There was no breeze, just fine talc, airborne and stagnant. Shreds of plastic bags snag on bits of coral, and feral dogs hunt in the canals.īrian told me how when he was a boy, all this was dense tropical forest. The winding channels among these coral spires are lined with an appallingly silky dirt, and old, filthy trash, too expensive to export from the island, blows around this blistering desert. It's a haunting landscape of dugout stone channels formed by limestone towers and coral outcroppings, all blindingly white under an intense equatorial sun. Picked clean, right down to the coral skeletons supporting the island. A curtain, hiding from sight one of the scariest things I've ever seen.Īlmost all of Nauru is missing. I immediately saw that the palms and pandanas you see on the shore are kind of scrim. But he turned off one of the few side roads, and we headed in. When I said I did, the mood in the cab noticeably darkened. Then he asked me if I wanted to see the interior, known as Topside.
#Shamyla this american life driver
The driver this day, whose name sounded like Brian, took me on a slow tour around the outer edge of the island. The next day though, I realized that Nauru was also at the center of a completely different story. The cleaning lady of the new global economy. It was as close as I or anyone would ever get to the red hot center of it all. I knocked on the door and a woman with a broom appeared, who told me there was no one there and never would be. Crammed with air conditioners to keep the computers humming in Nauru's brutal heat. It's a broken down building, basically two rooms. And I went to the shack where, at that time, much of the world's money laundering occurred. I caught the cab, there's only one of those too. See, almost everything, including fresh water, has to be imported. On the flight out, half the plane was taken up with giant plastic containers customized to fit ceiling to floor in the passenger seats.
I was told I was lucky to be aboard since the president often commandeers it to fly in party supplies, or sometimes creditors trying to collect on one of Nauru's many debts seize it right on the runway. I say the plane because Nauru Airways owns only one, a Boeing 737, all that connects this island to the world. So I traveled to Brisbane, Australia to catch the Nauru plane. I stepped over to my kid's globe to find the place. The first time I ever heard of Nauru was when a magazine editor called up a few years ago and asked me go there. I'm one of the few people on the planet who can tell you this, but he's pretty close. Nauru led the way in democratizing offshore banking, taking it to the internet, lowering the cost to make it easier on middle income international criminal syndicates. And Nauru would be under no obligation to say who ran it or where they lived.īanks that would hide your tracks for you have always been around, but it was more of a gentleman's sport practiced with old world grandeur in Switzerland. So when investigators went to track illicit money flows and got to the Panacea Bank, there would be no record of where the money came from. Nor did Nauru require that they ever tell anyone just who ran the bank.
Nauru didn't burden its banks with such fussiness. Most banks are required to keep an audit trail of money coming in and going out, like a standard statement for a checking account. Quite notorious with the regulators.Īnyway, here was the advantage. How does a Pacific island liquidate a superpower? Well, for a while in the 90s, Nauru advertised on the internet permitting anyone to start a bank there for as little as $20,000. Where he was at the time was Moscow, meeting with the vice president of Russia's central bank. How billions of dollars vanished from the former Soviet Union. What he was doing was trying to solve one of the great mysteries of the late 90s. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State at the time. He remembers when he first heard of Nauru. And an incident of international bankruptcy, as Jonathan Winer discovered. The dark back room scheming of global terrorism. A covert spy operation involving a fake embassy in China. Part of the pleasure of knowing about Nauru is watching it pop up, Zelig-like, at the strangest world events. Nauru is the place you've never heard of until you've heard of it, and then can't stop hearing of it. On a map, a tiny dot in a massive hole in the middle of the sea. A third the size of Manhattan, way east of New Guinea. Specifically, the middle of nowhere is an island, isolated even by Pacific Ocean standards, 1,200 miles from the nearest smudge of land. The middle of nowhere is at the center of everything. I don't mean that the way a zen master or a motivational speaker might. The middle of nowhere, it turns out, is at the center of everything.
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