Economic Crime

The riveting story of a dramatic confrontation between Native Americans and white settlers, a compelling conflict that unfolded in the newly created Washington Territory from 1853 to 1857. When appointed Washington’s first governor, Isaac Ingalls Stevens, an ambitious military man turned...

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

“Ojito has done truth an invaluable service. Extraordinary.”—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 2014 International Latino Awards Finalist A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist uncovers the true story of an immigrant's murder that turned a quaint village on the...

In partnership with Texas Monthly, Skip Hollandsworth's "Still Life" is now available as an audio download, where the length and timeliness of a podcast meets the high-quality production of a full-length audio program. Thirty-five years ago, Dallas--and the country--was gripped by the tragic...

Black Market Billions blows the lid off the world's fastest-growing illicit industry: organized retail crime. Hitha Prabhakar reveals how criminals with ties to terrorist groups around the world are committing huge product thefts, and using the profits to fund terrorist acts. Prabhakar connects the dots and follows the money - from consumers dying for a deal to terrorist cells eager to do the killing.

The economy isn’t just for the economists to debate on. All of us are affected by its ups and downs—global recession, rise in interest rates, or hike in food prices. But do we understand the principles at work and how and why they really affect us? Day to Day Economics is an...

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR’s founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR’s core mission: fearless reporting...

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement wants to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media wants a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama—drop by bloody drop—in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, or break them, or find loopholes to work around them.

Durante los gobiernos de Vicente Fox Quesada y Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, se desarrolla el "cártel negro", un conglomerado de funcionarios, trabajadores, empresarios, contratistas, inspectores, contralores, agentes aduanales, dirigentes y miembros del sindicato petrolero, políticos, ordeñadores, tapineros, huachicoleros, extorsionadores, defraudadores, contrabandistas y lavadores de dinero que, alineados con los traficantes de droga, se consolidan como una organización empresarial paralela a Pemex.

Ghosting the News tells the most troubling media story of our time: How democracy suffers when local news dies. Reporting on news-impoverished areas in the U.S. and around the world, America's premier media critic, Margaret Sullivan, charts the contours of the damage but also surveys some new...

"Starting with her years at the University of Texas Law School at Austin, Weddington, the attorney who won Roe v. Wade , traces the history of her involvement with this momentous Supreme Court case and its aftermath. She laments the ground that sometimes complacent pro-choice activists have lost...

The Ponzi Housing Scheme is the financial crime of the 21st century. It makes Madoff look like an amateur because of scale. The crime was sophisticated in it's plan. This crime violated laws on the books. It violated laws that should be on the books. And it violated the trust that people have with the banking community, and this violation reaches to the highest bankers in the land and off our shores. This crime is complex, but it is not rocket science. The proof of culpability can be known.

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR’s founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR’s core mission: fearless reporting...

Andrew Zimmern, the host of The Travel Channel’s hit series Bizarre Foods, has an extraordinarily well-earned reputation for traveling far and wide to seek out and sample anything and everything that’s consumed as food globally, from cow vein stew in Bolivia and giant flying ants in Uganda...