Blankfein, Cohn, and other Goldman leaders, in the aftermath of the mortgage crisis, had pledged to put clients first and regularly preached good governance. Yet Goldman had made hundreds of millions of dollars and 1MDB was in disarray, at a high cost to Malaysia’s people. The bank had turned a blind eye to irregularities, enabling the kind of industrial-scale corruption carried out in the past by Sani Abacha of Nigeria or Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. Those dictators had been crude—Abacha had sent trucks to loot cash from the central bank—but this was simply a more sophisticated way of
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