November 6, 2024 • 36 mins
An international team of journalists refuse to let Daphne Caruana Galizia’s voice be silenced. Could Daphne’s work on the Panama Papers hold the key to discovering who ordered her murder?
Crooks Everywhere is a production of iHeartPodcasts, Topic Studios and Vespucci.
The voice of Daphne Caruana Galizia is played by Sienna Miller.
The senior producer is Leo Hornak. The producer is Maddie Hickish.
The executive producers are: Christy Gressman for Topic Studios; Katrina Norvell and Nikki Ettore for iHeart Podcasts; Johnny Galvin and Daniel Turcan for Vespucci; and Sienna Miller.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Malta's institutions are deliberately being undermined, weakened and destroyed to
allow corruption and criminality to flourish. Those who voted for
this mess have a great deal to be ashamed of.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Strasbourg. The European Parliament Clean Recession of twenty fourth of
October twenty seventeen. Parliament President Antonio Tajani approaches the central
podium and signals for quiet. Comes as President.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Gome Chittadino, as a citizen com journalista, as a journalist, Volo.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Esprit used to express my indignation.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Indign brutal at the brutal assassination Didne Gwana Galizi.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Of Deafnite Karwana Galitzia.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
This is not normal business for the European Parliament. It's
rare for the Parliament to discuss an individual murder case
in one of its member states, but today it's happening.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Quiborns her family and the galleries, her husband, her three sons,
and I wish to say to them that we stand
alongside them, along with thousands of Montice are demonstrated in
the streets.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
The camera pans up to the observer's gallery, showing Daphne's widower,
Pisa and her three sons Matthew, Andrew and Paul, sitting
together dressed in suits and ties, blank faced, barely begun
to grieve. It's just ten days since Daphne's murder. Daphne's
(01:55):
middle son, Andrew, still remembers this speech.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Yes, I remember it. It's actually strangely nice to see
this again and everaged it.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
It's impossible to imagine the strength that it must take
for the family to be traveling and campaigning for justice
before Daphnitely has even been buried. But this parliamentary session
in Strasbourg does matter for us.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
That was a turning point when we moved from grieving
to campaigning.
Speaker 6 (02:30):
It was a very conscious decision.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
It was against everything that our emotions were telling us
to do, so suddenly we were transformed from a grieving
family into essentially professional lobbyists.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
That switch from grief to campaigning is the first step
in a new and unusual strategy to bring Daphne's killers
to justice, a strategy to short circuit the usual channels
of Mota's compromised institutions and divided culture. But it takes
its toll.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
We were turning up with speaking points about the rule
of law in the country, about the corruption crisis, and
in doing so, we were in a way dehumanizing our
own mother. We were turning her into a case, and
we were turning ourselves into campaigners rather than grieving sons.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
So far, we've heard about two routes for Dafnese killers
to be caught, First through the official police investigation, second
through political pressure from the protest movement in Dafnese's memory,
the sit ins and marches in Valletta and the gatherings
at the Great Siege Monument, the sense of raw anger
among ordinary Matese people. But the family know that on
(03:49):
their own both these approaches are flawed, open to political manipulation,
to corruption, to media blackouts and crackdowns by the Maltese
government here in Strasbourg. On the international stage, the odds
might be different here in Strasbourg Moreta's elite might find
it more difficult to stack the deck in their favor.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
Ultimately, this new strategy will produce breakthroughs in the case
that would never have happened otherwise, and will bring the
family close of an ever to finding out who ordered
Japanese murder.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
No silin and we will not remain Sanscobert, we must.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
See the perpetrators of this murder brought to justice. From
iHeart Podcasts, Topic studios and vespoci. I'm Manuel Delia and
I'm John Sweeney and this is Crooks Everywhere, Episode seven,
The bad Signal.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Sir Dafne is have decided to try and make this
a global story. I know from experience that isn't easy.
Foreign news, except for wars, rarely makes the front page
in London, Paris or New York.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
And the family are painfully aware of that, aware that
the new cycle will soon move on from their mother's death,
so they have to strike quickly.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
I worked on the story of Daphne's murder for the BBC.
I knew that from the point of view of my bosses,
this was a compelling story they wanted to cover, but
not one that could take up too much of the spotlight.
As the months wore on, the chances of identifying the
perpetrators seemed pretty slim. An unsolvable murder in a small
(05:42):
European country. Next item.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Please all that said, I think Daphne's family do have
one ease of their sleeve.
Speaker 7 (05:50):
I've worked on a number of cases over the years
of campaigns for justice for journalists who have been killed.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Robert Vincent works for Reporters with Borders, a charity that
advocates for persecuted journalists around.
Speaker 7 (06:03):
The world, and I often work closely with families in
these campaigns. Not every family is able to speak out
in this way. In fact, the way that they've been
able to organize and really sustain this effer over so
many years is highly unusual.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
The ace of the sleeve is the family itself, and
there's set of skills.
Speaker 7 (06:24):
So Matthew was an award winning journalist. I think he
had already been part of a team that won a Pulitzer.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
And then there's Andrew Dafnie Middleson, who we've already heard from.
Speaker 7 (06:34):
Andrew is always known as the diplomat because he had
in fact been a diplomat for some time, and personality wise,
of the three, he is definitely the diplomatic one. He
is very kind and very gracious.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Paul, the youngest brother, was at that time living in
London and later also became an award winning journalist and
the author of Dafnie's biography.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
So a diplomat and two journalists, all with international connections.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Dephnie's husband Peter and her sister Corinne are also essential
team members. He is a lawyer and she's a pr consultant,
also useful skills. This is Andrew the diplomat, And what.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
Me and my family realized very early on in Malta
was that international pressure was not only our only hope
because the domestic environment was just so difficult, but that
it was actually our most powerful lever, more powerful than say,
the opposition party, more powerful than what was left of
the press in Malta.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
But that raises the same question, how do you get
the rest of the world to care about a murder
in Malta.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
One possibility is the focus on the European Union's idea
of itself, the idea of Europe as a place of democracy,
rule of law, and freedom of the press, a place
where it matters if journalists are murdered.
Speaker 5 (07:57):
Malta is such a small country, it's so dependent on
new membership.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Bluntly, we Maltese need Europe more than Europe needs.
Speaker 5 (08:05):
Us, but so so dependent on international partnerships that it's
a unique example where international pressure can actually overcome domestic resistance.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
One really important example our economy depends on international finance
being based here. And if the EU decides that Malta
is no longer a stable, well governed member of the Union,
or even publicly criticizes how the country is run, then
those rich international investors might go elsewhere.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
Which means a public tribute to Japanese's work in the
European Parliament might have real financial consequences.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
So the first weeks after Dapnese's death go by, the
street protests build, and at this point the FBI come
in to investigate the forensic trail left by the killers,
and men like Melvin the Middleman, mister alleged Mastermind, and
the Georgia's become increasingly worried, gradually realizing that this isn't
(09:08):
just another local car bombing that will ultimately be ignored
by the police.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
And that's when Daphne's family decide to make solving Daphanese
murder a global cause for journals.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Everywhere and here Daphne's son, Matthew the journalist, has a
piece of luck. An international organization has just been formed
that was designed for exactly the situation.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
An organization called Forbidden Stories.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
The idea is that when a journalist is persecuted or murdered,
a global bet signal is sent out to other investigative
reporters around the world to take on the same stories
and follow them to their true conclusions.
Speaker 6 (09:50):
Because we thought that the stories should not die with
the people.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
So by murdering Daphne, her killers are multiplying theumber of
reporters on the case.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Attracting even more attention to her work and her stories,
and seeing if those stories might yield clues as to
who wanted her dead, who the real mister allegit mastermind
might be. The journalists that forbidden stories called their new
journalistic coalition the Deafnite Project, and they start by digging
(10:22):
deep into Dafnie's archive of old investigations.
Speaker 6 (10:25):
When Dafnit was killed, this was the natural thing to
do after that was to say, okay, this is the
first case. This is what we have to do. Now,
this is our case. Let's try to assemble a team
of journalists. Let's go to Marta. Let's try to tell
her story. Let's try to see that the people who
(10:47):
killed her and who wanted her stories to die, that
they don't get away with that, that the stories are
still going to see the light of day, and that
they're going to be punished.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
The hope of the Deafney project is that clues to
her murder might lie in some of the stories she investigated,
and it turned out that hunch was correct. Within her
blog posts there is in fact a faint trail leading
to the likely masterminds of her murder, and mister allegit
mastermind in particular.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Feb Second, twenty sixteen. If the Panama hat fits, wear it.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
But the clues are deeply buried. I remember when Dafney
published this blog post eighteen months before her death, the
start of her most famous story. It was typical of
her sense of mischief, being deliberately mysterious, playing with her public,
and it worked. You'd be repeatedly checking the block throughout
(11:55):
the day to see if all had been revealed on
the surface. This post strangely seemed to be all about hats.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Conrad Mitzi has found a hat that fits him.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
It includes a large stop photo of a Panama hat,
a kind of straw some hat. The text is made
up of cryptic and sarcastic messages about a government minister
called Conrad Mitzi, Walter's Health and Energy minister.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Take this as a genuine warning, I am not at
liberty to say more for the time being, because if
I were then rest assured that I would.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Twenty minutes later I definitely posted another puzzle. This one
had a picture of acute lamb and a few paragraphs
wandering out loud whether mister Mitzi would be eating New
Zealand lamb at Easter.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
When I say I have an international, worldwide network of spies,
I'm not quite joking, but sadly I can't say more
for now, though I'm bursting.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Too hats lambs. The government minister the truth was definitely
had got access to an incredible scoope through her son
Matthew's work. You might remember the Panama Papers, a huge
(13:13):
global story where millions of confidential finds from a secret
of firm in Panama were leaked to the press. What
we now know is that Daphanie had got an early viewing.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
The Panama Papers were a huge deal for the kind
of work I do, investigations into corrupt regimes. They gave
us a roadmap to the complex global arrangements that super
wealthy individuals use to keep their wealth secret, how rich
crooks avoid taxes and sanctions and money laundering investigations and
(13:46):
journalists with questions. In my work on Putins Russia, the
publication of the papers was a game changer, one of
those rare times where for a moment, a whole hidden
world is revealed.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
One hundred and forty three politicians from around the world
were featured in the files, including twelve national leaders, from
the then Prime Minister of Iceland to the then President
of Ukraine. But it wasn't just politicians. There were bureaucrats, businessmen,
minor royalty, even the Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
Of course, having a name churned up in the Panama
Papers does not necessarily mean that the person committed a crime,
but it does raise some interesting questions about what they're
doing with these secretive accounts. And the country of Panama
was significant because it was a tax haven with little regulation,
(14:40):
a place which tends not to share financial information with
most other countries, a place where you can park assets
away from prying eyes.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And Deafney's sneak preview revealed that the Panama Papers included
significant information about Malta too. Health and Energy Minister Mitzi
was featured in detail. Definitely had discovered that immediately after
being elected, mister Mitzi had created an elaborate financial arrangement
designed for secretly stashing assets outside Molta, a trust in
(15:14):
New Zealand containing a company based in Panama. Layers upon layers,
hence the references to New Zealand lamb and the Panama hat.
It looked exactly like something someone might choose to hide
large amounts of assets or funds.
Speaker 4 (15:30):
The global financial equivalent of buying a brand new piggybank
and stashing it in a very very secret place, all
on the day you get a new job.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
February twenty fourth, twenty sixteen. Conrad Mitzi's so called shell
company was never declared to Parliament in his annual declaration
of assets as a government minister, not in twenty thirteen,
not in twenty fourteen, and not in twenty fifteen. And
if he had told you that he had incorporated it
in Panama, the many hundreds of people who work in
financial services in Malta and the entire political class would
(16:07):
know exactly why he did this.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
These are expensive bigurebanks. They cost money to set up
and cost money to run. It would make absolutely no
sense for someone to use an arrangement like this on
the other side of the world to store a nor
mil government salary, even a minister salary. This figure bank
was built for something larger.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
No accountant or financial consultant would ever advise a client
to incorporate a company in Panama if there are no
extraordinarily significant assets to hold, and beyond that, assets which
the client wishes to conceal from the authorities back home.
Conrad Mitzi is in government now, but he is not
going to be in government forever.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
And daphnely didn't stop with mister Mitzi.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
February twenty seventh, twenty sixteen. Breaking now, Conrad Mitzi and
PM's chief of staff Schmbrie have exactly the same asset
concealing structures in blacklisted Panama.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Remember Teach Cambrie, the Prime Minister's chief of staff, the
man who would later meet Melvin the Middleman for a
dodgy job and a selfie.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
The Panama Papers revealed that he also had a secret
piggybank ready to be filled up.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
The agreements that made Schambrie beneficiary of his trust and
Mitzi's settler and protector of his were submitted together on
the same date.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
The same date, which is to say, immediately after the
Labor Party in Malta, one power suggesting that this might
be a shared and coordinated effort to provide senior government
figures with a place to keep extra earnings, almost a
perk of the job.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
There was a third asset concealing structure revealed by Dafne
another pigabank set up at the same time for a
third individual, but in this case those involved had covered
their tracks even better, That individual's name was not put
in writing anyone in the paperwork that has been made public.
One email says that the name will be communicated veribally
(18:09):
over a Skype video call.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
I mean nothing says honest democratic government like a secret
financial arrangement owned by a person whose name can't be
put in riting.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, probably not. An arrangement at your High Street bank
account would allow discovering the secret identity of the unknown
third person. The man or woman whose name couldn't be
written down became a campaign in itself.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
So I think there's something we should address here. For me,
the complexity of all these arrangements companies in Central America
structures from New Zealand bank accounts without names is something
that makes this kind of story really hard to report on.
And yet the secret bribes and kickbacks that politicians take
(19:00):
and businessmen give affect all our lives more than we
realize this. Invisible money changes how our elected representatives act,
who they obey, and twists and distorts the services we
receive from governments. But I know that even when you're
used to decoding this kind of corruption, the complexity can
(19:21):
be overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Which company is within, which trust or paid for? Which
are holding vehicle?
Speaker 4 (19:27):
And when I've realized this, none of this confusion, this
fog machine is an accident. It's the whole point. The
fog machine is wired to confuse the people who pay
to hide their ill gotten gains. This way, they want investigators,
reporters in the public to lose the thread, to get confused,
and to get bored, to give up, and to turn
(19:48):
the page to a simpler, clearer news story. And a
lot of the time it works, and that allows the
theft and corruption to and continue right under our noses
all the bloody time.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
And that is exactly how it feels trying to pin
down corruption in my country. You know it's there, sometimes
you see something yourself, but so much complexity has been
created around it that it's very hard to see the
whole picture. And that was Deafney's genius and what made
her so dangerous to certain people. She had the ability
(20:25):
to dispel the confusion, to lay it out in terms
that everyone could understand, and that gave the offenders nowhere
to hide. Her writing about the Panama papers made her
one of the most influential voices in the country.
Speaker 8 (20:41):
It's almost tangible in a sense.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Here's Nicole Maelak, a journalist at the Multa Today newspaper.
She was at university at the time. Definitely published the
Panama stories.
Speaker 8 (20:51):
Everyone was talking about this because how can you not
talk about it when you have a minister your chief
of staff implicated and having sort of these shady accounts
and Panama everyone's talking about it.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
The opposition party called Defnie Discoveries the biggest scandal and
Maltese political history and anti corruption protest marches were held
in the capital. Definitely attended as a hero.
Speaker 8 (21:17):
It didn't feel right to even like go to a
university lecture because I remember going to university lecture and
the mood was there. We couldn't do this lecture because
all this was happening there was such a monumental sort
of crisis.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
For a moment it looked as though possibly the whole
government might fall. But Prime Minister Joseph Mouscat didn't do
what Defni and the protesters were asking for. He didn't cave. Instead,
he stood firm.
Speaker 8 (21:44):
It raised eyebrows. Obviously on one hand, it's like, what
are they trying to hide? Like have you having secrets
companies and Panama's definitely not on when you're when you're
a sing minister. The Prime Minister at the time didn't
exactly them to resign or anything.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Conrad Mitzi at first claimed that he had done nothing
wrong in creating the Panama and New Zealand financial arrangements,
but later admitted that he had not declared the arrangements properly,
a breach of Multie law. His explanations for his intentions
and aims continued to evolve, sometimes in contradictory ways. He
(22:26):
eventually apologized in Parliament for his actions. In the spring
of twenty sixteen, Mitzi was moved to a different cabinet post.
Keach Cambri had a different set of explanations for his
pig Bank. He said that his arrangements had been the
result of decisions taken by his business advisers on his behalf,
and he stayed in post. There was no apology for
(22:48):
his part. Prime Minister Mouscart mostly handled the scandal using
the classic strategy for a populist leader. When pushed into
a corner, he claimed the whole scandal was invented, a
media conspiracy and attack on his supporters, the real people
of Malta sound familiar fake news.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
When someone accuses you of a great crime, you don't
deny it. You switch on the fog machine. You create
multiple versions of reality. Some masses of people get confused,
and within those versions you get your creatures to deny it.
Take Stalin's man made famine in nineteen thirty three, which
kills so many people. No one to this day knows
(23:29):
how many. No one knows because no one counted. Malcolm Muggridge,
one of a handful of journalists who try to tell
the truth about the famine, wrote, one of the most
monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the
future will scarcely believe it ever happened. Likewise with Donald
Trump and the insurrection against the Capitol. Likewise with Vladimir
(23:54):
Putin and the murder of Alexey Navalni. Populists don't deny
their crimes a switch of reality.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
And like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Joseph Muscat went
on the attack. Pro government blogs and TV shows focused
even more intensively on demonizing Daphne as an enemy of
not just the government but of Malta itself. One recurring
theme in pro government TV and radio was to describe
(24:25):
or depict her as a witch, an evil older women
with magical powers to harm others, particularly men. It's a
method that's been used to put women back in their
place for thousands of years, and it's still going strong today.
But the approach of trying to discredit Daphne was harder
to sustain when the International Panama Papers team published their
(24:47):
own findings and confirmed everything that she had written. When
Conrad Mitzi was eventually moved to a different post, Prime
Minister Mouscat explained his DESI the Panama affair hurt us
politically and personally. He said, although there was nothing illegal,
(25:07):
we expect better behavior and definitely had some feedback for
those who questioned her integrity.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
March second, twenty sixteen, excuse my language. Here, but nothing
else will suffice in this ridiculous situation. Total bollocks. Why
don't these just go on themselves? How I got the
information is irrelevant. What counts is the information itself. These
asset concealing structures, once open and totally secret, could be
used for the receipt of bribes, kickbacks and backhanders. Give up,
(25:38):
it's over, big time.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Sadly, it wasn't over. It was only just the beginning.
But somewhere in Malta, Daphne's future killer, mister alleged Mastermind,
was already taking notes. She'd got closer to his interests
than she realized.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
To understand a little better just what definitely was discovering
about this country. And so just a little trip to
a beach in the north of Molta, a beach with
a view of an island with a lot of history.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
So beautiful day. There's an island with barely a building
on it, and just the chop there's an old kind
of medieval citadel. Manuel, tell me this island in the middle.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
What's it called so?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And what is it is called? Camuna? Probably a corruption
of cumin. Maybe it used to grow there. It's an
island right in the middle of the channel between the
larger island of the Motese archipelago, Malta and the smaller one, Gozo.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
So why do you're checking me here? There's some kind
of historical metaphor you're about to hit me over the
head with.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
I know you I am. So you see on the
side of the island. You see how the sea has
eroded caves into the island, And that used to be
for some time in the sixteenth especially the seventeenth, but
in the eighteenth centuries a hideout for pirates. They'd be
hiding stuff there. In any case, it was a pirate cove,
(27:21):
a place of shelter.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
Okay, So I get the history lesson, But why exactly
if you check me here today?
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Because I think this story from two three hundred years
ago anticipates a bit what happens now. We still have
treasures that need hiding, and the caves of today are
a little bit different. So if you think trusts and
financial instruments and offshore banking is complicated, just think of
(27:51):
a dark cave.
Speaker 4 (27:51):
It's a good place to hide it.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, it's a good place to hide for a while.
Let the waters come down. People look away, and then
you can come out in the middle of the night
and take the stuff where you want it. You're parking,
you're stolen stuff for a while, keep it hidden, and
then bring it out when it's safe to do so.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
Aha. So listen, I mean, if we went across and
found these eighteenth century caves, you'd hear an echo, and
there's an echo of the past. So the whole country,
the whole archipelago, is a place where there are echoes
from the past. And if you listen carefully enough to
those echoes from the past, I tell you something about
now the twenty first century. More they do time for
(28:33):
an ice cream.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
So years after the Panama Paper scandal, after Dafnie's death,
after the Definite Projects send up their bet signal for
other international journalists to start investigating her stories, Bastiano Bermeyer
and the Definitey Project team find they had a problem Malta,
too many pirates and too many hidden caves to look into.
Speaker 6 (29:05):
The big problem that we were facing in Morta after
Dughness murder was that there were so many people who
would want her dad essentially where to start, which is
a crazy thing for this small island. So when we
(29:25):
looked around and we thought would have a motive. You know,
easily we counted to four or five, six very influential
figures who did have a good motive to want her dad.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
This is the same culture shop for I experienced when
I first learned about this story. And in fact we
know that mister alleged Mastermind used this idea to try
and reassure Melvin the Middleman at times, telling him that
Definitely had offended so many people that they would never
find the real killers.
Speaker 6 (29:57):
The biggest issue was that we were following four or
five stories at the same time, and literally each of
those stories could have been the one that was responsibly
the end for her killing, because one of the persons
involved in that story would have said, it's enough now,
we need to stop her now for good.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
But the scale of the task didn't deter the Definite
Project's investigators. Teams from the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, newspaper,
Francis Paper of Record, Lamonde, and Italy's La Republica, the
news agency Reuters and others were all digging at the
same time.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
And they did make progress. Stories that Definitely had hinted
that were developed and taken further investigations into a corrupt
scheme to allow wealthy foreigners to buy mult citizenship, for example,
and revelations about corrupt gas fials with the ruling elite
in Azerbaijan.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
In virtually every major policy initiative that was launched by
Joseph Moscart's government after it came to power in twenty thirteen,
Deafney reported shady dealings. Considered Defnie's reporting on the transfer
of the management of some of Molta's public hospitals to
private operators. Basically, the government would pay the salaries for
medical staff and pay the new managers a daily fee
(31:18):
to refurbish the hospitals and provide medical care. Defney had
her own views about how the health system should be run,
but that wasn't the bit that bothered her most. The
government transferred the running of the hospitals to a shady
sacials company, its owners, unknown, its financial basis and mystery,
and with no evidence of any experience in running hospitals
(31:39):
anywhere in the world. Muscat and his government promised the
privatization of the hospital's management would improve the quality of
healthcare for mortice people. Not what you'd expect socialists to
be saying, but Muscat was no ordinary socialist. There were
promises of rebuilt facilities, world class medical care services. Oh good,
(32:00):
people would be flying to more that to have their
scheduled surgeries done here.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Jafneg denounced the scheme as a sham, a cover for
some behind the scenes swindle. She didn't have all the details,
but as usual, her intuition was on the money to
coin a phrase. By the time she was killed, the
hospitals had got barely a fresh lick of paint. Wards
were abandoned, doors collapsed, roofs leaked. Months after Daphney was killed,
(32:26):
the mysterious managers of the hospitals went bust. The governments
had a contractual right to claim the hospital's back, but
they didn't do that.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
No, the faceless and ostensibly bankrupt managers of the hospitals
were allowed to sell the concession on. The new managers
would be a recognized healthcare brand from America.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
Did the hospitals get their fresh lick of paint?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Barely a drop? That's at the same time as between them,
the first private hospital managers and their American successors collected
nearly half a billion euro in payments from the mortis authorities.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
In those first six months after Daphne was killed, reporters
from the Daphne Project found the stories about passports for crooks,
blindingly expensive gas steals, and abandoned hospitals interesting, to be sure,
but there was nothing that pointed clearly to the real
culprit in Daphne's murder. For now, mister alleged mastermind could
(33:26):
rest easy. The stalemate must have been frustrating for the
Daphne Project and Daphne's other supporters like you Manuel.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
It was it almost seemed that the grand strategy of
Daphne's family to use international pressure and international journalism to
find Daphne's killer was leading nowhere. On that one measure,
the bat signal hadn't worked. But there was one question
that hadn't yet been explored, and it also concerned the
Panama Papers. Daphanie's reporting had proved that two senior government
(34:01):
ministers and another unnamed person had all simultaneously created elaborate
hidden piggybanks to hide assets in. But what she hadn't
revealed was why, What was the big payday that these
politicians were expecting to receive and from whom? And solving
that mystery will lead Daphne's family and Deafney Project straight
(34:24):
to the man who is believed to have ordered her murder.
The man we are calling for now, mister alleged Mastermind.
For now, though mister alleged Mastermind has other problems, problems
with the man he allegedly hired to do the killing.
Speaker 4 (34:46):
The strain of keeping this murder secret is beginning to tell,
and the once unimaginable betrayal is now coming.
Speaker 6 (34:57):
That's next.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Crooks Everywhere is a production of iHeart Podcasts, Topic Studios
and Vespucci. It's reported and hosted by me Manuel Delia
and John Sweeney. The senior producer is Leo Hornack. The
producer is Maddie Hickish. Krish Denesh Kumar is the assistant producer.
The story editors are Emma Federill, Matt Willis, and Philippa Geering.
(35:34):
The managing producers are Thomas Curry and Rachel Byrne. The
voice of daf Nick Carvana Galizia is played by Ciena Miller,
acting direction by Christopher Houten, Multie voices by Mikael basma
Jan and Pierre staff Raj. The executive producers are Johnny
Galvin and Daniel Turken at Vespucci, Christi Gressman at Topic Studios,
(35:56):
Katina Norvell and Nikki Etoor at iHeart Podcasts, Encienna Miller
Marketing Leaders, David Wassermann. Audio recording by Tom Berry at
Wardoor Studios. Audio mix and sound design by Joel Cox.
Special thanks to Andrew Botchcardona Alessandra di Crespo, Eddie Isles,
and Andrew Carna Galizia
Malta's institutions are deliberately being undermined, weakened and destroyed to
allow corruption and criminality to flourish. Those who voted for
this mess have a great deal to be ashamed of.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Strasbourg. The European Parliament Clean Recession of twenty fourth of
October twenty seventeen. Parliament President Antonio Tajani approaches the central
podium and signals for quiet. Comes as President.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Gome Chittadino, as a citizen com journalista, as a journalist, Volo.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Esprit used to express my indignation.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Indign brutal at the brutal assassination Didne Gwana Galizi.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Of Deafnite Karwana Galitzia.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
This is not normal business for the European Parliament. It's
rare for the Parliament to discuss an individual murder case
in one of its member states, but today it's happening.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Quiborns her family and the galleries, her husband, her three sons,
and I wish to say to them that we stand
alongside them, along with thousands of Montice are demonstrated in
the streets.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
The camera pans up to the observer's gallery, showing Daphne's widower,
Pisa and her three sons Matthew, Andrew and Paul, sitting
together dressed in suits and ties, blank faced, barely begun
to grieve. It's just ten days since Daphne's murder. Daphne's
(01:55):
middle son, Andrew, still remembers this speech.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Yes, I remember it. It's actually strangely nice to see
this again and everaged it.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
It's impossible to imagine the strength that it must take
for the family to be traveling and campaigning for justice
before Daphnitely has even been buried. But this parliamentary session
in Strasbourg does matter for us.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
That was a turning point when we moved from grieving
to campaigning.
Speaker 6 (02:30):
It was a very conscious decision.
Speaker 5 (02:33):
It was against everything that our emotions were telling us
to do, so suddenly we were transformed from a grieving
family into essentially professional lobbyists.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
That switch from grief to campaigning is the first step
in a new and unusual strategy to bring Daphne's killers
to justice, a strategy to short circuit the usual channels
of Mota's compromised institutions and divided culture. But it takes
its toll.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
We were turning up with speaking points about the rule
of law in the country, about the corruption crisis, and
in doing so, we were in a way dehumanizing our
own mother. We were turning her into a case, and
we were turning ourselves into campaigners rather than grieving sons.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
So far, we've heard about two routes for Dafnese killers
to be caught, First through the official police investigation, second
through political pressure from the protest movement in Dafnese's memory,
the sit ins and marches in Valletta and the gatherings
at the Great Siege Monument, the sense of raw anger
among ordinary Matese people. But the family know that on
(03:49):
their own both these approaches are flawed, open to political manipulation,
to corruption, to media blackouts and crackdowns by the Maltese
government here in Strasbourg. On the international stage, the odds
might be different here in Strasbourg Moreta's elite might find
it more difficult to stack the deck in their favor.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
Ultimately, this new strategy will produce breakthroughs in the case
that would never have happened otherwise, and will bring the
family close of an ever to finding out who ordered
Japanese murder.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
No silin and we will not remain Sanscobert, we must.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
See the perpetrators of this murder brought to justice. From
iHeart Podcasts, Topic studios and vespoci. I'm Manuel Delia and
I'm John Sweeney and this is Crooks Everywhere, Episode seven,
The bad Signal.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Sir Dafne is have decided to try and make this
a global story. I know from experience that isn't easy.
Foreign news, except for wars, rarely makes the front page
in London, Paris or New York.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
And the family are painfully aware of that, aware that
the new cycle will soon move on from their mother's death,
so they have to strike quickly.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
I worked on the story of Daphne's murder for the BBC.
I knew that from the point of view of my bosses,
this was a compelling story they wanted to cover, but
not one that could take up too much of the spotlight.
As the months wore on, the chances of identifying the
perpetrators seemed pretty slim. An unsolvable murder in a small
(05:42):
European country. Next item.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Please all that said, I think Daphne's family do have
one ease of their sleeve.
Speaker 7 (05:50):
I've worked on a number of cases over the years
of campaigns for justice for journalists who have been killed.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Robert Vincent works for Reporters with Borders, a charity that
advocates for persecuted journalists around.
Speaker 7 (06:03):
The world, and I often work closely with families in
these campaigns. Not every family is able to speak out
in this way. In fact, the way that they've been
able to organize and really sustain this effer over so
many years is highly unusual.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
The ace of the sleeve is the family itself, and
there's set of skills.
Speaker 7 (06:24):
So Matthew was an award winning journalist. I think he
had already been part of a team that won a Pulitzer.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
And then there's Andrew Dafnie Middleson, who we've already heard from.
Speaker 7 (06:34):
Andrew is always known as the diplomat because he had
in fact been a diplomat for some time, and personality wise,
of the three, he is definitely the diplomatic one. He
is very kind and very gracious.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Paul, the youngest brother, was at that time living in
London and later also became an award winning journalist and
the author of Dafnie's biography.
Speaker 4 (06:58):
So a diplomat and two journalists, all with international connections.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Dephnie's husband Peter and her sister Corinne are also essential
team members. He is a lawyer and she's a pr consultant,
also useful skills. This is Andrew the diplomat, And what.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
Me and my family realized very early on in Malta
was that international pressure was not only our only hope
because the domestic environment was just so difficult, but that
it was actually our most powerful lever, more powerful than say,
the opposition party, more powerful than what was left of
the press in Malta.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
But that raises the same question, how do you get
the rest of the world to care about a murder
in Malta.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
One possibility is the focus on the European Union's idea
of itself, the idea of Europe as a place of democracy,
rule of law, and freedom of the press, a place
where it matters if journalists are murdered.
Speaker 5 (07:57):
Malta is such a small country, it's so dependent on
new membership.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Bluntly, we Maltese need Europe more than Europe needs.
Speaker 5 (08:05):
Us, but so so dependent on international partnerships that it's
a unique example where international pressure can actually overcome domestic resistance.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
One really important example our economy depends on international finance
being based here. And if the EU decides that Malta
is no longer a stable, well governed member of the Union,
or even publicly criticizes how the country is run, then
those rich international investors might go elsewhere.
Speaker 4 (08:39):
Which means a public tribute to Japanese's work in the
European Parliament might have real financial consequences.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
So the first weeks after Dapnese's death go by, the
street protests build, and at this point the FBI come
in to investigate the forensic trail left by the killers,
and men like Melvin the Middleman, mister alleged Mastermind, and
the Georgia's become increasingly worried, gradually realizing that this isn't
(09:08):
just another local car bombing that will ultimately be ignored
by the police.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
And that's when Daphne's family decide to make solving Daphanese
murder a global cause for journals.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Everywhere and here Daphne's son, Matthew the journalist, has a
piece of luck. An international organization has just been formed
that was designed for exactly the situation.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
An organization called Forbidden Stories.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
The idea is that when a journalist is persecuted or murdered,
a global bet signal is sent out to other investigative
reporters around the world to take on the same stories
and follow them to their true conclusions.
Speaker 6 (09:50):
Because we thought that the stories should not die with
the people.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
So by murdering Daphne, her killers are multiplying theumber of
reporters on the case.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Attracting even more attention to her work and her stories,
and seeing if those stories might yield clues as to
who wanted her dead, who the real mister allegit mastermind
might be. The journalists that forbidden stories called their new
journalistic coalition the Deafnite Project, and they start by digging
(10:22):
deep into Dafnie's archive of old investigations.
Speaker 6 (10:25):
When Dafnit was killed, this was the natural thing to
do after that was to say, okay, this is the
first case. This is what we have to do. Now,
this is our case. Let's try to assemble a team
of journalists. Let's go to Marta. Let's try to tell
her story. Let's try to see that the people who
(10:47):
killed her and who wanted her stories to die, that
they don't get away with that, that the stories are
still going to see the light of day, and that
they're going to be punished.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
The hope of the Deafney project is that clues to
her murder might lie in some of the stories she investigated,
and it turned out that hunch was correct. Within her
blog posts there is in fact a faint trail leading
to the likely masterminds of her murder, and mister allegit
mastermind in particular.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Feb Second, twenty sixteen. If the Panama hat fits, wear it.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
But the clues are deeply buried. I remember when Dafney
published this blog post eighteen months before her death, the
start of her most famous story. It was typical of
her sense of mischief, being deliberately mysterious, playing with her public,
and it worked. You'd be repeatedly checking the block throughout
(11:55):
the day to see if all had been revealed on
the surface. This post strangely seemed to be all about hats.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Conrad Mitzi has found a hat that fits him.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
It includes a large stop photo of a Panama hat,
a kind of straw some hat. The text is made
up of cryptic and sarcastic messages about a government minister
called Conrad Mitzi, Walter's Health and Energy minister.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Take this as a genuine warning, I am not at
liberty to say more for the time being, because if
I were then rest assured that I would.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Twenty minutes later I definitely posted another puzzle. This one
had a picture of acute lamb and a few paragraphs
wandering out loud whether mister Mitzi would be eating New
Zealand lamb at Easter.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
When I say I have an international, worldwide network of spies,
I'm not quite joking, but sadly I can't say more
for now, though I'm bursting.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Too hats lambs. The government minister the truth was definitely
had got access to an incredible scoope through her son
Matthew's work. You might remember the Panama Papers, a huge
(13:13):
global story where millions of confidential finds from a secret
of firm in Panama were leaked to the press. What
we now know is that Daphanie had got an early viewing.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
The Panama Papers were a huge deal for the kind
of work I do, investigations into corrupt regimes. They gave
us a roadmap to the complex global arrangements that super
wealthy individuals use to keep their wealth secret, how rich
crooks avoid taxes and sanctions and money laundering investigations and
(13:46):
journalists with questions. In my work on Putins Russia, the
publication of the papers was a game changer, one of
those rare times where for a moment, a whole hidden
world is revealed.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
One hundred and forty three politicians from around the world
were featured in the files, including twelve national leaders, from
the then Prime Minister of Iceland to the then President
of Ukraine. But it wasn't just politicians. There were bureaucrats, businessmen,
minor royalty, even the Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
Of course, having a name churned up in the Panama
Papers does not necessarily mean that the person committed a crime,
but it does raise some interesting questions about what they're
doing with these secretive accounts. And the country of Panama
was significant because it was a tax haven with little regulation,
(14:40):
a place which tends not to share financial information with
most other countries, a place where you can park assets
away from prying eyes.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
And Deafney's sneak preview revealed that the Panama Papers included
significant information about Malta too. Health and Energy Minister Mitzi
was featured in detail. Definitely had discovered that immediately after
being elected, mister Mitzi had created an elaborate financial arrangement
designed for secretly stashing assets outside Molta, a trust in
(15:14):
New Zealand containing a company based in Panama. Layers upon layers,
hence the references to New Zealand lamb and the Panama hat.
It looked exactly like something someone might choose to hide
large amounts of assets or funds.
Speaker 4 (15:30):
The global financial equivalent of buying a brand new piggybank
and stashing it in a very very secret place, all
on the day you get a new job.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
February twenty fourth, twenty sixteen. Conrad Mitzi's so called shell
company was never declared to Parliament in his annual declaration
of assets as a government minister, not in twenty thirteen,
not in twenty fourteen, and not in twenty fifteen. And
if he had told you that he had incorporated it
in Panama, the many hundreds of people who work in
financial services in Malta and the entire political class would
(16:07):
know exactly why he did this.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
These are expensive bigurebanks. They cost money to set up
and cost money to run. It would make absolutely no
sense for someone to use an arrangement like this on
the other side of the world to store a nor
mil government salary, even a minister salary. This figure bank
was built for something larger.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
No accountant or financial consultant would ever advise a client
to incorporate a company in Panama if there are no
extraordinarily significant assets to hold, and beyond that, assets which
the client wishes to conceal from the authorities back home.
Conrad Mitzi is in government now, but he is not
going to be in government forever.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
And daphnely didn't stop with mister Mitzi.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
February twenty seventh, twenty sixteen. Breaking now, Conrad Mitzi and
PM's chief of staff Schmbrie have exactly the same asset
concealing structures in blacklisted Panama.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Remember Teach Cambrie, the Prime Minister's chief of staff, the
man who would later meet Melvin the Middleman for a
dodgy job and a selfie.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
The Panama Papers revealed that he also had a secret
piggybank ready to be filled up.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
The agreements that made Schambrie beneficiary of his trust and
Mitzi's settler and protector of his were submitted together on
the same date.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
The same date, which is to say, immediately after the
Labor Party in Malta, one power suggesting that this might
be a shared and coordinated effort to provide senior government
figures with a place to keep extra earnings, almost a
perk of the job.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
There was a third asset concealing structure revealed by Dafne
another pigabank set up at the same time for a
third individual, but in this case those involved had covered
their tracks even better, That individual's name was not put
in writing anyone in the paperwork that has been made public.
One email says that the name will be communicated veribally
(18:09):
over a Skype video call.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
I mean nothing says honest democratic government like a secret
financial arrangement owned by a person whose name can't be
put in riting.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, probably not. An arrangement at your High Street bank
account would allow discovering the secret identity of the unknown
third person. The man or woman whose name couldn't be
written down became a campaign in itself.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
So I think there's something we should address here. For me,
the complexity of all these arrangements companies in Central America
structures from New Zealand bank accounts without names is something
that makes this kind of story really hard to report on.
And yet the secret bribes and kickbacks that politicians take
(19:00):
and businessmen give affect all our lives more than we
realize this. Invisible money changes how our elected representatives act,
who they obey, and twists and distorts the services we
receive from governments. But I know that even when you're
used to decoding this kind of corruption, the complexity can
(19:21):
be overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Which company is within, which trust or paid for? Which
are holding vehicle?
Speaker 4 (19:27):
And when I've realized this, none of this confusion, this
fog machine is an accident. It's the whole point. The
fog machine is wired to confuse the people who pay
to hide their ill gotten gains. This way, they want investigators,
reporters in the public to lose the thread, to get confused,
and to get bored, to give up, and to turn
(19:48):
the page to a simpler, clearer news story. And a
lot of the time it works, and that allows the
theft and corruption to and continue right under our noses
all the bloody time.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
And that is exactly how it feels trying to pin
down corruption in my country. You know it's there, sometimes
you see something yourself, but so much complexity has been
created around it that it's very hard to see the
whole picture. And that was Deafney's genius and what made
her so dangerous to certain people. She had the ability
(20:25):
to dispel the confusion, to lay it out in terms
that everyone could understand, and that gave the offenders nowhere
to hide. Her writing about the Panama papers made her
one of the most influential voices in the country.
Speaker 8 (20:41):
It's almost tangible in a sense.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Here's Nicole Maelak, a journalist at the Multa Today newspaper.
She was at university at the time. Definitely published the
Panama stories.
Speaker 8 (20:51):
Everyone was talking about this because how can you not
talk about it when you have a minister your chief
of staff implicated and having sort of these shady accounts
and Panama everyone's talking about it.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
The opposition party called Defnie Discoveries the biggest scandal and
Maltese political history and anti corruption protest marches were held
in the capital. Definitely attended as a hero.
Speaker 8 (21:17):
It didn't feel right to even like go to a
university lecture because I remember going to university lecture and
the mood was there. We couldn't do this lecture because
all this was happening there was such a monumental sort
of crisis.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
For a moment it looked as though possibly the whole
government might fall. But Prime Minister Joseph Mouscat didn't do
what Defni and the protesters were asking for. He didn't cave. Instead,
he stood firm.
Speaker 8 (21:44):
It raised eyebrows. Obviously on one hand, it's like, what
are they trying to hide? Like have you having secrets
companies and Panama's definitely not on when you're when you're
a sing minister. The Prime Minister at the time didn't
exactly them to resign or anything.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Conrad Mitzi at first claimed that he had done nothing
wrong in creating the Panama and New Zealand financial arrangements,
but later admitted that he had not declared the arrangements properly,
a breach of Multie law. His explanations for his intentions
and aims continued to evolve, sometimes in contradictory ways. He
(22:26):
eventually apologized in Parliament for his actions. In the spring
of twenty sixteen, Mitzi was moved to a different cabinet post.
Keach Cambri had a different set of explanations for his
pig Bank. He said that his arrangements had been the
result of decisions taken by his business advisers on his behalf,
and he stayed in post. There was no apology for
(22:48):
his part. Prime Minister Mouscart mostly handled the scandal using
the classic strategy for a populist leader. When pushed into
a corner, he claimed the whole scandal was invented, a
media conspiracy and attack on his supporters, the real people
of Malta sound familiar fake news.
Speaker 4 (23:07):
When someone accuses you of a great crime, you don't
deny it. You switch on the fog machine. You create
multiple versions of reality. Some masses of people get confused,
and within those versions you get your creatures to deny it.
Take Stalin's man made famine in nineteen thirty three, which
kills so many people. No one to this day knows
(23:29):
how many. No one knows because no one counted. Malcolm Muggridge,
one of a handful of journalists who try to tell
the truth about the famine, wrote, one of the most
monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the
future will scarcely believe it ever happened. Likewise with Donald
Trump and the insurrection against the Capitol. Likewise with Vladimir
(23:54):
Putin and the murder of Alexey Navalni. Populists don't deny
their crimes a switch of reality.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
And like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Joseph Muscat went
on the attack. Pro government blogs and TV shows focused
even more intensively on demonizing Daphne as an enemy of
not just the government but of Malta itself. One recurring
theme in pro government TV and radio was to describe
(24:25):
or depict her as a witch, an evil older women
with magical powers to harm others, particularly men. It's a
method that's been used to put women back in their
place for thousands of years, and it's still going strong today.
But the approach of trying to discredit Daphne was harder
to sustain when the International Panama Papers team published their
(24:47):
own findings and confirmed everything that she had written. When
Conrad Mitzi was eventually moved to a different post, Prime
Minister Mouscat explained his DESI the Panama affair hurt us
politically and personally. He said, although there was nothing illegal,
(25:07):
we expect better behavior and definitely had some feedback for
those who questioned her integrity.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
March second, twenty sixteen, excuse my language. Here, but nothing
else will suffice in this ridiculous situation. Total bollocks. Why
don't these just go on themselves? How I got the
information is irrelevant. What counts is the information itself. These
asset concealing structures, once open and totally secret, could be
used for the receipt of bribes, kickbacks and backhanders. Give up,
(25:38):
it's over, big time.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Sadly, it wasn't over. It was only just the beginning.
But somewhere in Malta, Daphne's future killer, mister alleged Mastermind,
was already taking notes. She'd got closer to his interests
than she realized.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
To understand a little better just what definitely was discovering
about this country. And so just a little trip to
a beach in the north of Molta, a beach with
a view of an island with a lot of history.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
So beautiful day. There's an island with barely a building
on it, and just the chop there's an old kind
of medieval citadel. Manuel, tell me this island in the middle.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
What's it called so?
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And what is it is called? Camuna? Probably a corruption
of cumin. Maybe it used to grow there. It's an
island right in the middle of the channel between the
larger island of the Motese archipelago, Malta and the smaller one, Gozo.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
So why do you're checking me here? There's some kind
of historical metaphor you're about to hit me over the
head with.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
I know you I am. So you see on the
side of the island. You see how the sea has
eroded caves into the island, And that used to be
for some time in the sixteenth especially the seventeenth, but
in the eighteenth centuries a hideout for pirates. They'd be
hiding stuff there. In any case, it was a pirate cove,
(27:21):
a place of shelter.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
Okay, So I get the history lesson, But why exactly
if you check me here today?
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Because I think this story from two three hundred years
ago anticipates a bit what happens now. We still have
treasures that need hiding, and the caves of today are
a little bit different. So if you think trusts and
financial instruments and offshore banking is complicated, just think of
(27:51):
a dark cave.
Speaker 4 (27:51):
It's a good place to hide it.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, it's a good place to hide for a while.
Let the waters come down. People look away, and then
you can come out in the middle of the night
and take the stuff where you want it. You're parking,
you're stolen stuff for a while, keep it hidden, and
then bring it out when it's safe to do so.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
Aha. So listen, I mean, if we went across and
found these eighteenth century caves, you'd hear an echo, and
there's an echo of the past. So the whole country,
the whole archipelago, is a place where there are echoes
from the past. And if you listen carefully enough to
those echoes from the past, I tell you something about
now the twenty first century. More they do time for
(28:33):
an ice cream.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
So years after the Panama Paper scandal, after Dafnie's death,
after the Definite Projects send up their bet signal for
other international journalists to start investigating her stories, Bastiano Bermeyer
and the Definitey Project team find they had a problem Malta,
too many pirates and too many hidden caves to look into.
Speaker 6 (29:05):
The big problem that we were facing in Morta after
Dughness murder was that there were so many people who
would want her dad essentially where to start, which is
a crazy thing for this small island. So when we
(29:25):
looked around and we thought would have a motive. You know,
easily we counted to four or five, six very influential
figures who did have a good motive to want her dad.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
This is the same culture shop for I experienced when
I first learned about this story. And in fact we
know that mister alleged Mastermind used this idea to try
and reassure Melvin the Middleman at times, telling him that
Definitely had offended so many people that they would never
find the real killers.
Speaker 6 (29:57):
The biggest issue was that we were following four or
five stories at the same time, and literally each of
those stories could have been the one that was responsibly
the end for her killing, because one of the persons
involved in that story would have said, it's enough now,
we need to stop her now for good.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
But the scale of the task didn't deter the Definite
Project's investigators. Teams from the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, newspaper,
Francis Paper of Record, Lamonde, and Italy's La Republica, the
news agency Reuters and others were all digging at the
same time.
Speaker 4 (30:36):
And they did make progress. Stories that Definitely had hinted
that were developed and taken further investigations into a corrupt
scheme to allow wealthy foreigners to buy mult citizenship, for example,
and revelations about corrupt gas fials with the ruling elite
in Azerbaijan.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
In virtually every major policy initiative that was launched by
Joseph Moscart's government after it came to power in twenty thirteen,
Deafney reported shady dealings. Considered Defnie's reporting on the transfer
of the management of some of Molta's public hospitals to
private operators. Basically, the government would pay the salaries for
medical staff and pay the new managers a daily fee
(31:18):
to refurbish the hospitals and provide medical care. Defney had
her own views about how the health system should be run,
but that wasn't the bit that bothered her most. The
government transferred the running of the hospitals to a shady
sacials company, its owners, unknown, its financial basis and mystery,
and with no evidence of any experience in running hospitals
(31:39):
anywhere in the world. Muscat and his government promised the
privatization of the hospital's management would improve the quality of
healthcare for mortice people. Not what you'd expect socialists to
be saying, but Muscat was no ordinary socialist. There were
promises of rebuilt facilities, world class medical care services. Oh good,
(32:00):
people would be flying to more that to have their
scheduled surgeries done here.
Speaker 4 (32:05):
Jafneg denounced the scheme as a sham, a cover for
some behind the scenes swindle. She didn't have all the details,
but as usual, her intuition was on the money to
coin a phrase. By the time she was killed, the
hospitals had got barely a fresh lick of paint. Wards
were abandoned, doors collapsed, roofs leaked. Months after Daphney was killed,
(32:26):
the mysterious managers of the hospitals went bust. The governments
had a contractual right to claim the hospital's back, but
they didn't do that.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
No, the faceless and ostensibly bankrupt managers of the hospitals
were allowed to sell the concession on. The new managers
would be a recognized healthcare brand from America.
Speaker 4 (32:47):
Did the hospitals get their fresh lick of paint?
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Barely a drop? That's at the same time as between them,
the first private hospital managers and their American successors collected
nearly half a billion euro in payments from the mortis authorities.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
In those first six months after Daphne was killed, reporters
from the Daphne Project found the stories about passports for crooks,
blindingly expensive gas steals, and abandoned hospitals interesting, to be sure,
but there was nothing that pointed clearly to the real
culprit in Daphne's murder. For now, mister alleged mastermind could
(33:26):
rest easy. The stalemate must have been frustrating for the
Daphne Project and Daphne's other supporters like you Manuel.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
It was it almost seemed that the grand strategy of
Daphne's family to use international pressure and international journalism to
find Daphne's killer was leading nowhere. On that one measure,
the bat signal hadn't worked. But there was one question
that hadn't yet been explored, and it also concerned the
Panama Papers. Daphanie's reporting had proved that two senior government
(34:01):
ministers and another unnamed person had all simultaneously created elaborate
hidden piggybanks to hide assets in. But what she hadn't
revealed was why, What was the big payday that these
politicians were expecting to receive and from whom? And solving
that mystery will lead Daphne's family and Deafney Project straight
(34:24):
to the man who is believed to have ordered her murder.
The man we are calling for now, mister alleged Mastermind.
For now, though mister alleged Mastermind has other problems, problems
with the man he allegedly hired to do the killing.
Speaker 4 (34:46):
The strain of keeping this murder secret is beginning to tell,
and the once unimaginable betrayal is now coming.
Speaker 6 (34:57):
That's next.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Crooks Everywhere is a production of iHeart Podcasts, Topic Studios
and Vespucci. It's reported and hosted by me Manuel Delia
and John Sweeney. The senior producer is Leo Hornack. The
producer is Maddie Hickish. Krish Denesh Kumar is the assistant producer.
The story editors are Emma Federill, Matt Willis, and Philippa Geering.
(35:34):
The managing producers are Thomas Curry and Rachel Byrne. The
voice of daf Nick Carvana Galizia is played by Ciena Miller,
acting direction by Christopher Houten, Multie voices by Mikael basma
Jan and Pierre staff Raj. The executive producers are Johnny
Galvin and Daniel Turken at Vespucci, Christi Gressman at Topic Studios,
(35:56):
Katina Norvell and Nikki Etoor at iHeart Podcasts, Encienna Miller
Marketing Leaders, David Wassermann. Audio recording by Tom Berry at
Wardoor Studios. Audio mix and sound design by Joel Cox.
Special thanks to Andrew Botchcardona Alessandra di Crespo, Eddie Isles,
and Andrew Carna Galizia
Hosts And Creators
Manuel Delia
John Sweeney
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