Imagine you’re the leader of one of the 195 countries in the world. Never mind how you landed that gig (Free election? Rigged election? Dynastic inheritance? Super, super high IQ?), it comes with a jumbo helping of entitlement. Being human, before long you start to take the perks for granted, until one day up pops this thought: I need more. Conveniently, you’ve discovered a back door to your country’s treasury, or a slick method for friction-less bribery, and…money, money, money! or (build,build, build!).
It’s there, not only for the taking, which is nice, but also the source of an ancillary urgency: where to hide it. Opulent homes on many continents, each with a private zoo? Patek Philippe watches for every day of the month?
Sounds good? Can you see yourself in that role? To guide you through the do’s and don’ts, ask the Integrity Initiative Inc. or me.
Or better ask Jim Mintz and Irwin Chen, who have created“ Kleptocrat,” a new free game available in the Apple App Store. Kleptocrat operates on the premise that the player is a bad guy trying to launder ill-gotten riches while evading the investigator, a relentless exemplar of all the anti-corruption killjoys out there. Mintz is the founder of the Mintz Group, an international private-investigation firm (“Clarity in a complex world”), many of whose clients are law firms pursuing civil cases, and Chen is a designer and an adjunct professor in interaction design at the New School. The hide-and-seek scenarios in Kleptocrat are extrapolated from the behaviors of real kleptocrats around the world, including those laid out in Where the Bribes Are, a Mintz Group database. Rendered as a map of the world, the database depicts, to scale and in deepening shades of red, the bribe-susceptibility of industries within a given country, as well as details of successful prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “Our expertise boils down to following dirty money,” Mintz said the other day, in a boardroom on lower Fifth Avenue.
Mintz got his private investigator’s license in 1980, a segue from investigative journalism. In the late- 1970s, he was part of a team in Washington, D.C., that somehow avoided blindness while piecing together shredded documents salvaged from a dumpster in the alley behind the office of a corrupt K Street lobbyist. Since 2007 he’s taught investigative reporting at Columbia’s School of Journalism.
His habitual aversion to publicity was tested in the 1990s, when he wound up in the tabloids for suing Ivana Trump in a fee dispute, after she allegedly stiffed him for work he did during her divorce from Donald of the same last name.
The archetypal kleptocrat, Mintz says, “may be good at running a country or a business, but he’s terrible at hiding money.” One recent weekend, a reporter in late middle age spent several hours validating that dictum on his iPhone, playing Kleptocrat over and over without coming close to beating the investigator.
Each game begins with a bribe (keeping a casino open in exchange for free chips; arranging a government contract “for the mobile-phone company that just hired your 16-year-old daughter as a ‘consultant’;” a kickback on a contract to deliver defibrillators to army hospitals). Hiding and laundering the money often requires a network of devious offshore lawyers (“expert in exotic island banks, sleazy accountants, pirate tax havens, fake charities, backdated registrations”), corrupt military officers, well-connected mistresses, oblivious front men or the occasional Liechtenstein foundation.
Eventually, the money is meant to be enjoyed—a private fleet of jets and helicopters; a Hong Kong shopping spree with sequentially numbered credit cards for each of your in-laws; a rare-game safari; Elvis Presley’s starburst jumpsuit. The fun lasts as long as you can evade the investigator—that is, until your buddy’s coked-up girlfriend flips on you, or your wife’s gym-rat cousins get clipped moving suitcases of cash through customs. You win if you accumulate a certain amount of swag before getting busted. In the event of the latter, it’s game over and you, a prisoner of your ravenous avarice, tap Play and try again.
Are you game? Willing to play a game in which players must launder their ill-gotten riches without getting caught?
Get the app…at the App Store for free.
I thank The New Yorker for alerting me to this new game.
Flashback: On July 11 I wrote about ‘Open Government Partnership – Part of Fighting Corruption’ and made extensive reference to reports prepared by the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) of the local Open Government Partnership implementation group. The reason why I used the IRM source is that the Integrity Initiative is part of the Civil Society Groups supporting the OGP Program and the reporting of the IRM. In fact, the Integrity Initiative has added progress information to the latest IRM report.