Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

by Tom Wright

Low even wrote Ivanka Trump, then a student at Wharton, inviting her to attend. Low told his friends she declined the offer on the grounds she would never set foot in one of her father’s “skeevy” casinos.

This was layering, the process of hiding money’s origins through a complex maze of transactions—a crucial instrument in the money launderer’s tool kit.

On Election Day, May 5, Najib averted disaster, clinging to power with the most slender of margins. Low had delivered yet again, and the prime minister was grateful. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. Not only did the government’s coalition fail to win back Penang, it also lost the popular national vote. Najib remained in power only because of electoral rules that reserve more parliamentary seats for Malay-dominated rural areas. Sophisticated urban voters, many of them Chinese-Malaysians, had turned out in droves for the opposition, sick of the money politics. Anwar Ibrahim claimed election fraud, but the system was skewed against him.

To build his connection to the White House, Low got involved with efforts to reelect Obama to a second four-year term. Pras Michél would be his conduit. In 2012, Low sent $20 million from an offshore company he controlled to two companies owned by Pras. The money was ostensibly a “gift,” but the musician used one of these firms to make a $1.2 million donation to a super PAC called Black Men Vote, which supported Obama’s campaign.