grata. No longer a prosecutor, he couldn’t bring the case against the
chairman and Samsung himself. He was helpless.
“A state of panic,” as he put it, “overtook me.”
He retreated to the countryside east of Seoul, where he locked himself
indoors, listening to Beethoven piano sonatas and caring for his kennel of
dogs.
“Beethoven is the only musician who could express his rage through his
music,” Kim explained. He called his children in the United States and told
them never to come back to South Korea—because there wouldn’t be any
jobs for them. “I am not even a father,” Kim lamented.
—
“TELL ME ABOUT THE X-File,” I told Kim.
The X-File was a secret batch of recordings, named the “Samsung X-
File” by the press, that was leaked and splashed all over the media, posing a
threat to the rulers of the Samsung empire. A month before my meeting
with Yong-chul, I’d met Roh Hoe-chan, a former parliamentary lawmaker,
at his office at the outskirts of Seoul, in a gray industrial zone where we sat
outside and ate barbecued pork and drank soju.
Roh, a balding middle-aged man with a giant smile and booming voice,
bore the brunt of what it means to be a Samsung critic. I was surprised he
maintained such an upbeat, optimistic outlook.
“It was a search for justice,” he told me. “We could not allow Samsung
to treat our country like it’s a Republic of Samsung.”
A former activist and journalist who covered labor movements before
entering politics, Roh recounts a story similar to Kim’s.
“I found a package in my mailbox at the National Assembly,” he told
me. “It was 2005. The sender was anonymous. Inside it was a CD.”
Roh put the disc in his computer and up popped a recording. It was a
top-secret tape recorded by the nation’s spy agency and leaked by an
unknown source.
“Ah, and will there be any greetings for Chuseok?” asked one person on
the recording. The man was referring to gifts—sometimes a cover for
bribes in South Korea—during South Korea’s equivalent of Thanksgiving.
“The ones that are worth it, yes.”