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  • Come on, come on, come on, come on.

  • Welcome to the Red Granite Party, the emergence of real film, real content, and the change of the film industry forever.

  • It was a very strange experience, because it was the sort of equivalent of a big studio party.

  • It was just this heaving mass of people, and then stars everywhere.

  • Right, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio was there, and then Kanye West comes on stage, and Jamie

  • Foxx joins in, and they do Gold Digger.

  • And the guy next to me is like, that's like a million dollars, burn, right there.

  • It was kind of bizarre, because no one actually knew who Red Granite were.

  • They just sort of launched, and suddenly they were here with this massive party.

  • People were really sort of stunned, wondering, who are these people?

  • These officials and their associates conspired to misappropriate and launder billions of dollars.

  • Through complex money laundering schemes and a web of opaque transactions, including high-end real estate in New York and Los Angeles.

  • They used the money to pay gambling debts at Las Vegas casinos.

  • A motion picture company used more than $100 million of that.

  • They rented luxury yachts.

  • They parked Laurel Condo in New York City in a townhouse.

  • Assets that kleptocrats and other corrupt officials steal.

  • Fire transfers totaling approximately $64 million.

  • Funds were used to acquire nearly $100 million.

  • People were defrauded on an enormous scale.

  • Schemes whose tentacles reached around the world.

  • ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

  • In February 2013, I started an investigation into illicit money flow coming into the United States.

  • The money was coming into high-end real estate, and it was coming through shell companies where the owners could be hidden.

  • I decided to focus on the Time Warner Center.

  • It's an iconic building of a much more global phenomenon.

  • ♪♪

  • A lot of the money the very rich have is invisible.

  • You don't see people's bank accounts.

  • But real estate is very visual.

  • This is really the starting point for the story.

  • This deed for 80 Columbus Circle, Time Warner Center, penthouse 76B.

  • The owner, 80 Columbus Circle, parentheses, NYC, LLC.

  • No name of a human being.

  • Sale price, $30.55 million.

  • After Time Warner Center, I looked for shell company names in this same format.

  • Address, parentheses, city, LLC.

  • And I found some.

  • One Central Park West.

  • Parentheses, NYC, LLC.

  • Then there's this one here.

  • Park Laurel, parentheses, NYC, LTD.

  • The buyer is Sorsom Investments, Inc., another shell company, signed by sole director of Sorsom Investments, named Reza Aziz.

  • Once I saw the name, Reza Aziz, I looked him up, and it was pretty easy to see that he was running Red Granite Picture and that he was in the process of producing Wolf of Wall Street.

  • My name is Jordan Belford.

  • The year I turned 26, I made $49 million, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week.

  • The Wolf of Wall Street's based on Jordan Belford, a very charismatic, smart individual who set up a firm and stole money.

  • Nobody knows if the stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in circles.

  • You know what a fugazi is?

  • A fugazi. It's a fake.

  • He wired the money around the world as part of a disguise to hide it and then used that money to acquire great wealth and toys that come with it.

  • But there's nowhere to go

  • And there's no way to slow

  • The parallels between the Wolf of Wall Street story and Red Granite story, they're actually pretty stunning.

  • It really is a very strange turn of events.

  • This was an incredibly hard film to get financed from the onset.

  • Not many studios are chomping at the bit to do an American epic with Wall Street in the title, let alone this sort of focus on hedonism and debauchery and excess.

  • And for that reason, I'm thankful to the people that we ran into in Red Granite that were willing to take a gamble on making a very adult American epic about the state of our culture.

  • We're very excited, very, very excited.

  • Riza Aziz was a mid-level banker at HSBC.

  • This was not a high-level person who would have made tens of millions of dollars that you would need to see these movies.

  • And Joey McFarlane, his partner at Red Granite, was from Kentucky, had had some random real estate deals in the Midwest, and then had worked as a broker for a company in the Midwest, and then had worked as a talent broker.

  • But again, not someone who was coming with tens of millions of dollars needed to see the movie.

  • I started talking to a number of different sources in Hollywood about Red Granite.

  • Who were these guys who had showed up out of nowhere, really?

  • A Hollywood source played for me a secret recording of Joey back from 2011, talking about Red Granite.

  • Once this ball gets rolling, if this first picture makes money and shows them what we're capable of, and the first launch party, the premiere party, all the red carpet bullshit that goes along with this is going to be the biggest business I do all year, because I'm going to be fucking inviting the goddamn forensics out of Arabia.

  • It showed that Joey had a lot of self-confidence and belief in his ability to get people big money to do what he wanted.

  • It also gave me some insight into Rizzo's family.

  • All the way to the top.

  • Yes, they're uncles, they're all...

  • They're like the Kennedys.

  • I'll put it to you this way, bro.

  • If we fucking have a killer in two years, we'll be one of the biggest companies in the world.

  • You don't realize the people that I have behind me.

  • Matt! Matt!

  • Matt! Matthew, please!

  • Matthew! Matthew, please help me, please!

  • Congratulations, Margo. Congratulations.

  • I was there at the Wolf of Wall Street premiere after party.

  • Rizzo was just out with the rest of the guests, sitting on a banquette.

  • He had a tall, beautiful blonde woman accompanying him, not acting like he was the center of the action.

  • Leonardo DiCaprio was in the VIP area.

  • And there was a man there with Leonardo DiCaprio.

  • I said, who's that fellow?

  • Pointing.

  • And they said, oh, he's a really rich man.

  • He's Joe Lowe.

  • He's provided the money for the movies.

  • And I said, oh, well, how did he make his money?

  • And they said, we're not sure, but he's the man behind all the money.

  • A very easy, quick Google search brought up the mysterious, mysterious, big spender of New York.

  • And he had been covered a few years prior in the New York Post for spending so much money in the club scene.

  • He was very sought after by every club owner.

  • He was there.

  • He was making your year.

  • Just one bottle after the next, after the next.

  • Like $10,000 bottles of champagne.

  • He had an entourage.

  • Everyone was trying to woo him and be his best friend.

  • I thought he was, like, Malaysian royalty, whatever that means.

  • You know, I didn't really know, and I didn't really care.

  • You know, I didn't really know, and I didn't really care, to be honest.

  • So 76B is one of the Time Warner penthouses that was purchased in 2011 for $30.5 million.

  • Right up there, it's on the tower on the right, and it's on the left side of the tower.

  • It's one of the most lavish penthouses in the building.

  • The renters of this unit used to be Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

  • And we found that during the shooting of Wolf of Wall Street,

  • Leonardo DiCaprio stayed in 76B, and Joey McFarlane spent a lot of time in the complex.

  • There were so many loud parties that there were complaints.

  • I had a lot of sources in and around this building, and I was told there was a young Malaysian man who came to the showing of this unit, and he told people he was buying it for a group of investors, including the prime minister of Malaysia.

  • That young man was Joe Lowe.

  • Because of that connection,

  • I knew that this was a two-headed investigation.

  • It was an investigation of Joe Lowe, and it was an investigation of the prime minister of Malaysia.

  • Najib became prime minister in 2009.

  • Obviously, he's my brother.

  • We were extremely proud of his achievement.

  • Our family has been very much at the heart of government in Malaysia since independence.

  • Our late father became the second prime minister of Malaysia.

  • We were extremely proud of what my father achieved, and we wanted his legacy to always be remembered correctly.

  • Najib took on that mantle, and it was exciting in the early days.

  • Tetapi bagi saya, I am a gentleman.

  • Najib is a very interesting character.

  • He had very modern ideas for Malaysia when he took power.

  • He promoted himself as a moderate Muslim leader in the world, as a friend to America.

  • So on that level, very modern.

  • But having started out as a supposedly reformist figure, he ends up becoming a more and more authoritarian leader.

  • PEMBICARA 1

  • The prime minister controls the attorney general, the judiciary, the media, and the election commission.

  • And we have been governed by the same political party since independence.

  • One party for more than 60 years.

  • It is a very undemocratic system of process.

  • The prime minister and the wife of the prime minister, they are very, very funny characters.

  • They give an idea every day.

  • But in Malaysia, there are two individuals who cannot be drawn into cartoons.

  • One is the wife of the prime minister, and the second one is the Prophet Muhammad.

  • That means she is now on the same level as the Prophet Muhammad.

  • Because of my cartoons, I am facing nine charges, which carry a maximum penalty for 43 years in prison.

  • PEMBICARA 2

  • When I arrived in Malaysia, my luggage was lost.

  • And when my luggage showed up, it was all ruffled through.

  • I was sensitive not to contact a lot of people before I went, because you don't know whose communications are tapped and so on.

  • And I went to Georgetown in Penang.

  • And I met with Malaysians who knew Jho Low and his family when he was growing up.

  • PEMBICARA 3

  • PEMBICARA 4

  • I found out that the Low family is a wealthy, but not extraordinarily rich family originally.

  • They became much richer through Jho's activities.

  • They had their ups and downs.

  • He had fallen out with business partners.

  • There was a renovation on their home there that ended up in a lawsuit over unpaid bills.

  • Larry had split off from his company, and it was a bit of a depressed affluence.

  • And Jho really became the Low family's hope for the future when he went off to Harrow.

  • The old schools change little through the years.

  • Old customs die hard within their walls.

  • There are still straws in the wind on Harrow Hill.

  • I think the big sort of transformative moment for Jho Low was when his parents decided to send him to Harrow Boarding School in the UK in the late 1990s.

Come on, come on, come on, come on.

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