Leonardo DiCaprio in Rome on January 16, 2016 for the premiere of the film “The Revenant” ©BelgaImage
On April 26, 2018, an FBI special agent, Robert B. Heuchling, received in a room on Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, a personality and not just any personality. Because it is indeed Leonardo DiCaprio who was questioned by him, and this for hours. It took until this week for the Bloomberg media leak information via official documents. We discover that the FBI wanted to question him about his relationship with a Malaysian businessman, Jho Low, now on the run and accused of a huge fraud of 4.5 billion dollars.
The sulphurous reputation of Jho Low
Leonardo DiCaprio has known Jho Low for a long time, who comes from a wealthy family of Chinese origin. He would have met him for the first time in 2010, in a nightclub, and since then he affectionately nicknamed him “My man” (“My man”). He had been told that the Malaysian millionaire represented the “Mozart of the business world” and he befriended him. He took it well since Jho Low maintained this relationship with the backing of sumptuous gifts, not to mention a contribution to the financing of his film “The Wolf of Wall Street”.
But in 2015, Malaysia was hit by the huge 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal. This XXL affair of corruption, linking the former conservative Prime Minister Najib Razak (whose party is still in power today) and many personalities, was quickly qualified by the USA as “biggest case of kleptocracy to date“. And among the people involved, the name of Jho Low appears. He would be one of the masterminds behind this massive fraud operation and he would have personally siphoned 4.5 billion dollars. Since then, the businessman has been on the run and wanted by international authorities.
DiCaprio and Low: A Pretty Close Friendship
As Bloomberg reports, Leonardo DiCaprio initially did not respond to a request for comment when the FBI told him about the 1MDB scandal. The American police then presented him with documents and copies of emails where we see in particular DiCaprio qualifying Jho Low as “ami“, but the actor claimed to not really remember it anymore. He even argued about a message that it did not sound like “something he would write“.
In any case, it turns out that the proximity between the two men was quite close. Their mothers had met and they had brainstormed ideas for projects to pursue together: launching a billion-dollar fund to produce films, creating a Warner Bros park in Asia with rides representing DiCaprio’s films, developing a eco-resort in Belize, etc. The American’s manager, Rick Yorn, had also become close to Jho Low, to the point of being invited on his yacht in the Mediterranean and sometimes leading tense negotiations with him, such as for the financing of the “Wolf of Wall Street “.
DiCaprio’s growing distrust of his “man”
Asked about these points, Leonardo DiCaprio defended himself by saying that at the beginning he had done “check” Jho Low’s background, while stating that he did not know where exactly his wealth came from. He then thought that Jho Low was a good person, his agents having given him the green light to do business with him. But afterward, their relationship has sometimes strained, such as when Jho Low harassed DiCaprio about a Chinese film fund. Yorn then serves as “tampon” between the two.
When the involvement of Jho Low in a gigantic case of corruption reached the ears of the team of Leonardo DiCaprio, the latter admits not having reacted immediately, the rumors being numerous. It wasn’t until investigations really started coming out that this one took the scandal to the “serious“. At the same time, Jho Low failed DiCaprio about a fundraiser in Saint-Tropez for his foundation. From then on, “DiCaprio began to distance himself“. A relationship definitively broken off as the scandal grows in Malaysia.
Bloomberg finally clarifies that after the interrogation, the actor’s lawyers proposed that the authorities publish a press release written by them in order to “thank Mr. DiCaprio for providing substantial assistance“. Their request remained a dead letter.