In 2020, the Financial Times exposed a &euro;2 billion fraud at Wirecard, a high-flying German fintech. Many thought that was the end of the story. But for reporter Sam Jones, it was just the beginning.
This season on Hot Money: Agent of Chaos, Jones investigates Wirecard&rsquo;s chief operating officer, who vanished just as Wirecard collapsed. And turned out to also be a Russian spy.
From an Ibizan sting operation to an attempted takeover of the Austrian intelligence service, his reporting spirals into a world of warlords, espionage, and disinformation.
All in an attempt to answer one question: Who is the real Jan Marsalek? And what does his secret life reveal about the powerful forces he serves?

Hot Money: Agent of Chaos

Nearly 40 years ago, in the parking lot of a community college in Port Huron, Michigan, a 20-year-old student named Scott Macklem was shot dead in broad daylight. His murder shocked the community. It made no sense. The police quickly found their suspect. There was only one problem: the man said he was nowhere near the scene of the crime. And he could prove it. In Examined: The Backfire Effect, journalist Josie Duffy Rice talks with eyewitnesses, investigators and local reporters to unravel a shocking story of judicial apathy and expedience — a story that leaves no one off the hook.
 Examined looks at overlooked cases that never got the real investigation they deserved. Each season features deeply reported stories about crime, punishment, and the criminal legal system. 
 Find more episodes of Examined: The Backfire Effect wherever you get podcasts. Binge the full series now with a Pushkin+ subscription — sign up on the Examined Apple show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.
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Examined: The Backfire Effect | New Podcast 

In February 2024, celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Petra Mathers and her husband, photographer Michael Mathers, mailed letters to dozens of friends and family members to let them know they had died by suicide. Petra and Michael were by all accounts healthy, happy, and deeply in love. As much a love story as one about death, it begs the question: what did that decision do to the people left to mourn them?
 In season 3 of Death of an Artist, journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice Gregory set out to interview everyone who got one of Petra and Michael’s letters—as one married couple trying to understand another. Told through intimate conversations with Petra and Michael’s friends and family about their own relationships to aging, grief, death, and the friends they thought they knew, Death of an Artist weaves together a portrait of a community grappling with the Mathers’ deaths and the final words they left behind.
 Search for Death of an Artist wherever you get podcasts. And get early, ad-free access to the entire season now by subscribing to Pushkin+ on the Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.
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Petra Mathers and Her Michael | From Death of an Artist 

Deep Cover's new season, The Family Man, tells a story about how families can deceive each other and the lengths we’ll go to to protect our loved ones Elise and Marissa grew up in a seemingly normal house in the suburbs of St. Louis, but it was a house built on secrets. There were things their father never told them—like how he really made his money. One night, the police showed up, raided their house, and seized boxes of evidence. Hours later, the sisters turned on the TV and saw something surreal: their father in the middle of a police chase. The local news identified him as “The Boonie Hat Bandit”. The girls were stunned. They struggled to accept the truth: Dad had been living a double life. How long had he been lying to them? What had he done? And who, exactly, was their father?
 Find Deep Cover: The Family Man wherever you get podcasts. If you want to know how the story ends right now, binge the full season by signing up for a Pushkin+ subscriptions on the Deep Cover show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.
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Deep Cover: The Family Man | The Raid

Drilled is a true-crime climate change podcast exposing how corporate corruption and political operatives built decades of climate denial and delay. Hosted and reported by award-winning investigative climate journalists, led by Amy Westervelt, each season unravels new evidence of deception, disinformation, and the power structures keeping real climate solutions out of reach.
 In September 2025, a group of Brazilian ministers trekked all the way to chilly North Dakota to see a presentation on a new type of clean energy project, one that promised to help them deliver Brazilian President Lula’s dream of turning Brazil into "the Saudi Arabia of sustainable aviation fuels." It was the latest in a string of projects from Midwest Republican kingmaker and corn ethanol magnate Bruce Rastetter, whose investments in Brazil might just transform him into a global carbon czar, even as his Summit pipeline carbon project faces fierce opposition from Iowa to North Dakota. The problem? It all requires loads of land and none of it does a thing about climate change.
 Here's episode 1 of Drilled: Carbon Cowboys. Find Drilled wherever you get podcasts.
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Introducing Drilled: Carbon Cowboys

Here's a preview of a podcast we think you'll enjoy, Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister, a special limited series from RTÉ. The story of Elizabeth Plunkett – a 23 year old woman from Dublin who was murdered by Ireland’s first serial killers. On the last weekend of summer in 1976 Elizabeth Plunkett went on a night away with friends, to Brittas Bay in county Wicklow before she was abducted by John Shaw and Geoffrey Evans. Now, almost 50 years later, Elizabeth’s family are finally trying to get their sister some justice.
 Binge all episodes of Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Sign up at pushkin.fm/plus or on the Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister show page on Apple Podcasts. 
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Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister: Elizabeth Plunkett 

In this special bonus episode from The Financial Times, "The Broker" tells the story of how a failed baseball hopeful and disgraced stockbroker reinvented himself as one of America’s most consequential modern arms dealers.
 From a family-run warehouse in Virginia Beach, Will Somerindyke built his company into a crucial conduit in the Pentagon’s covert supply chains — sourcing Soviet-era weapons for wars in Syria and Yemen before emerging as a central player in Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
 As artillery shells became the most sought-after commodity of the war, he placed a multimillion-dollar bet on reviving crumbling Cold War factories in the Balkans, transforming himself from middleman to manufacturer.
 Based on months of reporting, The Broker traces Somerindyke’s rise through the shadow world of privatized warfare — where geopolitics, profit and personal ambition collide — and reveals how modern conflicts are sustained not only by soldiers on the front lines, but by entrepreneurs who move the weapons behind the scenes.
 This piece, written by the FT’s Miles Johnson, host of Hot Money Season 2: The New Narcos, was originally printed in FT Weekend.
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From The Financial Times: The Broker

How did a quasi-fictional novel about Vladimir Putin’s spin doctor become an international bestselling sensation and now, a political thriller starring Jude Law and Paul Dano? Filled with real political insight and intrigue, The Wizard of the Kremlin is a riveting look at the nature of power and the inner workings of Putin’s regime at a time when the Russian leader’s decisions are reverberating across the world. 
 Here's a preview of The Wizard of the Kremlin (01:00). If you like what you hear, get the audiobook now on Audible, Spotify, Apple Books, pushkin.fm/audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
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Listen Now: The Wizard of the Kremlin 

Valley of Shadows is a new Pushkin true crime podcast that digs into a nearly 30-year old secret buried in the California desert. On June 11, 1998, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy Jon Aujay went for a run in California’s Devil’s Punchbowl park...and never came back. Nearly 30 years later, the mystery surrounding his disappearance has only deepened. Some say Aujay is just another missing hiker, claimed by the inhospitable landscape of the Southern California desert. Some say he took his own life out there. But there’s another theory that many of Aujay’s friends and LASD colleagues are convinced is true—that he was the victim of foul play, and that his own department is covering it up. Through exclusive interviews, revealing wiretaps, and buried police files, investigative reporters Hayley Fox and Betsy Shepherd uncover vestiges of the Wild West in a small California town, where outlaw biker gangs crank out methamphetamine and local cops operate on both sides of the law.
 (00:01:04) Find Valley of Shadows wherever you get podcasts. Binge the entire season of Valley of Shadows, ad-free, by subscribing to Pushkin+. Sign up on the Valley of Shadows show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin.fm/plus.
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Introducing Valley of Shadows: Corruption in California’s Mojave Desert

We’re sharing a preview of another podcast we think you’ll enjoy, Deep Cover Presents: Snowball. Snowball follows journalist Ollie Wards as he unravels the wild story of how his own family was taken in, and taken down, by a charming con woman from California…and tries to find out where she is now. He embarks on a question to find out how she did it, why she did it, and where she is now. Financial ruin, shattered trust, and a mystery that stretches across continents and decades—it’s got all the twists and turns you'd expect from a high-stakes crime thriller…only it's all true. Here’s a preview of Snowball by the Unravel Podcast team. 
 If you can’t wait to find out what happens, binge episodes of Deep Cover Presents: Snowball early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Find Pushkin+ on the Deep Cover show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.
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Introducing Deep Cover Presents: Snowball

Here's an episode from Heavyweight, a new addition to the Pushkin slate of shows. Heavyweight, hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, creates space for difficult conversations and resolving long-standing regrets and unanswered questions. In this episode: A young man had just turned 14 when he took his father’s shotgun, skipped school, and robbed a bank for $40,000. Now, 33 years later, he wants to apologize to the people he harmed that day.
 Find Heavyweight wherever you get your podcasts.
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