Matt Levine, Columnist

The Blackmail Business Isn’t Easy

Also bribes, money laundering and Coke.

December 2, 2019 at 5:11 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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The basic “mystery of blackmail” is:

The mystery is why blackmail should be illegal when its component parts aren’t. But there’s another practical mystery about blackmail, which is: