Introducing The Pirate of Prague | 11

Summary

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Under Cover of Knight | Episode 11: Introducing The Pirate of Prague

Release Date: November 13, 2023
Host: Joe Nocera (for The Pirate of Prague, featured in Under Cover of Knight)
Produced by: Apple TV / Spoke Media
Episode Focus: The rise and schemes of Victor Khajani, the infamous "Pirate of Prague," and how he seduced the elite into his grand oil scam.

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Episode Overview

This episode kicks off a tale of audacious ambition, deception, and seduction in the world of international finance. It introduces Victor Khajani—once a multimillionaire with dreams of controlling the oil of an entire nation—who now lives in obscurity in a rundown Bahamian motel. Through interviews, eyewitness accounts, and immersive storytelling, Joe Nocera and co-host Peter Elkind unravel how Victor charmed his way into Aspen high society and orchestrated an international con centered on the privatization of Azerbaijan’s oil industry. The episode zeroes in on a legendary Aspen party that set the stage for Victor’s most audacious scheme.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening: Tracking Down Victor Khajani (00:08–01:59)

• Joe Nocera and Peter Elkind try to locate Victor Khajani in a shabby motel in the Bahamas.
• Despite Victor's former wealth, his current surroundings are a stark contrast: "This place, it's a wreck. And Victor, he was once seriously, seriously loaded." (Joe Nocera, 01:59)

2. Who is Victor Khajani? (02:00–05:32)

• Victor is described as an oligarch, “the one who showed all the other oligarchs how to be an oligarch,” and a quintessential charmer. He is from the Czech Republic—not Russian—and was known for having “millions and millions of dollars.”
• Guests and those close to Victor remember him as both dazzling and dangerous:
  • "I was mesmerized … wildly attracted … I had never met anyone like him." (Kendall Callahan, 05:05)
  • “He’s brilliant. Victor's brilliant.” (Kendall Callahan, 08:38)
  • “The thing that I loved about him, which was his brilliance, was also the thing that was lethal about him.” (Kendall Callahan, 09:08)

3. The Aspen Arrival and Aura (06:47–10:24)

• Victor arrives in Aspen, Colorado (Christmas 1997), making an immediate impression by buying “the Peak House” on Red Mountain for almost $20 million in cash.
• Tales abound of Victor’s limitless spending, famously sending an $8,000 bottle of wine back at a London restaurant.

4. The Legendary Aspen Party (10:24–24:19)

• Victor throws an extravagant party, orchestrated by renowned party planner Peter Helburn.
• The guest list swells to around 500 of Aspen’s, and even the world’s, richest and most connected individuals. “Everybody who was anybody was there... if you didn’t get [an invitation], well, you were a nobody.” (Joe Nocera, 11:37)
• The evening features:
  • Free-flowing high-end wines (Cristal, Château Petrus)
  • A seven-course dinner (including bird's nest soup and smoked elk tenderloin)
  • Elaborate party favors (“I got gold cufflinks and I think he gave my wife a diamond.” – Aaron Fleck, 27:28)
  • A surprise live performance by Natalie Cole (“...people were blown away. It was really amazing because she had polished off most of the bottle of Grand Marnier before she even performed.” – Peter Helburn, 24:19)

5. The Bait: Victor’s Grand Deal (24:19–30:03)

• Amidst the festivities, Victor subtly pitches an “opportunity of a lifetime”: buying into Azerbaijan's oil through its state company, SOCAR, supposedly being privatized.
• Key guests—money managers like Aaron Fleck, wealthy investors, celebrities—are ripe targets. Victor claims he can secure the entire company: “According to Victor, he could get his hands on the whole thing.” (Peter Elkind, 28:18)
• Projected returns are outlandish (“We talked about the potential of many billions of dollars...more than 100 times your investment.” – Aaron Fleck, 29:01)

6. The Seduction and Aftermath (30:03–31:07)

• Victor’s spell is cast through charisma, opulence, and exclusivity, pushing guests to overlook prudent investing instincts.
• “They barely knew the guy, but they were about to part with millions and millions of their hard earned dollars.” (Joe Nocera, 29:11)
• “For him, the shrapnel doesn't matter.” (Kendall Callahan, 30:03)
• His ex-wife reflects on his complex legacy: “I understand how people are swayed by his charisma...that brought a lot of big people down.” (Kendall Callahan, 30:19)
• Aaron Fleck sums up the betrayal: “I treated him like he was part of my family, like he was a son. Do I hate him? I know who he is. That's all.” (Aaron Fleck, 30:55)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Victor’s Downfall:
  “How does a guy like that end up in a place like this?”
  —Joe Nocera (01:59)

• On Victor’s Personality:
  “He was a schmoozer, a charmer. And unlike those other oligarchs, this guy's not Russian. He's from the Czech Republic. The tabloids called him the Pirate of Prague.”
  —Joe Nocera (04:27)

• On Aspen’s High Society:
  “Aspen… the sort of place where you can't buy a house unless you've really made it.”
  —Joe Nocera (06:55)

• On the Over-the-Top Party:
  “Chateau Petrus, baby.”
  —Joe Nocera (17:43)

• On the Con’s Power:
  “Victor's illusion appeared so complete, so believable, so utterly perfect, that these people were about to ignore everything they'd ever learned about investing and make quite possibly the worst decision of their lives.”
  —Joe Nocera (31:07)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:08–01:59 – Tracking Victor in the Bahamas
• 05:05–06:07 – Character sketches of Victor by ex-wife & observers
• 06:47–10:24 – Setting the Aspen scene and acquiring Peak House
• 10:24–14:17 – Party planning and extravagant invites
• 17:13–18:00 – The scale of opulence and cost
• 24:19–24:43 – Natalie Cole’s live performance
• 27:28–27:37 – Lavish party favors
• 28:04–28:44 – Introduction to the Azerbaijani oil deal
• 29:01–29:11 – Unbelievable promises of return
• 30:03–31:07 – Psychological insights and foreshadowing the aftermath

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Tone & Language

The episode maintains a witty, cinematic, and conversational tone, with Joe Nocera’s narration mixing skepticism, admiration, and a sense of dramatic irony. Interviewees reminisce with awe, regret, and sometimes bitterness—especially those who lost more than just money.

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Summary Takeaway

Chapter One of “The Pirate of Prague” brilliantly sets up Victor Khajani as a dazzling, dangerous figure whose charms masked the makings of an epic scam targeting Aspen’s elite. Through lush detail and firsthand accounts, listeners glimpse how a meticulously crafted illusion can seduce even the most sophisticated investors and how, behind the opulence, lurked devastation for those drawn into Victor’s orbit.

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Transcript

[Joe Nocera]

Paradise island, the bahamas. Hello?

[Peter Elkind]

Hello, victor?

[Joe Nocera]

Hello.

[Peter Elkind]

Hello.

[Joe Nocera]

Hi.

[Peter Elkind]

I'm a journalist and I'm trying to find one of your neighbors and wanted to see if you could help me find him. It's a fellow named Victor Khajani. He's got red hair, he's a white man, kind of round face and curly hair.

[Joe Nocera]

This place looks like a Down at the Heels Motel. Two stories, peeling paint, doors off the hinges. It's not the Bahamas of your dreams. Yes. There's a pool out back, but you wouldn't want to swim in it. This is the last place you'd expect to find the man we're looking for, but all the leads point right here.

[Peter Elkind]

Okay, you don't know anything about him. Okay, thank you very much. Have a great day.

[Joe Nocera]

I've never seen him, actually.

[Peter Elkind]

Is that right?

[Joe Nocera]

Yeah, I don't know him.

[Peter Elkind]

We're trying to find him. I'll show you the picture we have.

[Joe Nocera]

I haven't seen him.

[Peter Elkind]

The car that was identified back in 2015 as being driven by Victor is sitting right here in the parking lot. It's in pretty bad shape. Have you seen him by any chance?

[Joe Nocera]

You don't ever see them, but you hear them.

[Peter Elkind]

Oh, really?

[Joe Nocera]

You hear people every night. You do? Having parties. They have quite a bit of arguing, too. There's people there, I don't know, four or five nights a week, but I've never seen him. I wouldn't recognize him. He walked by here.

[Peter Elkind]

Well, we are thinking we might have found Victor. Where he lives, there's no doorbell to ring. There's no name on the door. There's no mailbox. This really does seem like somebody who does not want to be found.

[Joe Nocera]

Hello. There's something really off here. It doesn't add up because this place, it's a wreck. And Victor, he was once seriously, seriously loaded. I'm talking millions and millions of dollars. And he had a plan, a cunning plan. A plan to get control of all the oil of an entire country. And I promise you, that was a lot of oil. So here's the question, and it's a good one. How does a guy like that end up in a place like this? This is the Pirate of Prague, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House. I'm Joe Nocera. It's chapter one, the Party. The thing about bad guys is you often can't help but like them in spite of yourself. And let's not mince words here. This is a story about a very bad guy. At least if everything they say about him is true. This is a guy who came from nature. Nothing to having the very best of everything. Everything everyone else wants. Private jets, yachts, secluded islands, and suitcases bursting with cash. Other people's cash. The fellow in question was an oligarch, maybe even the first oligarch. The oligarch who showed all the other oligarchs how to be an oligarch, only unlike the rest of them. This guy, you could imagine being friends with him. People liked him. I mean, they really liked him. He was a schmoozer, a charmer. And unlike those other oligarchs, this guy's not Russian. He's from the Czech Republic. The tabloids called him the Pirate of Prague.

[Kendall Callahan]

I was mesmerized. I was wildly attracted to. I just thought I had never met anyone like him, which most people who've met him would also say.

[Peter Helburn]

He goes to me. My name is Victor Cuisini. I'm here at Dubai, an island like a mad genius, perhaps a bit twisted.

[Katherine Fleck]

It was one of those experiences you look back on and think, was I really there? Did I really do that? You know, did all of this really happen?

[Joe Nocera]

This is the story of Victor Khajani.

[Peter Elkind]

Hello, Victor. Hello.

[Joe Nocera]

That guy knocking on the door, that's Peter Elkind, a journalist and a good friend of mine. Once upon a time we worked for the same magazine and I sent you around the globe on this one.

[Peter Elkind]

You did? You did. I went to Nassau in the Bahamas. I got to take a plane ride with Victor at the controls.

[Joe Nocera]

Oy, that sounds kind of dangerous.

[Peter Elkind]

It was interesting to say the least. And I spent a lot of time with some of the wealthiest people on the planet. And I also got to travel to Azerbaijan, of all places.

[Joe Nocera]

And you love this story, But I gotta ask, I mean, was it because you got an all expenses paid trip to the Bahamas?

[Peter Elkind]

There was that. I didn't exactly spend time on the beach, but yes. I really, really love this story.

[Joe Nocera]

So anyway, you wrote, I edited it, we published it, but the tale hadn't really ended exactly right.

[Peter Elkind]

And it was far from over. And I always wanted to return to it because a lot has happened since.

[Joe Nocera]

All right, so we are back. So where do we start?

[Peter Elkind]

Well, how about Christmas 1997 in Aspen, Colorado?

[Joe Nocera]

Okay, so it's early evening, three days before Christmas. Aspen. Shishi. Really? Shishi? The sort of place you buy a house when you've really made it? Actually, it's the sort of place where you can't buy a house unless you've really made it. Sure, there's skiing, but if you're in this tax bracket. Who cares about the skiing anyway? It's 1997, Bill Clinton is president, and the Spice Girls are at number one with their hit song Too Much. And in this town, everyone has too much. One guy in particular. The snow is falling. The festive lights sparkle. Everyone is off the slopes. It's apres ski time. And there's one party in particular that everyone's talking about. It's happening at one of Aspen's swankiest addresses. This place is posh. It is right up high on top of what the locals call billionaires mountain. And the host. Yep, It's Victor. Just 34 years old, and he's got a sensational smile. Six feet plus, red hair, big grin, and totally charming person.

[Peter Helburn]

Very personable, very charming.

[Aaron Fleck]

He was as charming as almost anybody I've ever met.

[Peter Helburn]

Mr. Charming. Sort of like movie star charming.

[Joe Nocera]

Okay, all right, I get it. He's charming.

[Peter Elkind]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's charming and he's charismatic. But, you know, Victor wasn't just a charmer. He was way more than that.

[Kendall Callahan]

He's brilliant. Victor's brilliant.

[Joe Nocera]

That's Kendall Callahan, and she should know. She was once married to the guy.

[Kendall Callahan]

I was like, he's so brilliant. I've never met anyone more brilliant in my life. I remember telling my sister, I've never met anybody so smart. And I find intelligence incredibly attractive. But the very thing that I loved about him, which was his brilliance, was also the thing that was lethal about him.

[Joe Nocera]

Yeah, she said lethal. Victor was the new boy in town. Nobody seemed to know much about him except that he was some kind of businessman and he had a lot of cash. There's a rumor that at some tony Mayfair restaurant in London, that's the most expensive neighborhood, he sent back an $8,000 bottle of French wine. The check that night, $21,000.

[Katherine Fleck]

If I had said to him, you know, I really feel like some truffles, he probably would have sent the plane to Ital pick them up. There was this feeling of limitlessness.

[Joe Nocera]

That's Katherine Fleck. Aspen's her home. And she got to know our guy pretty well. He made quite the first impression.

[Katherine Fleck]

Victor came to town in the fall, I believe, and the story goes, that he arrived with a suitcase full of cash, walked into a real estate office and said, I want to buy a big, beautiful house. And what I really want is the house up on top of the mountain.

[Joe Nocera]

2137 Red Mountain Road. The Peak House, people called it.

[Katherine Fleck]

It may have been the largest price paid for a house in Aspen. At that time, oh, it was.

[Joe Nocera]

It cost Victor just shy of $20 million. And he paid cash. Victor was Aspen's version of Jay Gatsby, someone few people knew well, but everyone wondered about and gossiped about. And soon he did something else that was quintessential Gatsby. He threw a party. But this wasn't exactly a housewarming. It was much more than that. Much, much more. It seems Victor was up to something. But of course, his guests, they didn't know that for them it was just a hot ticket.

[Peter Helburn]

Everyone wanted an invitation.

[Aaron Fleck]

He was a hell of a party.

[Katherine Fleck]

The Cristal was flowing, the Chateau Petrus was flowing.

[Peter Helburn]

Money was no object, let's put it that way.

[Aaron Fleck]

One of the best parties I've ever gone to in my life.

[Joe Nocera]

Everybody who was anybody was there. The well heeled, the well connected, the richest of the rich. They all got an invite. And if you didn't get one, well, you were a nobody.

[Katherine Fleck]

People were actually calling the party planner and saying, I want to be invited to this party.

[Peter Helburn]

I mean, I got multiple calls at home because people, or guess that I might be working on this event.

[Joe Nocera]

That's the fellow that organized it all, Peter Hellburn, party planner par excellence. The guy who put on the flashiest events for those with the deepest pockets.

[Peter Helburn]

People found out that he was giving this massive holiday party. And of course, in Aspen, everybody thinks they should be invited. It doesn't work that way, but they think they certainly will call whomever they know to see if they can get in. That way, all the little ploys are tried.

[Joe Nocera]

The guest list started with 100 names.

[Peter Helburn]

But guess what, it kept getting added to. We were hearing rumors that the count was, you know, up to 450 and then the count was up to 500. At which point we tried to have a conversation with Victor that we can't really handle any more people. And he said, oh, you can make it work. And walked away.

[Joe Nocera]

The invite said 7pm and boy were people eager.

[Peter Helburn]

Every bay serve arrived at the same time. At one point, there are people standing outside waiting to get in. Which, sir, reminded me of a nightclub, a bad nightclub.

[Joe Nocera]

It was pandemonium.

[Peter Helburn]

Where do you put 500 coats? Where do you put.

[Joe Nocera]

Inside? At the top of the staircase stood Victor, greeting each guest one by one. Though he didn't have a clue who.

[Peter Helburn]

Half these people were, I was behind him. And I would whisper into Victor's ear, this is Mr. And Mrs. So and so. That was it. I didn't get many histories on the people or where they came From. Or anything of that nature. Because we were trying to get the traffic jam out of the doorway.

[Joe Nocera]

A little later on, in the grand living room, our host slowly eased his way through the throng. He was pressing the flesh, grabbing hands, slapping backs, flashing that smile.

[Kendall Callahan]

He was tall. I don't know how tall he is. Six?

[Peter Elkind]

Four?

[Kendall Callahan]

Six? Three. He's tall, you know, Blond hair, blue eyes, Czech accent.

[Joe Nocera]

It was an intoxicating mix for Victor's former wife, Kendall.

[Kendall Callahan]

Victor has a charisma. I don't know what it is. I don't know how he does it. I don't think it's something you can learn how to do. I just know I'm not the only one who was bedazzled.

[Joe Nocera]

Bedazzled? Don't you just love that word? Victor wasn't the only draw. There were some big names there that night. Goldie Hawn and Ivana Trump. Was it really five years since her divorce from Donald? But they weren't the guests who really mattered to Victor. They were part of Victor's act to impress the guests who did really matter. The big money types. By all accounts, they were Victor's marks. Like his new neighbor, Rick Burke. Hardly a household name, but worth a lot more than most household names. He's the Burke from Dooney and Burke, the luxury handbag maker. And there's a lot of money in handbags. Burke wasn't even going to come to the party. Said he didn't have a tux. But Victor picked up the phone and twisted his arm, so Burke went, and like everyone else, he was blown away. But of course, in time, like plenty of other people there that night, he'd come to wish that he'd stayed home. So, Peter, who else was there?

[Peter Elkind]

Well, there were a bunch of other big money investors. And crucially, there was this guy, Aaron Fleck.

[Joe Nocera]

So tell me about him.

[Peter Elkind]

Aaron Fleck is a money manager who handled a few hundred million dollars in assets. And it was mostly for wealthy families. And that's not a ton of money, as these things go. But the crucial thing about Aaron was that he was really well liked and very well connected. He had impeccable connections on Wall Street.

[Joe Nocera]

So he's the kind of guy Victor wants as an ally.

[Peter Elkind]

Exactly.

[Aaron Fleck]

He was a great host. Everything about it was top notch.

[Joe Nocera]

That's Aaron Fleck. Still going strong at 100 1.

[Aaron Fleck]

Everything worth hors d', oeuvres, the caviar, you know, he bought the champagne, the pink stuff and the Petrus. I heard he bought all the Petrus around the Country.

[Joe Nocera]

Peter, what is Petrus?

[Peter Elkind]

Actually, Joe, it's Chateau Petrus. It's one of the most expensive wines in the world.

[Peter Helburn]

Really?

[Joe Nocera]

The kitchen was buzzing with top chefs hired just for that night.

[Aaron Fleck]

He said they were the best in the country. You know, he brought them in. Each one had a specialty. That's what he told me.

[Peter Elkind]

It was a seven course sit down dinner. The meal alone cost $1,000 per head, plus $500 per person for the cocktails. For the champagne and the wine.

[Joe Nocera]

Chateau Petrus, baby.

[Peter Elkind]

There were two waiters attending each table.

[Joe Nocera]

Remind me how many people there were at this party?

[Peter Elkind]

Well, we think there were around 500.

[Joe Nocera]

So what did the whole thing cost?

[Peter Elkind]

Oh, it was easily over a million bucks.

[Joe Nocera]

So you get it. It was a big party. An expensive party, an extravagant party. The party of a lifetime. But why? You don't spend more than a million bucks on a party just for the hell of it. Victor was up to something. Of course he was. He was always up to something. And this was something big. Something audacious. He'd pulled a trick like this once before, but this was on a whole other level. He was too savvy to talk about it openly, of course, but he could drop the odd hint. Something about a massive deal that was about to go down. The opportunity of a lifetime. And it could be worth billions. But to make billions, you need, well, at least a few million. And whose millions was Victor after? You guessed it. So where was this deal anyway? It was a long way from Aspen, thousands of miles to the east. Welcome to the Republic of Azerbaijan. Not exactly the best place on God's earth to invest on the checklist of red flags. It's got em all war torn.

[Peter Elkind]

Check.

[Joe Nocera]

An economy on its knees. Check. Grinding poverty.

[Peter Elkind]

Check.

[Joe Nocera]

Autocratic ruler. Yep. And of course, plenty of bribery and corruption. Full house. So what the heck was Victor doing in a place like this? Well, squeezed between Iran and Russia, Azerbaijan had one thing, the thing that always trumps everything else. A real game changer. Oil. We'll come back to the oil. Meanwhile, at the peak house, everybody was getting, shall we say, thoroughly lubricated.

[Peter Helburn]

We had tables all over the place. I mean tables everywhere. I mean close enough that you could actually fall into the reflection pool. And I think somebody did. It was all play. It was all play. Everything was top drawer. So people really were indulging, shall we say. And they were also touring the house.

[Joe Nocera]

And what a house it was. Carved into the side of the Red Mountain. Less a house and more an estate with a heated driveway to melt the snow. The inside was something else too. Seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms. There was a two million dollar ivory collection, a 17th century Flemish tapestry, a couch hand sewn from 33 alligator skins. There was a hot tub, spa, sauna, a lap pool, a solarium, a 12 vehicle garage with a $250,000 jet black armored Mercedes parked inside. The place even had its own elevator. No oligarch should ever have to take the stairs, right? A total of 23,000 square feet of primo Aspen real estate. Peter Victor would later add a few of his own personal touches. Right?

[Peter Elkind]

Yeah, that's exactly right. Little things, none of which, by the way, he had approval to build. One of them was a cigar room. Victor loved his cigars. He also had his own personal wine cave built with seating for 12.

[Joe Nocera]

You go to the wine cave, you sit down and you have a drink.

[Peter Elkind]

Or two or three. And then he had a panic room installed in the house.

[Joe Nocera]

Did he have anything to panic about?

[Peter Elkind]

Well, not just yet. And you'll love this detail, Joe. Behind a hidden door, he had a mistress bedroom suite installed in the house.

[Joe Nocera]

A mistress suite. So you've driven up to the peak house and you've had a little sniff around. What was it like?

[Peter Elkind]

Yeah, I only managed to stand outside the main gates. We couldn't go in. I peered over and one thing was very clear, it was very grandiose. The whole thing was super over the top.

[Joe Nocera]

So in other words, it's like something Donald Trump would own.

[Peter Elkind]

Yeah, you could say that. But even if it's not to your taste, you know that whoever owns it, that they're super rich and successful. And this was all part of Victor's act to convince these rich people in Aspen, his neighbors, that he was the right person to invest with. You could say it was the shadow Petrus of Holmes.

[Joe Nocera]

Dinner included bird's nest soup retrieved from a cave in Vietnam and smoked elk tenderloin. And then it was time for the main event. The partygoers could hardly believe it. The headline act, a real A Lister, Natalie Cole.

[Peter Helburn]

They brought the lights down, they had the roaring fire, everybody got situated and she came into the room singing and people were blown away. It was really amazing because she had polished off most of the bottle of Grand Manier before she even performed.

[Joe Nocera]

The food, the wine, the house, and now this. Being serenaded by Natalie Cole by the fireplace three days before Christmas. And was that the ghost of her father, Nat King Cole, flickering above the flames or was that just the Chateau Petruce taking effect? What a show. But remember this spectacle this piece of theater, it was all part of the lure, an elaborate seduction. And it was slowly working its magic. And still, Victor had only just hinted about his deal, his grand plan, with the promise of almost unimaginable returns. The kind of returns you can only make with that stuff that has a magic all its own. Peter, I never thought of Azerbaijan as having a lot of oil, but then again, I never really thought about Azerbaijan at all.

[Peter Elkind]

Understandable. But Joe, Azerbaijan really has a lot of oil. It was actually the site of the world's first oil well. And back in the early 1900s, it was the Saudi Arabia of its day. At one point, it produced half of the world's oil.

[Joe Nocera]

Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan. It was the first time many of them had even heard of the place. But that didn't matter. By this stage of the evening, they didn't care. Victor's hints just sounded so exotic, so enticing, so intoxicating. Victor had his guests right where he wanted them. They were sold, but not because of the plan. They barely knew what the plan was. It was because of Victor. It was the early hours. Party planner Peter Helburn was helping the stragglers out the door.

[Peter Helburn]

I think we got the last person out at like 3 in the morning.

[Joe Nocera]

High rolling investor Aaron Fleck had a terrific night.

[Aaron Fleck]

I never stayed out that late before or after. It was very late.

[Joe Nocera]

They'd remember this party for a long, long time. Victor made sure of that. Like little kids, they each left clutching a party bag and some party bag inside a gift, a very expensive gift from Asprey and Garrard, the ritzy London jewelers.

[Aaron Fleck]

That's right. I got gold cufflinks and I think he gave my wife a diamond.

[Joe Nocera]

The party was over. The groundwork had been laid. It was time to get down to business.

[Aaron Fleck]

He said, you can invest and you're going to make a lot of money. That was the exact words.

[Joe Nocera]

What exactly was this deal of Victor's?

[Peter Elkind]

Well, it was all about Azerbaijan's crown jewel, Sokar Socar. It was a state owned oil company and Victor said it was being privatized and it was up for grabs.

[Joe Nocera]

And they were offering Victor a piece of it.

[Peter Elkind]

Not just a piece of it, Joe. According to Victor, he could get his hands on the whole thing.

[Joe Nocera]

Okay, that sounds completely crazy.

[Peter Elkind]

Well, the whole story is crazy. But Victor knew exactly how he was gonna do this. He had a plan. He'd done something like this once before.

[Joe Nocera]

And so just to put this in context, how big a deal was this at the time, which is 1997, it was huge.

[Peter Elkind]

If you owned Socar, you owned all of Azerbaijan's oil, and that was a lot. So it was a really big deal. And Victor was promising, promising that anyone smart enough to get involved would make a fortune.

[Aaron Fleck]

We talked about the potential of many billions of dollars more than 100 times your investment.

[Joe Nocera]

A hundred times your investment. I mean, even Warren Buffet wouldn't expect that kind of return. Anyway, word about the deal spread fast. Was it risky? Of course it was. But it was too attractive, too enticing to resist, even for these investors. The smartest of the smart, Victor, had cast his spell. The house, the party, and yes, the Chateau Petruce. It had all worked like a charm. His neighbors had been desperate to get into the party. Now many were desperate to join Victor's big scheme. He'd even have to fend some of them off. They barely knew the guy, but they were about to part with millions and millions of their hard earned dollars.

[Kendall Callahan]

You see what he does. You see that he engages in something, but it's actually not for the other people. It's for him. It's the win. For him, the shrapnel doesn't matter.

[Joe Nocera]

And Victor's former wife, Kendall, she was one of the casualties.

[Kendall Callahan]

I understand how people are swayed by his charisma and his ability to charm people. That brought a lot of big people down.

[Joe Nocera]

Pretty soon, word of Victor's deal started to spread far beyond Aspen. And it seemed like everyone wanted in. A Wall street billionaire, one of the world's biggest corporations, a former senior member of the US Senate, all of them bedazzled.

[Aaron Fleck]

I treated him like he was part of my family, like he was a son. Do I hate him? I know who he is. That's all.

[Joe Nocera]

Victor's illusion appeared so complete, so believable, so utterly perfect, that these people were about to ignore everything they'd ever learned about investing and make quite possibly the worst decision of their lives. Because they were about to go into business with the Pirate of Prague. Marioni.

[Peter Helburn]

Cash.

[Joe Nocera]

Okodi.

[Peter Helburn]

Capitalismus.

[Joe Nocera]

Investiture, camelliardi perez. You've been listening to the Pirate of Prague, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House and hosted by me, Joe Nocera. The producer is Ben Crichton. The associate producer is Peter Elkind. The writers are Lawrence Grisel, Ben Crichton and me, Joan Ocera. Music is by Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis Nankmannell and Toby Mattama. Sound design and engineering by Vulcan Kiziltug. Our managing producer is Amica Shortino Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Grizzell.