virtually cornered the international kleptocracy beat on the US end of the black aquifer."
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
For years, one country has acted as the greatest offshore haven in the world, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit finance tied directly to corrupt regimes, extremist networks, and the worst the world has to offer. But it hasn’t been the sand-splattered Caribbean islands, or even traditional financial secrecy havens like Switzerland or Panama, that have come to dominate the offshoring world. Instead, the country profiting the most also happens to be the one that still claims to be the moral leader of the free world, and the one that claims to be leading the fight against the crooked and the corrupt: the USA.
American Kleptocracy examines just how the United States’ implosion into a center of global offshoring took place: how states like Delaware and Nevada perfected the art of the anonymous shell company, and how post-9/11 reformers watched their success usher in a new flood of illicit finance directly into the U.S.; how African despots and post-Soviet oligarchs came to dominate American coastlines, American industries, and entire cities and small towns across the American Midwest; how Nazi-era lobbyists birthed an entire industry of spin-men whitewashing trans-national crooks and despots, and how dirty money has now begun infiltrating America's universities and think tanks and cultural centers; and how those on the front-line are trying to restore America's legacy of anti-corruption leadership—and finally end this reign of American kleptocracy.
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Journalist Michel debuts with a blistering account of how greed, deregulation, and deliberate avoidance have enabled dictators and drug cartels to launder their illicit profits in the U.S. He documents the profligate spending and sadistic violence of corrupt rulers including Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his son, Teodorin, and explains how Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who is believed to have "run one of the largest Ponzi schemes the world had ever seen," laundered money through Rust Belt steel mills and Cleveland real estate. The roots of the problem, according to Michel, go back to Delaware's campaign in the 1980s to attract capital by offering anonymity to companies registered in the state. Other states soon followed suit; in Nevada, Michel contends, it's easier to form an anonymous shell company than to get a library card, while an estimated $900 billion is held in anonymous South Dakota trusts. Efforts to increase accountability have been resisted by business leaders and politicians including Donald Trump, who sought to abolish the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by executive order. Through rigorous research and cogent prose, Michel builds a persuasive case that the influx of unregulated money decimates America's industrial regions and poses a grave threat to democracy. This is a stunning portrait of avarice run amok.
