Hot Money · Pushkin Industries

Episode 5 - Nerds vs Narcos

December 14, 2023·24 min·1 clip

After months of brute-forcing millions of passwords, Dutch police broke into six terabytes of criminal messages — then trolled the entire underworld by broadcasting: 'the police are now in Canada.'

The episode opens with Irish police raiding a Dublin apartment on a tip about a Kinahan cartel safe house, where they instead find a man with multiple false identities who is later identified by Dutch police as the murder broker suspected of organising the killing of Ali Muttamid in the Dutch city of Almere. The murder broker's presence in a Kinahan safe house raises a central question about the connection between the cocaine super cartel and what appears to be an Iranian government assassination. Host Myles Johnson frames this as a symptom of a broader transformation in international organised crime, in which criminal organisations operating from Dubai can now manage complex operations remotely. Dutch crime journalist Paul Virkus, who broke the story that the murdered electrician was actually an Iranian dissident, receives a tip that a group of criminals want him dead because they believe he knows information connecting them to gangland killings. For five weeks he tells no one about the threat, continuing to work while trying to stay safe. Eventually he confides in a police contact, who is visibly alarmed, and a meeting over coffee and cookies at Paul's home leads to increasing government involvement in his protection. Paul and his girlfriend are eventually moved to a luxury safe house guarded by the same security detail that protects the Dutch royal family, though Paul describes the experience as a golden cage. Meanwhile, criminals fire a rocket launcher at the offices of a Dutch magazine covering drug trafficking, signalling that journalists have become acceptable targets. Dutch public prosecutor Martin Engberg, who works on high-tech crime and is described as soft-spoken with the air of a Silicon Valley engineer, observes that murdered gang members are all carrying the same type of stripped-down encrypted phone with no camera or microphone, supplied by a Dutch company called Enetcom. These cryptophones allowed cartel leaders in Dubai to run operations including drug supply and murder contracts without ever being in the same country as their operatives. Engberg faces a legal catch-22: he cannot access the criminal messages without evidence of criminality, but cannot get evidence without accessing the messages. His solution is to target the phone company rather than the criminals, persuading a Canadian judge to allow his team to copy Enetcom's servers in Ontario, yielding six terabytes of data. After months of trying millions of password combinations, Engberg's team brute-forces the encryption on the Enetcom key server and recovers even the self-deleting messages that were thought to be gone permanently. Among the millions of recovered messages is a brief November 2015 exchange in which a user describes a target — a Turk who works at an electricity company and drives a white van — and asks why the target needs to be killed, saying he does not even want to know. To maximise the psychological impact of the breach, Engberg's team sends a mass message to every Enetcom user announcing that police are in Canada and have seized everything, listening as panic spreads through Dutch criminal networks. Meanwhile, local councillor Ulysses Elian has been campaigning publicly about the Muttamid murder and his belief that the Iranian regime was behind it, despite being dismissed by politicians and officials. In 2019, the Dutch foreign minister makes a statement attributed to classified intelligence saying the government believes Iran was responsible for the Muttamid killing and a second murder, and expels Iranian diplomats. The announcement vindicates Elian's years of advocacy. However, Nofol Fassi, the murder broker now in prison awaiting trial, files a legal complaint against Elian through a lawyer, alleging false accusations about a connection to Iran. Elian reports this to Dutch security services, who put him and his family under police protection. Elian publicly announces he will not be silenced. The episode closes with unresolved questions about who gave Nofol Fassi his orders, and with a preview suggesting the next episode will explore connections between the super cartel and US government actors.

As heard by us

A Dublin arrest opens into a precise story about encrypted crime.

Lower Bagot Street starts with a safe-house tip in Dublin and quickly widens into a story about identity, encrypted phones, and organized crime.

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Why you'd press play

Start here if you want the case to move from a Dublin flat to a Canadian server.

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