Episode 4: Backbearings

Summary

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos Season 3, Episode 4: Backbearings Release Date: June 24, 2025

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Introduction and Background

In the gripping fourth episode of Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, reporter Sam Jones delves deeper into the enigmatic disappearance of Jan Marsalek, the Chief Operating Officer of Wirecard, following the company's exposure as a €2 billion fraud in 2020. Initially presumed to have fled to the Philippines or China, Marsalek's vanishing act quickly piqued Jones's investigative instincts, leading him into a tangled web of espionage and deceit.

Jan Marsalek's Disappearance

Marsalek's sudden disappearance left colleagues bewildered, igniting rumors about his potential affiliations with intelligence services across Germany, Austria, and Israel. Jones meticulously traces Marsalek's route, uncovering his journey from Munich to Vienna, Minsk, and ultimately Moscow. Despite extensive travel records, Marsalek remains elusive, with his whereabouts shrouded in mystery.

Investigating Marsalek's Residence

Two months after Marsalek’s disappearance, Jones and his producer Peggy infiltrate his former Munich residence at Prinz Regent Strasse. The villa, rented for €680,000 annually, stands opposite the Russian Consulate, raising suspicions about Marsalek’s connections.

[02:29] Sam Jones: "From the moment I first became drawn into Jan Marsalek's world, there's been this huge paradox."

Inside, the house is stark and meticulously maintained, with sparse personal belongings and suspicious artifacts like a life-size Donald Trump cardboard cutout. The absence of personal items suggests a hurried departure or potential security measures to mask his true identity.

Inside Wirecard and Jan's Leadership

Wirecard, a fintech giant with a tumultuous trajectory, showcased Marsalek’s dual nature as both a charismatic leader and a potential saboteur. His leadership style was a blend of charm and ruthlessness, maintaining a tight grip over the company even as fraud allegations loomed.

Personal Insights from Martin Osterlo

A pivotal segment features Martin Osterlo, a former Wirecard colleague who worked closely with Marsalek for 16 years. Osterlo paints a multifaceted portrait of Marsalek:

[22:27] Martin Osterlo: "Young guy at the time was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, had an impressive charisma about him."

Osterlo recounts Marsalek’s meteoric rise within Wirecard, attributing it to his ability to bring order to chaos and his exceptional people skills. However, beneath the surface, Marsalek exhibited signs of manipulation and control, often testing colleagues' resilience and loyalty.

[25:32] Martin Osterlo: "In cases when people got on his bad side or showed him that they didn't like him, he could be extremely ruthless."

Exploring Jan's Early Life

Jones shifts focus to Marsalek’s roots in Kloster Neuberg, a small Austrian town. Through interviews with Marsalek’s former teachers and classmates, a picture emerges of a prodigious yet troubled youth. Marsalek’s early interest in technology and his unconventional decision to abandon his final high school exams for a lucrative tech job hints at his complex personality.

[37:45] Host: "He was obsessed with it and with learning about this new thing called the Internet."

Martalek's strained relationship with his mother, described as "combative" and "very left-wing," appears to have significantly influenced his later actions. His mother’s recent attempts to reconnect and her involvement with the Austrian Russian Friendship Society add layers to Marsalek’s motivations and possible ties to Russian intelligence.

Understanding the Motivation Behind Marsalek's Actions

The crux of the episode revolves around understanding what drove Marsalek from a promising executive to a fugitive and alleged Russian spy. Jones contemplates whether personal vulnerabilities and a troubled past made him susceptible to recruitment by Moscow.

[49:52] Sam Jones: "If Moscow decides, and it is always Moscow who decides, if Moscow decides that this person can be and should be recruited, then they work out ways of how to recruit this person."

Former colleagues and acquaintances suggest that Marsalek's charm and strategic thinking made him an ideal candidate for espionage, blending seamlessly into high-stakes environments while serving clandestine agendas.

Conclusion and Future Directions

As the episode wraps up, Jones highlights the profound impact Marsalek’s actions had on those around him, particularly Martin Osterlo, whose life savings were wiped out by Wirecard's collapse. Osterlo reflects on the tragedy of Marsalek's descent, pondering the lost potential and the complex interplay of personal and political factors that led to his downfall.

[31:38] Martin Osterlo: "I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Marsalek is he probably could have earned millions, gazillions with his charm and his wit and his business acumen and his skills that he didn't need to be what he turned out to be."

Jones sets the stage for further exploration into Marsalek's espionage activities and the broader implications of his secret life, promising more revelations in subsequent episodes.

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Notable Quotes

• Sam Jones [02:29]: "From the moment I first became drawn into Jan Marsalek's world, there's been this huge paradox."

• Martin Osterlo [22:27]: "Young guy at the time was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, had an impressive charisma about him."

• Martin Osterlo [25:32]: "In cases when people got on his bad side or showed him that they didn't like him, he could be extremely ruthless."

• Host [37:45]: "He was obsessed with it and with learning about this new thing called the Internet."

• Sam Jones [49:52]: "If Moscow decides, and it is always Moscow who decides, if Moscow decides that this person can be and should be recruited, then they work out ways of how to recruit this person."

• Martin Osterlo [31:38]: "I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Marsalek is he probably could have earned millions, gazillions with his charm and his wit and his business acumen and his skills that he didn't need to be what he turned out to be."

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Key Insights and Conclusions

• Dual Identity: Jan Marsalek’s life was a complex tapestry of corporate success and clandestine espionage, making him a unique figure on the intersection of finance and intelligence.

• Influence of Early Life: Marsalek’s upbringing in Kloster Neuberg, marked by a strained relationship with his mother and early immersion into technology, likely played a crucial role in shaping his later actions.

• Charisma and Ruthlessness: Marsalek's ability to charm and manipulate those around him facilitated both his rise in Wirecard and his eventual role as a spy, highlighting the dark side of charisma in leadership.

• Impact of Wirecard's Collapse: The unraveling of Wirecard not only exposed financial fraud but also unveiled deeper geopolitical intrigues, positioning Marsalek as a key player in a broader narrative of chaos and control.

• Human Vulnerability: The episode underscores the notion that individuals with difficult pasts and significant vulnerabilities can be susceptible to manipulation and recruitment by powerful entities like foreign intelligence services.

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Hot Money: Agent of Chaos continues to unravel the intricate layers of Jan Marsalek’s life, promising listeners a thrilling journey through corporate fraud, espionage, and the shadows that connect them. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes as Sam Jones seeks to answer the pivotal questions surrounding Marsalek's true identity and his affiliations with powerful global forces.

Transcript

[Host]

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[Host]

Previously on Hot Money.

[Sam Jones]

Very fast, actually. He started then talking about his experience in Syria, facilitated by the boys just after the recapture of the city of Penyra from isis.

[Host]

When he said, with the boys, what did you think?

[Sam Jones]

He basically said with the Russians.

[Host]

So is it that one? It's that one on the left. Those two great big gates there. It's fucking massive. Yeah. So we stood outside Krenzgerstrasse. Well, that house on Prinzingen Strasse, that belongs here. It's tall it's snowing slowly through trees without leaves. There's a very high fence, which is like a wrought iron fence that's thickly covered with ivy. In February, my producer Peggy and I went to Jan Marsalek's former residence in Munich, a place he'd kept almost entirely secret. It's where he ran his shadow life, his extracurricular world. Outside of Wirecart 61 Prinzrig Entenstrasse. Marsalek rented it for €680,000 a year. Here he was, occupying one of the grandest residential buildings in Munich, which is the wealthiest city in Germany and therefore possibly one of the wealthiest cities in all of Europe. From the moment I first became drawn into Jan Marsalek's world, there's been this huge paradox. And coming back to Munich, I'm hit by it full force. We're on a street. He's opposite the Russian Consulate, and down the road, various embassies and other grand residences. And I suppose, insofar as you would assume that one of the prime objectives of most people working in intelligence is discretion and to remain hidden, then one wonders why he chose here, a villa opposite the Russian Consulate, giving Paul those Novichok documents, boasting about your relationships with Russian mercenaries. How can you function as a spy, a good spy, if you're compelled to drop hints about being one all the time? I don't know, It's a kind of almost like a. A Sharon Stone moment from Basic Instinct. You know the plot of Basic Instinct where she. She murders her husband, but that's also the plot of the book she's written, so it couldn't possibly be true. One of my favorite books about espionage is John Le Carre's the honorable schoolboy. MI6, aka the circus. Pick up clues about Russian master spy Karla by looking back in time through looking more closely at how they were misled at the wreckage the Circus find the traces of something, a thread on which to pull. Le Carre calls it taking back bearings. And it feels to me like we need to do something similar. So far, I've heard about three radically different Jan Marsaleks. The corporate high flyer, the fraudster, and now the Russian agent. And yet, even with that, I have very little sense of who Jan Marsalek really is behind these identities. What makes up the substance of his character, what motivates him. Motive, I think, is the Holy Grail in this story. Not only for what it reveals about one man psychologically, but for what, but also what it might help us glimpse about a whole Worldview and those who pursue it. And so in this episode, I track down people who knew Mars Lec well, worked with him closely, grew up with him in his hometown, all to gather clues. My name is Sam Jones from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is hot money. Season 3 Agent of Chaos Episode 4 Backbearings Jan Marsalek vanished five years ago after Wirecard was exposed as a massive fraud. He hasn't been seen in public since, at least not under his real name. At first everyone thought Marsalek had gone to the Philippines. He told colleagues he was going to find wirecards missing billions. But then the trail in Manila went cold. People wondered whether he'd absconded to China. Rumours swirled about his connections to Germany's intelligence services, to the Austrians, to Israel. Perhaps he'd been taken into protective custody. But these were all trails that Marsalek himself had quite deliberately left behind. In reality, he'd taken a car over the Alps to a village outside Vienna. Travel records show he'd hopped on a plane to Minsk and from there had gone on to Moscow. But even the people close to him didn't know where he ended up. They were left to figure things out for themselves. Just talk us through. When you then go into Prinz Regent Strasse, what was it like inside? And what were you. What was going through your head?

[Sam Jones]

I was scared like to hell. I haven't told my wife, I've told other people that I'm going there, where I am.

[Host]

It's two months after Jan Marsalek's disappearance and this man, we're going to call him Mr. Samt, has gained access to his house.

[Sam Jones]

I had a phone in my socks. I did not know what to expect.

[Host]

Mr. Samt has asked that we don't reveal his real name as a condition of speaking with us for professional reasons. What I can tell you is that he's a high level PR consultant hired by companies when they're in crisis. Samt in German means velvet. It's the alias he has chosen for himself that day. Samt is with an ex business partner of Marsalek's who knew about this place, who was in fact a regular visitor. They snuck into the house because, well, they both have questions. I mean, who doesn't?

[Sam Jones]

So, and we walked around and. Unbelievable. You walk around and you see a parallel world. Yeah, this room is soundproof. This room got searched every other week by a specialist for microphones and surveillance stuff. And you walk around and wow. And then you see his bedroom, which was a black and white Painted room like a zebra, with a mattress on the floor and black and white bed sheets. Not like a cozy bedroom.

[Host]

The house is almost entirely empty, which is strange because when Marsalek fled, all he had with him were two pieces of luggage. Someone must have cleared the house out afterwards. There are just a few striking artifacts left behind.

[Sam Jones]

I was impressed by his medical cabinet. It was a normal door looked in beyond the door was 40 cm deep in shelves full of medical stuff. And because we were in Covid at that time, everything to fight a virus was there. This is sedative, this is virus, this is the flu. And one was for diabetes.

[Host]

It sounds to me like the private stash of someone who never wanted to depend on public healthcare services. Or perhaps someone who never wanted to have to take out a prescription in his own name. There are bottles and bottles of Russian medicines. Sam's heart is still racing and he's scared for a reason. As he looks out the window from the room he was told was Marsalek's office. There, directly opposite the house is the Russian Consulate. And he's thinking, jesus, could there even be a tunnel between these buildings? Apart from Cillian Kleinschmidt, who you heard from in the last episode, Sant is the only person I've met who's been inside the Prinzrikettenstrasse house. He knew Jan Marsalek for about 18 months, but he knew him very well, or at least he knew one side of him, and he knew him under pressure.

[Sam Jones]

I'm hired sometimes when there's something smelly going on and how to not avoid, but how to go through with it and don't have too much damage.

[Host]

Wirecard hired SAMT in 2019, when my FT colleagues Dan and Paul were beginning to reveal to the world that the company was a fraud. Within days of joining, Samt began working closely with Jan Marsalek. Samt prides himself on his ability to read people, to watch them, and to a certain extent to be immune to their charms. Can you describe him for us?

[Sam Jones]

I noticed his friendliness. Do you want to drink something? And I said, yeah, I'll grab a Coke. Oh no, please allow me to give you a Coke. In very formal, polite German. Bitter Duge Stade Stocht das ichte eine Kohler gebe.

[Host]

So please you, yeah, almost elaborate with your kind indulgence.

[Sam Jones]

You allow me to hand you a Coke. You know those head waiters in Austrian restaurants? Herr Ober, her Oberker. So it to me was the behavior of a head waiter.

[Host]

When I think of an Austrian Oberkelner. I have a specific thing in mind. Formal, sometimes stiffly so, maybe even outwardly obsequious, but people totally in control of their own worlds. In a Viennese cafe house, you are the guest of the head waiter. Samt soon found himself getting close to Marsalek. He noticed his quirks. Marsalek ate chocolate constantly. He kept a big box of Lindt Carre, little individually wrapped chocolate squares in his office. The bin was always full of wrappers and Samt, he would often bring him chocolate or sweets. On those visits, Sant clocked the curious collection of objects in Marsalek's office. Like a life size Donald Trump cardboard cutout, for example. One day he asked another senior wirecard.

[Sam Jones]

Do you know about this life size Trump figure in the office in Marshall X office? Marshall's office and his altar of Russian officers. Caps like Ushanka, kind of, yeah, those hats.

[Host]

The executive replies, yeah, no, I've never.

[Sam Jones]

Been in this office, actually.

[Host]

He also noticed that while so much of Marsalek's world at work seemed neat, precise, there was also chaos kind of hidden away.

[Sam Jones]

He put all the dirty cappuccino and all the dirty china. He put it in the cupboard in his conference room.

[Host]

Not just a few cups, weeks and weeks and weeks worth of cups, because he didn't want to see it. He didn't want to see the mess.

[Sam Jones]

Yes. And it was summer, so that was a biotope after a while. And the cleaning woman found it by accident because they were missing so much china. And he just put it messy, like in this cupboard and in the back, it was already growing.

[Host]

There were also times when Samt would catch glimpses of Marsalek's personal life. Like one night when it was quite late and Marsalek had kept him waiting for a long time. So long that Samt had had time to go out to a nearby toy shop and buy him a present. A Lego Batmobile.

[Sam Jones]

I like to play build Lego. Who does not? And so I bought it and gave it to him as a gift and said, here, that reminds me of you. And he looked, oh, Batman. I said, no, the Joker.

[Host]

Marsalek brushes off the jibe and eagerly opens the box.

[Sam Jones]

He started building and during that building he received like 15, 10, 15 phone calls from his girlfriend and his father who were in town and who were waiting for him for dinner. But he didn't want to go. He was sitting there with me, we were talking business and he was building this Batmobile. And then he said, yeah, I'll come later. And I'LL join you later. And we were sitting there. I was sitting on one end of the conference table, he was sitting on the other and we were rolling the car.

[Host]

But he clearly didn't want to go and spend time with him.

[Sam Jones]

He clearly didn't want to go. And I had the feeling that it was a difficult relationship.

[Host]

And then there was the money.

[Sam Jones]

I remember one time we went into a restaurant here in Munich and I had a capaccio Real cauliflower, 2 or 3 Coke Zero. And so my bill was less than €50. Probably the whole bill was 700 something. Marsalek started with caviar. He had all the classic oyster, whatever, beefsteak Fiorentina and this bottle of sparkling wine. And it was a €720 bill and he gave 900. He tried to be humble or to give the picture of being a humble person devoted to his job. On the other hand, paying everything cash and living a life that is in the high 1% of Munich. Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself.

[Host]

Possibly, thought Sant. The early days of Wirecard had seen the company pay its executives huge bonuses before it listed. But even that didn't quite account for Marsalek's apparent wealth, because it wasn't just flashy dinners.

[Sam Jones]

He was invested with 7 million into.

[Host]

Telegram, the messaging app founded in Russia. Marsalek was an early shareholder.

[Sam Jones]

But when you only make a million before tax at Wirecard, you have to work 15 years and eat ravioli from cans and live in a very reduced lifestyle to save up the money to invest like that in one single direct investment.

[Host]

And of course, Sant didn't even know at this point about the palatial property on Prince Regentenstrasse that he found out two months later, after Wirecard blew up, even though they would often meet at a restaurant very close by.

[Sam Jones]

I could have beaten myself. There's Kefa at the restaurant here in Munich, and we met very often at the Kefa restaurant. And his secret office was like 500 meters or less than 500 meters down the road.

[Host]

After the day he'd poked around the villa, Sant realises that really, whatever he thought he confidently knew about Jan Marsalek is barely anything substantial at all. And that in the 18 months they worked together, Marsalek's entire Persona at Wirecard was effectively a lie. I needed to talk to someone who'd known him for longer than Sant. That's coming up after the break.

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[Host]

Martin Osterlo first met Jan Marsalek when he joined Wirecard almost 16 years ago.

[Martin Osterlo]

Young guy at the time was wearing a T shirt and jeans, had an impressive charisma about him. But you never would have thought that this guy would be managing the whole company very quickly at the time.

[Host]

Back then, in 2005, Marsalek was just 25. He hadn't been to university, he hadn't even finished school. After joining the company five years earlier in 2000, he'd been quickly promoted and by the time Martin arrived at Wirecard, Marsalek was head of it.

[Martin Osterlo]

Rhetorically. I already realized at that stage that he was very, very good. He was like a Hoover. He could take information extremely quickly and formulate a summary almost in a fashion where you would lick your lips. You'd love to have that ability to quickly take something on board and be able to express it in a form that seemed on the one hand smart, but still very, very understandable for a broad audience.

[Host]

Martin says that Jan worked his way up the company by bringing order and structure to what was otherwise a chaotic, fast growing startup.

[Martin Osterlo]

If you were the type of guy or girl to say, there's no structure for this, I can't do this, you were out of the door very, very quickly. If you went in and said, I can't do this yet, how do I do it? Take ownership and do it yourself. Those people excelled at Wirecard in the early days. That's why probably Jan Marsalik had an easy to climb ladder because he was a doer.

[Host]

And one thing he was particularly good at was charming people. Sometimes it almost seemed like he was setting himself a challenge to win someone to his side by doing something like deliberately turning up late.

[Martin Osterlo]

We had CEOs of very important companies and he would just come 20 minutes late and still charm this individual, that they seemed like the best friends afterwards, where you would think that would be inexcusable, but Yann had the ability to turn things around. I think really there are traits that I have had strong envy for. But I envied Jan so much because it seemed so damn simple for him. He really mastered giving you the feeling that you're important, despite the fact that you could figure out over many, many years that it was a routine.

[Host]

With his people skills, Jan was a good manager. He became Martin's boss and as you can hear, Martin really liked him.

[Martin Osterlo]

Jan had a broad spectrum of friendly, formally friendly. So when, for example, when you went to Jan and said, do you have a, a minute, do you have a second he would always say for you, always.

[Host]

Which wasn't to say he didn't have edges.

[Martin Osterlo]

I did have the feeling that he liked people or didn't like people. In cases when people got on his bad side or showed him that they didn't like him, he could be extremely ruthless is the only word I find.

[Host]

Over time, Martin noticed that to get on with him you needed ultimately not to take things too seriously. Marsalek liked to test people to see if they could hold their own against him.

[Martin Osterlo]

He did say things to shock and provoke people here and there. He had a Wiener Schmidt, sort of the Vienna joking.

[Host]

Playfulness.

[Martin Osterlo]

Playfulness. So he could get away with murder saying certain things. And you also have to understand that he was in a circle of management where making politically incorrect jokes was in fashion. I think Jan, he'd enjoy walking on a ledge and. And some people falling down.

[Host]

So by the early 2000 and tens, Jan Marsalek is a hugely successful young corporate executive. He's basically the man running this fast growing German company which is on its way to a main market listing. He's a bit of a maverick and prefers action over rules. But whatever is striking or unusual about Jane, it tends to get masked by the fact that Wirecard is also an unusual company. It primarily processed payments for high risk industries. The businesses, other payment processing companies and banks were hesitant to get wrapped up in like gaming, gambling and porn. Although Wirecard had a different way of describing that.

[Martin Osterlo]

Adult content or emotional content as we would call it.

[Host]

And over the coming years, Wildcard's appetite for risk also took it to countries where the rules of business were more ambiguous.

[Martin Osterlo]

I had heard before that he had several trips to Russia.

[Host]

When would that have been?

[Martin Osterlo]

That was four or five years, maybe three. Three to five years before Wirecard collapsed.

[Host]

So sort of 20, 15, 2014, 1516.

[Martin Osterlo]

Around bit later. Yeah, yeah, 1516, yeah. But of course we did build up Wirecard Russia in that time as well. So it wasn't so surprising.

[Host]

Just weeks before Wirecard collapse, something surprising did happen and it chilled Martin. Marsalek wanted to invest money in a new company that was issuing credit cards. He needed the board's approval. Martin and another colleague had run the numbers on this company and they knew this investment was a bad idea. Right ahead of the crucial board meeting, they told Marsalek that explicitly. They gave him the figures on the returns Wirecard could expect. Martin remembers specifically what he said.

[Martin Osterlo]

Long term, the card project over the next decade, if it runs a decade, then it would potentially cover 1.25 million.

[Host]

Jan took it all on board. There's no way he didn't know the numbers.

[Martin Osterlo]

Martin says Jan was very, very quick in understanding. And an hour later we are sitting in the meeting and he simply ignored what we said. He said, the card project alone in the first year will cover the 1.5.

[Host]

Million with you in the room, with.

[Martin Osterlo]

Us in the video conference. So he just ignored what we discussed.

[Host]

It's a very curious kind of game. You know, you're watching him do this and obviously it's clear based on everything you understand about him until now, that he, you know, is not stupid. He didn't mishear you. He didn't, you know, didn't lose the facts.

[Martin Osterlo]

We were flabbergasted. We were speechless. It had never happened like that. I mean, we were all important people in the company. It was like a punch in the face.

[Host]

What really comes across as Martin recounts this is just how effortlessly and easily Marsalek lied, how confidently it's like he knew he had Martin and his colleague under his thumb and. And they wouldn't raise an objection. And I think that's what made it so shocking for Martin because it obviously raised the question, what else had Marsalek lied so bloodlessly about? Today, I think Martin is actually quite bemused by everything that has happened. He tells me that part of the reason he decided to talk to me is that it's a kind of coping mechanism, which I think hints at how deeply the whole experience has affected him. The collapse of Wirecard and the revelations that Marsalek was a spy, they don't anger him, they sadden him.

[Martin Osterlo]

I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Marsalek is he probably could have earned millions, gazillions with his charm and his wit and his business acumen and his skills that he didn't need to be what he turned out to be. That is really something that most people who worked at Wirecard or witnessed him when discussing it afterwards. We all come to that point.

[Host]

When Marsilec's fraud at Wirecard was discovered, the company's stock went to zero and Martin's life savings were basically wiped out. For me, the remarkable thing is that despite that Martin, Martin evidently still holds quite a lot of affection for his former boss.

[Martin Osterlo]

I often ask myself now, did I know the true yan at all and how much of it was an act, how much was genius, how much was in between, how much was learned, how much was instinctive? All these questions I really can't answer. I also asked myself, when Jan wakes up in the morning, what he thinks now of all the contacts of all the employees. Was that all just a lie? At what stage was the lie? What was the turning point?

[Host]

If it was possible to wave a magic wand or whatever? Could you imagine going for a drink with him or dinner with him now and being friends with him?

[Martin Osterlo]

Actually, I think I would love to do that. Actually, I have thought about getting into Moscow and seeing if I could organize it. I was thinking one could try that.

[Host]

Why haven't you?

[Martin Osterlo]

I mean, the honest truth is, would you have the balls to actually go to Moscow and feel that you're not endangering yourself and your family? That probably, if I had a guarantee that I would not be touched, I'd love to get his side on this.

[Host]

Martin says he feels certain there must have been a point where something in Marsalek's life went quite wrong to set him on the path he took. But when he thinks back, he really can't say exactly when that might have been. Martin realises that Marsalek could talk, he could charm, he could hold court, he could make you feel like you're his close friend. But actually, he almost never revealed anything about his life directly at all. What he did at home or where he had come from, his whole youth.

[Martin Osterlo]

Is a complete blank. He never spoke of that, nor did he speak of Vienna in his youth, which is quite remarkable because, I mean, I would have felt like I'd had a lot of personal talks with him, but only later did I realize he said a lot, but he didn't really give an insight of his past at all.

[Justin Richmond]

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[Host]

A few months ago I traveled to a small Austrian town called Kloster Neuberg. It's just outside Vienna. Kloster Neuberg is dominated by a huge monastery on a hill at its center. It's home to about 28,000 people, and it's the place where Jan Marsalek grew up. In the Town hall cafe, I meet up with four people who knew Jan as a child. Rudolf Koch rustles up some Velengerter black coffees. He used to be the headmaster of the local secondary school, Marsalek's school, and he's brought along another teacher, Bruno, and two of Marsalek's classmates, Verena and Philipp. We all sit down around the table together. I hope they might be able to tell me something about Jan Marsalek before Wirecard, about the experiences that formed him as an adult. This is the first time that Philipp, Rudolf and Bruno have spoken to the press about Marsalek. When Wirecard went down and Marsalek went on the run, it was a shock.

[Martin Osterlo]

Top 10 White Collar Crime of this century.

[Host]

As Philip runs down the list of Jan's exploits, he says it sounds like a bad James Bond plot. Rudolf shows me and my producer Peggy an old school yearbook. Oh wow. Lots more hair. Yeah. In the picture, Jan is in the front row, crouched down, almost ready to spring up again. He's looking directly at the camera, arm resting on one knee, fingers laced together. There's maybe 20 other students in the class. They all look like classic teenagers, awkward in their own bodies. Jan, though he looks very at ease. It would of course be totally stupid to expect to see signs of a criminal treasonous future in an old school photo. But this. This isn't exactly what I expected either. I learned Jan actually began his schooling at Elysees in Vienna, a French private school, before moving back to the local school in Kloster Neuberg when he was 12. And because of his time at the lycee, Jan was fluent in French. Philip, his former classmate, remembers a time when their French class was being taught by a supply teacher, a sub. And Jan just stood up and said he was leaving. The teacher was of course totally taken aback. But when they tried to put him in his place, Jan answered with a five minute monologue in flawless French.

[Martin Osterlo]

Totally baffled.

[Host]

Jan must have gone to the place he always went whenever he could skip a lesson. In fact, where he went, even in the minutes between lessons, to the library. And that's where he got to know Bruno. Bruno taught history, German and philosophy and he also looked after the school library. Soon after Jan joined the school, the head of IT told Bruno that Marsalek was his star pupil and suggested he could help with the new computer system the library had got. So Jan became Bruno's helper. Bruno says that it couldn't have run smoothly without him. In fact, when everyone here thinks of Jan back then, they picture him sat in front of the computer in the library. He was obsessed with it and with learning about this new thing called the Internet. Jan was certainly different from other 15 year olds who were more likely to be skateboarding or playing football outside. Philip says it was like they were all still children and Jan was somehow not. He seemed more like a fully grown adult already. Varenna says he was maybe aloof, but definitely not arrogant. Yet other kids admired him. And the teachers, well, the thing Filip remembers them saying is be more like Jan. I wonder if his teachers knew about his strategy to avoid washing his socks. Philipp says that one day Jan announced he had done a cost benefit analysis and he would never wash a pair of socks again. Calculating the value of his labour and time in washing, drying and folding the socks, he'd decided it was cheaper just to take out a subscription and have new pairs constantly delivered. It sounds almost like Jan enjoyed being unconventional in making decisions and crucially for me, telling people about those decisions that seemed to expose or undermine the sense of what others thought of as being normal. If Jan liked computers and enjoyed being atypical, he wasn't a loner, though, says Verena. Far from it. He had a wide group of friends and she was part of it. And yet she also remembers that Jan never socialized outside of school. He never took friends home. He had a very private side to his life. Verena uses this German word, schrag, to describe him, which you might say means askew. Set at a different angle to the rest of the world. Jan was a straight A student. But in his last year, two weeks before he was due to sit his final high school exams, he received a job offer from a tech company in Vienna. He accepted and he told his schoolmates he was leaving immediately. He wasn't going to bother with the exams. Everyone thinks he's daft, leaving at the 11th hour. You've got to have a lot of self belief or maybe self delusion to do something like that. Aged 17. Think back to how important exam results seemed to you at that age. I can remember believing my whole future depended on them. Rudolf jumps in to offer an explanation. He says that the job offer was very, very lucrative. But all four of them also suggest another possible reason why Jan was so keen to leave Klosterneuburg. I asked about Jan's family. He has a younger sister and a brother, both of whom seem to lead perfectly ordinary lives. No one really remembers anything about his father. Either way, the father had left the family by the time Jan was going to the local school. But everyone remembers his mother. Rudolf, then the headmaster, describes Marsalek's mother as combative. But it's obvious from his body language and the way he raises his eyebrows as he carefully pronounces the word that he wants me to know. It's a bit of a euphemism. Verena agrees with Rudolf's assessment. She now works for the town council and she knows Frau Mars Leck as a corporation conspicuous woman. Lorena says Jan's mother used to be regularly upset about one thing or another. She campaigned against a 5G mask being put up in Kloster Neuberg and against a development that would have threatened a nature reserve. She says she's very left wing. Everyone thinks Jan had a hard time with his mother, that it was a difficult relationship to the point where Jan he did whatever he could to get away from home. I got in touch with Jan's mother, and to my surprise, she replied. I got an email from her. She said she has, quote, no interest in giving us an interview because she has neither the desire, nerves or time to rake over, quote, an extremely unpleasant period of my life. She has asked that we don't reveal her name here. She said it's unfair to label her as combative and said it's a shame for her campaigning efforts in town to get dismissed as left wing and disruptive. She did say that her relationship with her son changed massively the year before he left home. She says it broke down because she didn't let him get away with everything and, quote, didn't let him wrap me around his little finger. She tried to involve a psychologist to mediate between them. It didn't work. Jan, she implies, had his teachers charmed, but she was resistant. Since then, she says, she's only tried to make contact with her son once in 25 years. The email she sent me had a whole load of attachments. 18 documents concerning all kinds of things to do with Jan. Some are press releases from as far back as 2000, and they make me think that despite their estrangement, she has been tracking her son's career. She's read, it would seem, almost all of the books and materials that have been published about the wirecard fraud. A lot of the attachments she's sent me, though, are all about the Austrian Russian Friendship Society, and she urges me to look more into it. It's the organization in Vienna that wirecard sponsored. From Marsalek's mother's response, and from what we've heard from others, it's clear that she and her son had a deeply troubled and painful relationship. Whatever happened when he left home, Verena says, seemed significant because when she next saw Jan after the exams, she he appeared to be a changed person. It was at a reunion after everyone else had graduated. They were around 19 years old, she says he boasted that he now knew how the world worked, that money could buy him whatever he wanted, even sex. Even he implied sex with her. Incredulous, she told him he was stupid. When Verena told this story, everyone around the table seemed shocked. It sounded so unlike the Jan they knew, like he'd somehow come off the rails a bit. Before everyone gets up to leave, to pick up their children from nursery to go back to work. Philipp tells me why he agreed to speak with us. He says he's speaking with us because he wants people to understand that Jan, though he had a difficult childhood, ended up where he did because he was vulnerable. He wasn't destined to become a fugitive. And it's deeply sad that he did. I've always believed that people are much more malleable things than we realize, capable of extremes. We have a tendency to see those who end up at the fringes as somehow radically different to us. Broken, evil. The reality, though, is that with the right pressures, the right challenges, the right circumstances, or all the wrong ones, people can be warped into the strangest shapes and situations. When you want to recruit someone as a spy, if you're good at it, you understand something of that. You look for the parts of a person's life, their personality, their needs that you can work with, bend, change, use their history. But not everyone with a difficult childhood becomes a spy. So how did Jan Marsalek get drawn into it? Why did he end up working with the Russians? And what did he actually do? Coming up on Hot Money.

[Sam Jones]

If Moscow decides, and it is always Moscow who decides, if Moscow decides that this person can be and should be recruited, then they work out ways of how to recruit this person.

[Host]

This is a dangerous situation because those.

[Martin Osterlo]

Spies tend to be the better ones, better than the guys who do it solely for money.

[Host]

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones. The senior producer and co writer is Peggy Sutton. Our producer is Izzy Carter. Our researcher is Maureen Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shakurji, Fact checking by Kira Levine. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo d' Oliveira, with additional sound design by Izzy Carter. Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet. Our show art is by Sean Carney. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines McQuaid and Matthew Garaghan. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to rula Khalaf, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuele Zaragoza, Nigel Hansen, Vicky Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohn. I'm Sam Jones.

[Justin Richmond]

This is Justin Richmond from Broken Record. The three things I love about summer are pool days blaring all the new summer songs that come out, and endless, refreshing iced drinks from Starbucks. Even better, my favorite summer drink has returned to Starbucks. The Summer Berry Refresher is available now. A mix of berry flavors shaken with ice and poured over raspberry flavored pearls. It's light, vibrant and just as refreshing as the summer fun you'll be having. So queue up your playlist and head over to Starbucks to check out their summer menu. There's something for everyone, from creamy cold brews to ice cold refreshers. Your summer berry refresher and is ready at Starbucks.

[Host]

It's Megan.

[Sam Jones]

Are you ready for Megan?

[Host]

Summer Megan.

[Sam Jones]

Megan. Megan.

[Martin Osterlo]

Megan. Megan.

[Host]

Would you prefer that I give you a printout that you can read at your own pace? Megan? Yes, it's me.

[Sam Jones]

What a shock.

[Host]

Et cetera on June 27. She is a smoking hot warrior princess. All right, meat sacks, let's get to work. Are you going to stand in my way?

[Sam Jones]

The bee is back.

[Host]

You think you learned your lesson the first time? Megan. Megan 2.0.

[T Mobile Representative]

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[Host]

This is an I Heart podcast.