Confronting Corruption
By Nnamdi Igbokwe
“You must pay them!” the soldier bellowed from the front seat. As we rolled to a stop, the base of his rifle pressed further into my right knee. I dare not move an inch, I thought, physically frozen, even after hours of sitting in place. I feared even the slightest shift would cause the gun to discharge.
Why are we stopping? I wondered. I carefully lifted my head to briefly gaze at his green and brown camouflage uniform, puzzled that the soldier sitting inside the car so closely resembled the rugged man now standing outside. They wore the same uniform, they carried the same rifle; he, too, was a soldier. I saw his face through the window. He leaned in and muttered, "So what do you have for me?"
I was eight years old, sitting next to two of my sisters in the dusty backseat of a gray Volvo in the dead of night. Our Nigerian family was traveling from Lagos to Enugu by road, and there I watched corruption unfold—one soldier inside the car, paid to guard our passage, and the other soldier standing outside, paid to allow it.
There was total silence as the soldier outside eagerly reached into his left chest pocket to pull out his growing stack of bills. "Yes, it is complete," he said, barely glancing up as he added our Naira to his collection. The reality of that soldier dwindled into the night as we drove away; yet that moment never receded from my memory. My curiosity was ignited. While my eyes knew what they saw, my eight-year-old mind could not yet make sense of it all.
“Leave nothing, take everything!” The elevator doors had barely begun to shift apart when I heard the voice reverberate. Did I hit the wrong button? What floor is this? Before I could decide what alternate reality I must have stepped into, I was corralled. We moved through the lobby, past the agents seizing files, beyond the unplugged Bloomberg terminals, and into the conference room where my colleagues were already gathered. “In there! Hurry up!” the voice said.
It was 2011, 20 years later, and I was working at a hedge fund on Wall Street. Our office was taken over by federal agents and our company's possessions were confiscated. Amid looks of fear and anxiety permeating the room, I noticed one colleague awkwardly humming to himself, tapping his right hand on his right knee to a melody that reminded me just how strange this morning was.
Usually, our fund manager would stand at the center of the room, flanked by his many soldiers ready to deal, trade and operate at his behest, pushing everything to the limit as he blasted the theme song from Scarface with its chorus “Push it to the limit!” vibrating off the walls. But this morning, there was absolute silence. Everything came to a stop.
As I shifted my eyes to peer through to the other side of the glass, I recognized the feeling. The environment was vastly different, the uniforms of Securities and Exchange Commission agents a different color, and their guns seemed a great deal smaller. But once again, I was physically frozen, sitting in place for hours, waiting for these officers to fade away into the distance.
This time was different, however. I was not a bemused child in the backseat of a Volvo watching corruption unfold. Now I was an adult, caught in the crosshairs of corporate corruption.
That morning was only the start. The probe lasted nearly three weeks, and because of it, everything was suspended. No work, no calls, no trades, no contact. Then, one late night just after 11 pm, a group Blackberry text dropped a time and a place to meet the next day. The message title: “Money Never Sleeps.”
“I was not a bemused child in the backseat of a Volvo watching corruption unfold. Now I was an adult, caught in the crosshairs of corporate corruption.”
I arrived with my colleagues, a mere three blocks from our former office. This time as the elevator doors opened, we were greeted with smiles, cheers and of course a certain song from a certain soundtrack that recapitulated the purpose of our business. It was as if our fund manager hit the reset button in a video game: We were back with a new name, a new office and new business cards. Yet it was the same business—with the same people and the same clients. “We are no longer a young dumb startup,” our manager explained. “We are players, and when you are a player you don't follow the rules, you make them!”
I barely made it two hours that day; I could not believe how normal everyone else acted. What happened to the feds? What was the result of their investigation? What did the firm do to garner their attention? More importantly, what did the firm do to make it all disappear?
The collective comfort in the office that day was confounding. I sat in disbelief, watching the fear and anxiety of days past magically transform into foolish audacity. I still remember the leather smell of our newly furnished office mixed with freshly poured Louis XIII cognac. And in the far corner of one office, I noticed the head of compliance fumbling with his cigar cutter while joking with a risk manager; the celebration of corruption was on full display.
My mind was riddled with questions: How could everyone here just disregard what happened? Why did no one else seem to see it or even care? What does that say about the nature of corruption?
“In this class, I attained a brief snapshot of what my future could look like tackling a subject that was such an important part of my life in Nigeria and in America.”
To answer that question, I had to go back in time to college. I was a senior at Northwestern University and my friends and I had all signed up to take an untitled special topics course in the Sociology department.
We arrived in Kresge Hall for that class greeted by an old Russian professor with a full gray beard and frameless glasses. “The money, the crime, you see, it is all a business, an organized business,” he said in a villainous tone. “Welcome to the mafia and the history of organized crime.” He went up and down the rows to each student. “Here you are no longer you, you are a county and their matrix of crime and corruption.” You, Italy... there, Japan...you, Russia... Nigeria...United States….” Then he landed on me: You are Mexico.
For that quarter I studied cartels, crime and corruption in Mexico with the same rigor I examined modus, ponens, tollens in my logic and philosophy course. I examined statutes in my international law class and would immediately apply the premises to potential cases of money laundering and crime in Mexico.
I was engrossed, I was enthralled. That class was the first time corruption was framed academically as something to be studied, analyzed and understood. For so long, corruption seemed more illusory than intelligible. But in this class, I attained a brief snapshot of what my future could look like tackling a subject that was such an important part of my life in Nigeria and in America.
But I was not quite ready to dive all the way in. First, I had to study for and take the LSAT; I had to finish and graduate college; I had to flirt with the prospect of law school; I had to swim in the waters of corporate America for 10 years, including a seat at the table in a Wall Street conference room.
Then, three weeks after that federal sweep by SEC agents, I quit my job on Wall Street and left a career I had spent nearly ten years building. I realized that I was now ready to examine the complex world of corruption. I could not have known that when I faced armed uniformed soldiers in Nigeria counting Naira, or bespoke-suited portfolio managers counting down to the opening bell every morning. But as I began my first year in graduate school, I immediately understood that this was not merely an academic pursuit, but rather, a profound opportunity to make sense of both a criminal world and the reality of my own life.
Nnamdi Igbokwe, a political economist and expert in corruption, is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University's Institute for Humanities Research and a member of the inaugural ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship class of 2020. He was a doctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.