About Jack
Abandoning a mediocre advertising career in 2013, I set about trying to figure out — often very clumsily — what a journalist does and how to do that. I got my first big break when Vice commissioned me to go live in a Bucharest sexcam studio. For my troubles I was given 350 pounds and a lifetime urge to go see strange things for myself and write about them. From there I reported on failed revolutions and successful assassinations across what used to be Yugoslavia. I got my first taste of investigative journalism during the refugee crisis of 2015 — a year that concluded with a madcap tour of Albania, trying to figure out why such a lovely country was so blighted by gun crime.
It was on that romp across Albania the email arrived announcing that from January 2016 I would no longer be a scurvy-addled freelancer but a salaried reporter of the Phnom Penh Post. At that time one of Cambodia’s finest newspapers, the Post has sadly since been swallowed up by cronies of the ruling party. But back then it was the greatest apprenticeship a clueless cub reporter like myself could have wished for. As we said then, it was a unique opportunity to report aggressively on a dictatorship for a domestic audience. I got to cover everything from the justice minister’s offshore ties to a notorious conman to murderous village sorcerers, timber smuggling army units, and a corrupt aid organisation betraying its dispossessed constituents in favour of a deep-pocketed and tyrannical senator.
After a short detour in Denmark, cranking out stories about the financial markets for the house website of a shady investment bank, I found myself back in the Balkans. I tracked down and interviewed a hitman for the inside scoop on Croatia’s greatest heist and unmasked the shady Bulgarian tycoon suing the Serbian state. Farther afield, I got hold of documents showing the United Nations staff pension fund was heavily invested in companies violating human rights and UN edicts across the world. My reporting eventually contributed to the fund divesting from companies operating illegally in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I capped off my time in Eastern Europe by exposing the twisted 20-year plot to monopolise Moldovan agriculture. The scheme included kidnaps, double-crosses and money laundering; and it implicated a former president and a retired US ambassador.
The approach to Phnom Penh airport is not particularly beautiful. But every time my plane comes in to land there, my heart heaves with love. There’s nowhere in the world quite like Cambodia, and that’s probably why it keeps sucking me back in. For the last half a decade or so, I’ve been single-mindedly focused on the ways Cambodia’s rulers pillage the state and what they do with their loot — whether that be buying up farmland in Florida, private banks in London, or piggybacking a $100 million fraud in Australia. Later I delved into a government-sanctioned monkey smuggling epidemic that’s put nearly five years of biomedical research in jeopardy, and the multibillion dollar conglomerate that’s allegedly a front for serious crime (allegations, I should add, the company strongly denies).
Along the way my work has been cited during parliamentary debates in both Britain and Australia, and I’ve been lucky enough to be a finalist for the Carlos Tejada award for excellence in investigative reporting.
I’m convinced that I’ve stumbled into the best job in the world. I’m so excited to see where it takes me next.