The day before doctors had scheduled Amanda Duffy to give birth, the baby jolted her awake with a kick.

A few hours later, on that bright Sunday in November 2014, she leaned back on a park bench to watch her 19-month-old son Rogen enjoy his final day of being an only child. In that moment of calm, she realized that the kick that morning was the last time she had felt the baby move.

She told herself not to worry. She had heard that babies can slow down toward the end of a pregnancy and remembered reading that sugary snacks and cold fluids can stimulate a baby’s movement. When she got back to the family’s home in suburban Minneapolis, she drank a large glass of ice water and grabbed a few Tootsie Rolls off the kitchen counter.

But something about seeing her husband, Chris, lace up his shoes to leave for a run prompted her to blurt out, “I haven’t felt the baby kick.”

Chris called Amanda’s doctor, and they headed to the hospital to be checked. Once there, a nurse maneuvered a fetal monitor around Amanda’s belly. When she had trouble locating a heartbeat, she remarked that the baby must be tucked in tight. The doctor walked into the room, turned the screen away from Amanda and Chris and began searching. She was sorry, Amanda remembers her telling them, but she could not find a heartbeat.

Amanda let out a guttural scream. She said the doctor quickly performed an internal exam, which detected faint heart activity, then rushed Amanda into an emergency cesarean section.

She woke up to the sound of doctors talking to Chris. She listened but couldn’t bring herself to face the news. Her doctor told her she needed to open her eyes.

Amanda, then 31, couldn’t fathom that her daughter had died. She said her doctors had never discussed stillbirth with her. It was not mentioned in any of the pregnancy materials she had read. She didn’t even know that stillbirth was a possibility.

But every year more than 20,000 pregnancies in the United States end in stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks or more. That number has exceeded infant mortality every year for the last 10 years. It’s 15 times the number of babies who, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS, in 2020.

The deaths are not inevitable. One study found that nearly one in four U.S. stillbirths may be preventable. For pregnancies that last 37 weeks or more, that research shows, the figure jumps to nearly half. Thousands more babies could potentially be delivered safely every year.

But federal agencies have not prioritized critical stillbirth-focused studies that could lead to fewer deaths. Nearly two decades ago, both the CDC and the National Institutes of Health launched key stillbirth tracking and research studies, but the agencies ended those projects within about a decade. The CDC never analyzed some of the data that was collected.

Unlike with SIDS, a leading cause of infant death, federal officials have failed to launch a national campaign to reduce the risk of stillbirth or adequately raise awareness about it. Placental exams and autopsies, which can sometimes explain why stillbirths happened, are underutilized, in part because parents are not counseled on their benefits.

Federal agencies, state health departments, hospitals and doctors have also done a poor job of educating expectant parents about stillbirth or diligently counseling on fetal movement, despite research showing that patients who have had a stillbirth are more likely to have experienced abnormal fetal movements, including decreased activity. Neither the CDC nor the NIH have consistently promoted guidance telling those who are pregnant to be aware of their babies’ movement in the womb as a way to possibly reduce their risk of stillbirth.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the nation’s leading obstetrics organization, has been slow to update its own guidance to doctors on managing a stillbirth. In 2009, ACOG issued a set of guidelines that included a single paragraph regarding fetal movement. Those guidelines weren’t significantly updated for another 11 years.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that federal goals for reducing stillbirths keep moving in the wrong direction. In 2005, the U.S. stillbirth rate was 6.2 per 1,000 live births. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in an effort to eliminate health disparities and establish a target that was “better than the best racial or ethnic group rate,” set a goal of reducing it to 4.1 for 2010. When that wasn’t met, federal officials changed their approach and set what they called more “science-based” and “realistic” goals, raising the 2020 target to 5.6. The U.S. still fell short. The 2030 goal of 5.7 was so attainable that it was met before the decade started. The 2020 rate, the most current according to the CDC, is 5.74.

By comparison, other wealthy countries have implemented national action plans to prevent stillbirth through awareness, research and care. Among other approaches, those countries have focused on increasing education around stillbirth and the importance of a baby’s movements, reducing rates of smoking and identifying fetuses that grow too slowly in the womb.

The efforts have paid off. The Netherlands, for instance, has reduced its rate of stillbirths at 28 weeks or later by more than half, from 5.2 in 2000 to 2.3 in 2019, according to a study published last year in The Lancet.

Dr. Bob Silver, chair of the obstetrics/gynecology department at University of Utah Health and a leading stillbirth expert, coauthored the study that estimated nearly one in four stillbirths are potentially preventable, a figure he referred to as conservative. He called on federal agencies to declare stillbirth reduction a priority the same way they have done for premature birth and maternal mortality.

“I’d like to see us say we really want to reduce the rate of stillbirth and raise awareness and try to do all of the reasonable things that may contribute to reducing stillbirths that other countries have done,” Silver said.

The lack of comprehensive attention and action has contributed to a stillbirth crisis, shrouded in an acceptance that some babies just die. Compounding the tragedy is a stigma and guilt so crushing that the first words some mothers utter when their lifeless babies are placed in their arms are “I’m sorry.”

In the hospital room, Amanda Duffy finally opened her eyes. She named her daughter Reese Christine, the name she had picked out for her before they found out she had died. She was 8 pounds, 3 ounces and 20 1/2 inches long and was born with her umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck twice. The baby was still warm when the nurse placed her in Amanda’s arms. Amanda was struck by how lovely her daughter was. Rosy skin. Chris’ red hair. Rogen’s chubby cheeks.

As Amanda held Reese, Chris hunched over the toilet, vomiting. Later that night, as he lay next to Amanda on the hospital bed, he held his daughter. He hadn’t initially wanted to see her. He worried she would be disfigured or, worse, that she would be beautiful and he would fall apart when he couldn’t take her home.

The nurses taught Amanda and Chris how to grieve and love simultaneously. One nurse told Amanda how cute Reese was and asked if she could hold her. Another placed ice packs in Reese’s swaddle to preserve her body so Amanda could keep holding her. Amanda asked the nurses to tuck cotton balls soaked in an orange scent into Reese’s blanket so the smell would trigger the memory of her daughter. And just as if Reese had been born alive, the nurses took pictures and made prints of her hands and feet.

“I felt such a deep, abiding love for her,” Amanda said. “And I was so proud to be her mom.”

On the way home from the hospital, Amanda broke down at the sight of Reese’s empty car seat. The next few weeks passed in a sleep-filled fog punctuated by intense periods of crying. The smell of oranges wrecked her. Her breast milk coming in was agonizing, physically and emotionally. She wore sports bras stuffed with ice packs to ease the pain and dry up her milk supply. While Rogen was at day care, she sobbed in his bed.

In the months that followed, Amanda and Chris searched for answers and wondered whether their medical team had missed warning signs. Late at night, Amanda turned to Google to find information about stillbirths. She mailed her medical records to a doctor who studies stillbirths, who she said told her that Reese’s death could have been prevented. They briefly discussed legal action against her doctors, but she said a lawyer told her it would be difficult to sue.

Amanda and Chris pinpointed her last two months of pregnancy as the time things started to go wrong. She had been diagnosed with polyhydramnios, meaning there was excess amniotic fluid in the womb. Her doctor had scheduled additional weekly testing.

One of those ultrasounds revealed problems with the blood flow in the umbilical cord. Reese’s cord also appeared to be wrapped around her neck, Amanda said later, but was told that was less of a concern, since it occurs in about 20% of normal deliveries. At another appointment, Amanda’s medical records show, Reese failed the portion of a test that measures fetal breathing movements.

At 37 weeks, Amanda told one of the midwives the baby’s movements felt different, but, she said, the midwife told her that it was common for movements to feel weaker with polyhydramnios. At that point, Amanda felt her baby was safer outside than inside and, her medical records show, she asked to schedule a C-section.

Despite voicing concerns about a change in the baby’s movement and asking to deliver earlier, Amanda said she and her husband were told by her midwife she couldn’t deliver for another two weeks. The doctor “continues to advise 39wks,” her medical records show. Waiting until 39 weeks is usually based on a guideline that deliveries should not happen before then unless a medical condition specifically warrants it, because early delivery can lead to complications.

Amanda would have to wait until 39 weeks and one day because, she said, her doctors didn’t typically do elective deliveries on weekends. Amanda was disappointed but said she trusted her team of doctors and midwives.

“I’m not a pushy person,” she said. “My husband is not a pushy person. That was out of our comfort zone to be, like, ‘What are we waiting for?’ But really what we wanted them to say was ‘We should deliver you.'”

Amanda’s final appointment was a maximum 30-minute-long ultrasound that combined a number of assessments to check amniotic fluid, fetal muscle tone, breathing and body movement. After 29 minutes of inactivity, Amanda said, the baby moved a hand. In the parking lot, Amanda called her mother, crying in relief. Four more days, she told her.

Less than 24 hours before the scheduled C-section, Reese was stillborn.

Four months after her death, Amanda, then a career advisor at the University of Minnesota, and Chris, a public relations specialist, wrote a letter to the University of Minnesota Medical Center, where Amanda had given birth to her dead daughter. They said they had “no ill feelings” toward anyone, but “it pains us to know that her death could’ve been prevented if we would have been sent to labor and delivery following that ultrasound.”

They noted that though they were told that Reese had passed the final ultrasound where she took 29 minutes to move, they had since come to believe that she had failed because, according to national standards, at least three movements were required. They also blamed a strict adherence to the 39-week guideline. And they encouraged the hospital staff to read more on umbilical cord accidents and acute polyhydramnios, which they later learned carries an increased stillbirth risk.

The positive feelings they had from speaking up were replaced by dismay when the hospital responded with a three-paragraph letter, signed by seven doctors and eight nurses. They said they had reexamined each medical decision in her case and concluded they had made “the best decisions medically possible.” They expressed their sympathy and said it was “so very heartwarming that you are trying to turn your tragic loss into something that will benefit others.”

Amanda felt dismissed by the medical team all over again. She didn’t expect them to admit fault, but she said she hoped that they would at least learn from Reese’s death to do things differently in the future. She was angry, and hurt, and knew that she would need to find a new doctor.

A spokesperson for the University of Minnesota Medical School told ProPublica she could not comment on individual patient cases and did not respond to questions about general protocols. “We share the physicians’ condolences,” she wrote, adding that the doctors and the university “are dedicated to delivering high quality, accessible and inclusive health care.”

For many expectant parents, it’s hard to muster the courage to call a doctor about something they’re not even sure is a problem.

“Moms self-censor a lot. No one wants to be that mom that all the doctors are rolling their eyes at because she’s freaking out over nothing,” said Samantha Banerjee, executive director of PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy, a nonprofit based in New York state that works to prevent stillbirths. Banerjee’s daughter, Alana, was stillborn two days before her due date.

In addition to raising awareness that stillbirths can happen even in low-risk pregnancies, PUSH teaches pregnant people how to advocate for themselves. The volunteers advise them to put their requests in writing and not to spend time drinking juice or lying on their side if they are worried about their baby’s lack of movement. In the majority of cases, a call or visit to the hospital reassures them.

But, the group tells parents, if their baby is in distress, calling their doctor can save their life.

Debbie Haine Vijayvergiya is fighting another narrative: that stillbirths are a rare fluke that “just happen.” When her daughter Autumn Joy was born without a heartbeat in 2011, Haine Vijayvergiya said, her doctor told her having a stillborn baby was as rare as being struck by lightning.

She believed him, but then she looked up the odds of a lightning strike and found they are less than one in a million — and most people survive. In 2020, according to the CDC, there was one stillbirth for about every 175 births.

“I’ve spoken to more women than I can count that said, ‘I raised the red flag, and I was sent home. I was told to eat a piece of cake and have some orange juice and lay on my left side,’ only to wake up the next day and their baby is not alive,” said Haine Vijayvergiya, a New Jersey mother and maternal health advocate.

She has fought for more than a decade to pass stillbirth legislation as her daughter’s legacy. Her current undertaking is her most ambitious. The federal Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act, named after her daughter, would authorize $9 million a year for five years in federal funding for research, better data collection and training for fetal autopsies. But it is currently sitting in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Not all stillbirths are preventable, and medical experts agree more research is needed to determine who is most at risk and which babies can potentially be saved. Complicating matters is the wide range of risk factors, including hypertension and diabetes, smoking, obesity, being pregnant with multiples, being 35 or older and having had a previous stillbirth.

ProPublica reported this summer on how the U.S. botched the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant people, who faced an increased risk for stillbirth if they were unvaccinated and contracted the virus, especially during the delta wave.

Doctors often work to balance the risk of stillbirth with other dangers, particularly an increased chance of being admitted to neonatal intensive care units or even death of the baby if it is born too early. ACOG and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine have issued guidance to try to slow a rise in elective deliveries before 39 weeks and the potential harm that can result. The Joint Commission, a national accrediting organization, began evaluating hospitals in 2010 based on that standard.

A 2019 study found that the risks of stillbirth slightly increased after the rule went into effect, but fewer infants died after birth. Other studies have not found an effect on stillbirths.

Last year, the obstetric groups updated their guidance to allow doctors to consider an early delivery if a woman has anxiety and a history of stillbirth, writing that a previous stillbirth “may” warrant an early delivery for patients who understand and accept the risks. For those who have previously had a stillbirth, one modeling analysis found that 38 weeks is the optimal timing of delivery, considering the increased risk of another stillbirth.

“A woman who has had a previous stillbirth at 37 weeks — one could argue that it’s cruel and unusual punishment to make her go to 39 weeks with her next pregnancy, although that is the current recommendation,” said Dr. Neil Mandsager, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Iowa and a medical advisor to a stillbirth prevention nonprofit.

At or after 40 weeks, the risk of stillbirth increases, especially for women 35 or older. Their risk, research shows, is doubled from 39 weeks to 40 and is more than six times as high at 42 weeks. In 2019 and 2020, a combined 1,200 stillbirths occurred between 40 and 42 weeks, according to the most recent CDC data.

Deciding when a patient should deliver entails weighing the risks to the mother and the infant against a possible stillbirth as the pregnancy continues, said Dr. Mark Turrentine, chair of ACOG’s Clinical Consensus Committee-Obstetrics, which helped create the guidance on managing a stillbirth. He said ACOG has addressed stillbirth in other documents and extensively in its 2021 guidance on fetal surveillance and testing, which is done to reduce the risk of stillbirth.

ACOG said it routinely reviewed its guidance on management of stillbirth but was unable to make significant updates “due to the lack of new, evidence-based research.” While prevention is a great concern to ACOG, Turrentine said it’s difficult to know how many stillbirths are preventable.

He said it’s standard practice for doctors to ask about fetal movement, and ACOG updated its guidance after new research became available. Doctors also need to include patients in decision-making and tailor care to them, he said, whether that’s using aspirin in patients at high risk of preeclampsia — a serious high blood pressure condition during pregnancy — or ordering additional tests.

After Reese’s death, Amanda and Chris Duffy wanted to get pregnant again. They sought out an obstetrician-gynecologist who would educate and listen to them. They set up several consultations until they found Dr. Emily Hawes-Van Pelt, who was recommended by another family who had had a stillbirth.

Hawes-Van Pelt cried with Amanda and Chris at their first meeting.

“I told her I was scared to be involved,” Hawes-Van Pelt said. “It’s such a tricky subsequent pregnancy because there’s so much worry and anxiety about the horrible, awful thing happening again.”

Amanda’s fear of delivering another dead baby led to an all-consuming anxiety, but Hawes-Van Pelt supported her when she asked for additional monitoring, testing and an early delivery.

When Hawes-Van Pelt switched practices midway through Amanda’s pregnancy, Amanda followed her. But the new hospital pushed back on the early delivery.

“We intervene early for poorly controlled diabetes,” Hawes-Van Pelt said. “We intervene early for all sorts of medical issues. Anxiety and prior stillbirth are two medical issues that we can intervene earlier for.”

Hawes-Van Pelt said she learned a lot from caring for Amanda, who made her reevaluate some of her own assumptions around stillbirths.

“I had a horrible fear of scaring women unnecessarily, and then realized that I was just not preparing women or educating them because of my own fears around it,” she said. “If you can carry a human being in your body and birth that human being and take care of it, you can hear those words.”

The hospital eventually agreed to let Hawes-Van Pelt schedule Amanda for a 37-week C-section. But after Amanda was again diagnosed with polyhydramnios, she went in for a C-section even earlier. She gave birth in 2015 to a healthy boy she and Chris named Rhett. Two years later, Amanda and Hawes-Van Pelt followed the same pregnancy plan, and she delivered a girl named Maeda Reese. Amanda chose the name because, when said quickly, it sounds like “made of Reese.”

Federal agencies, national organizations and state and city officials have mobilized in recent years to address maternal mortality, when mothers die during pregnancy, at delivery or soon after childbirth. They have focused on improving data collection, passing legislation and creating awareness campaigns that encourage medical professionals and others to listen when women say something doesn’t feel right.

In 2017, ProPublica and NPR documented the U.S. maternal mortality crisis, including alarming racial disparities.

According to CDC data, Black women face nearly three times the risk of maternal mortality. They also are more than twice — and in some states close to three times — as likely to have a stillbirth than white women, meaning not only are Black mothers dying at a disproportionate rate, so are their babies.

Janet Petersen, a state senator from Iowa, said it gives her hope to see how the country has turned its attention to maternal mortality and disparities in health care. She simply cannot understand why stillbirth isn’t being met with the same urgency.

In 2020, the CDC reported 861 mothers died either while pregnant or within six weeks of giving birth. That same year, 20,854 babies were stillborn.

Stillbirth, Petersen said, is a missing piece of the puzzle. Research shows the likelihood of severe maternal complications was more than four times higher for pregnancies that ended in stillbirths, and mothers who died within six weeks of delivery were more likely to have had a stillbirth.

“We see it over and over again that stillbirth is one of the maternal health care issues that continuously gets ignored,” said Petersen, a Democrat.

Petersen was a young legislator in 2003 when her daughter Grace was born still. Devastated, she thought of her grandmother, who lost a baby to stillbirth in 1920, just a few weeks before women got the right to vote.

“I was laying in my hospital bed thinking, ‘How could this still be happening in our country?'” Petersen recalled. “And it seemed, from the medical perspective, that, well, stillbirth happens. We can’t do anything to prevent them.”

Over the next few months, Petersen heard from other mothers who had lost their babies and wanted to spark change. As an elected official, Petersen was in a position to do that. In 2004, she introduced legislation that required the Iowa Department of Public Health to create a stillbirths work group, later securing funding through the CDC to create a stillbirth registry.

But the CDC didn’t renew the funding and never analyzed the data from the registry, though a CDC spokesperson said the Iowa Department of Public Health examined the data. Officials from the department did not respond to requests for comment.

Petersen and her fellow mothers pivoted. After hearing how researchers in Norway were able to increase awareness around fetal movement, they co-founded a nonprofit aimed at doing the same in the U.S.

The group, Healthy Birth Day, created colorful “Count the Kicks” pamphlets — and later an app — teaching pregnant people how to track a baby’s movements and establish what is normal for them. Monitoring a baby’s movements is the earliest and sometimes only indication that something may be wrong, said Emily Price, chief executive officer of Healthy Birth Day. One of the organization’s main messages is for pregnant people to speak up and clinicians to listen.

“Unfortunately, there are still doctors who brush women off or send them home when they come in with a complaint of a change in their baby’s movements,” Price said. “And babies are dying because of it.”

One Indiana county, which recorded 65 stillbirths from 2017 through 2019, reported that 74% had either some chance or a good chance of prevention, according to St. Joseph County Department of Health’s Fetal Infant Mortality Review program. For mothers who experienced decreased fetal movement in the few hours or days before the stillbirth, that estimate jumped to 90%.

Although there is not a scientific consensus that kick counting can prevent stillbirths, national groups, including ACOG, recommend that medical professionals encourage their patients to be aware of fetal movement patterns. ACOG also advises medical professionals to be attentive to a mother’s concerns about reduced movement and address them “in a systematic way.”

One complaint the CDC hears too often, an agency spokesperson said, is that pregnant people and those who gave birth recently find that their concerns are dismissed or ignored. “Listening and taking the concerns of pregnant and recently pregnant people seriously,” she said, “is a simple, yet powerful action to prevent serious health complications and even death.”

The CDC, she said, is “very interested” in expanding its research on stillbirth, which is “a crucial part of the development of any awareness or prevention campaigns.” In addition to working to improve its stillbirth data quality, the agency has funded some pilot programs at the city and state level to better track stillbirths, survey people who have had a stillbirth and research risk factors and causes. The Iowa registry, she said, led the CDC to fund different research projects in Arkansas and Massachusetts, which are ongoing.

In 2009, the CDC acknowledged that fetal mortality remained a “major, but often overlooked, public health problem.” Officials wrote that much of the public health concern had been focused on infant mortality “in part due to lesser awareness of the magnitude of fetal mortality, its causes, and prevention strategies.”

But little has changed over the past 13 years. Echoing its earlier message, the CDC this year declared that “much work remains” and that “stillbirth is not often viewed as a public health issue, so increased awareness is key.”

A spokesperson for the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which is part of the NIH, said the agency has continually funded research on stillbirths, even after one of its key studies ended. The agency, she said, also supports research on conditions that increase the risk of stillbirth.

As a scientific research institute, it does not issue clinical guidelines or recommendations, she said, though it did launch the Safe to Sleep campaign in 1994, two decades after Congress put it in charge of SIDS federal research efforts. That campaign, which educates parents and caregivers on ways to reduce the risk of SIDS, highlights recommendations issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics. She said the agency will continue to collaborate with organizations that raise awareness about stillbirth and other pregnancy complications “to amplify their messages and efforts.”

“NICHD continues to support research on the prevention, causes, frequency, and risk factors of stillbirth,” the spokesperson said in an email. “Our commitment to enhancing understanding of stillbirth and improving outcomes focuses on building the scientific knowledge base.”

But getting laws on the books that could raise awareness around stillbirth — even when they don’t require additional funding — has been a struggle. Petersen and Price are pushing Congress to pass legislation that would add stillbirth research and prevention to the list of activities approved for federal maternal health dollars.

Though the bill doesn’t ask for any additional funding, it has not yet passed.

In addition, the SHINE for Autumn Act breezed through the House of Representatives in December 2021. After Haine Vijayvergiya, the New Jersey mother who has championed it, secured bipartisan support from U.S. Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., she thought the most comprehensive stillbirth legislation in U.S. history would finally become law.

Neither bill has sparked controversy.

But months after press releases announced the SHINE legislation and referred to the U.S. stillbirth rate as “unacceptable,” lawmakers and the families they represent are running out of time as this session of Congress prepares to adjourn.

“From the day that the bill was introduced into the Senate,” Haine Vijayvergiya said, “approximately 13,000 babies have been born still.”

Last month, on a brilliant fall day much like the one when Reese was stillborn, Amanda Duffy bent down to kiss her son Rogen’s head before they walked on stage.

She wore a soft blue T-shirt tucked into her jeans that read “Be courageous.” The message was as much for her as it was for the crowd on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., many of them like her, mothers who didn’t know stillbirth happened until it happened to them. Since Reese’s death, she has coached doctors and nurses on improving care for patients who have suffered pregnancy loss. Among her many suggestions, she tells them their first words when a concerned patient reaches out should be “I’m so glad you called.”

A few hundred people had gathered for The Big PUSH to End Preventable Stillbirth, billed as the first-ever march on the issue. As part of an art installation, Amanda wrote a note to Reese: “You’re pretty magical & for that I’m grateful. You’re a change maker and you are so very loved. Love, Mama.” Before she slipped the folded paper into a sea of more than 20,000 baby hats, Rogen added his own message: “Hope you are having a good time — Rogen.”

Reese would have turned 8 this month.

Before Amanda spoke, she took a deep breath and silenced her nerves. She walked onto the stage and called on Congress to pass the stillbirth legislation before it. She didn’t ask. She demanded.

“It’s time to empower pregnant people and their care providers with information that leads to prevention,” she insisted.

With the afternoon sun bearing down, Amanda and Rogen disappeared into the crowd of families marching toward the Capitol. Many carried signs. Some pushed empty strollers. Amanda was still wearing the orange-scented oil she had rubbed on her wrists that morning.

When Robert Ball turned 63, he was looking forward to retirement in his wife’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia. The couple had a comfortable house with a lush garden, the certainty of his pension and the hope of spending more time with their grandchildren.

That dream shattered when Ball’s wife, Gloria Ball, developed severe health problems. They faced huge medical bills, yet their bank refused to refinance their mortgage. Left with few options for raising cash, Robert Ball drove to TitleMax, a business that prospers in Georgia’s banking deserts and lends money at terms that would be illegal for other financial institutions. “I was desperate” for quick cash, Ball said. “They welcome folk like me.”

In July 2017, Ball signed a contract to receive $9,518 from TitleMax in exchange for a lien on the title to his 2006 Honda Ridgeline truck, money that the couple used to pay for Gloria’s medical needs. The terms of Ball’s contract were typical for TitleMax, specifying that he would have to repay the money plus interest in 30 days. But the store manager explained that, as long as he paid $1,046 each month, he could extend the contract indefinitely and keep his car — on which he had no other debt — from being repossessed by the company. What the manager did not mention, Ball said, was that his payments would only cover interest.

For two years, Ball made his payments diligently, court records show. Then the company told him something that nearly made him fall down: Even though he had paid more than $25,000 by then, his principal hadn’t budged.

TMX Finance, TitleMax’s parent company, calls itself a community resource to its 293,000 customers, people written off as credit risks by traditional lending institutions but who need financing to pay for life’s basic needs. As the nation’s largest title lender, TitleMax thrives on an innovative business model that lends money to risky clients in exchange for collateral: the title to the vehicle in which the customers drove to the store. In 2019, TMX Finance reported $910 million in revenue, primarily from its TitleMax brand.

Rather than seeing the company as a force for good, a growing consortium of lawmakers, religious leaders and consumer advocates believe TitleMax, and its industry writ large, to be predatory leeches on the growing ranks of working-class Americans. More than 30 states prohibit title lending or have laws inimical to the industry. In 2016, TMX Finance paid a $9 million fine, approximately 1% of the company’s revenue that year, to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which ruled that the company misled customers about the full costs of its loans in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. Since then, at least five states have passed laws capping interest rates that title lenders can charge at 36% per year.

Georgia, however, has bucked this trend. Nearly two decades ago, the state made it a felony to offer high-interest payday loans that state lawmakers described as usurious. Yet state law allows title lenders to charge triple-digit annual interest rates. This has helped the industry grow like kudzu throughout the state, which is home to three of the nation’s top title lenders.

The Current and ProPublica spent seven months examining the operations of TitleMax, the dominant industry player in Georgia, based on hundreds of pages of internal company documents, interviews with current and former company officials and an analysis of storefront locations as well as vehicle lien records from the Georgia Department of Revenue’s motor vehicle division. The investigation offers for the first time a window into the scope and scale of the company in the state, as well as the impact on its target customers: the working poor and communities of color.

The Peach State is TMX Finance’s second-largest market, accounting for 20% of its business volume as of June, according to a financial ratings report by S&P Global Ratings. Only Texas, which has nearly three times the population of Georgia, was larger, representing 32% of the company’s business volume. From July 2019 through June 2022, roughly 210 TMX Finance stores in Georgia issued new “title pawns” for approximately 47,000 vehicles annually, under brand names TitleMax and TitleBucks. They represented more than 60% of the state’s total volume.

Annual interest rates in typical TitleMax contracts ranged from 119% to 179%, and title pawns — even though they are structured to last only 30 days— often remain active for multiple months, or even years.

Despite offering a product that customers say feels like a loan, TitleMax and its competitors aren’t considered lending institutions under state law. Instead, the title-lending industry works under Georgia’s pawn shop statutes, a loophole that exempts it from the usury laws and state oversight that other subprime lenders in Georgia must operate under. Title pawn contracts, meanwhile, are not amortized like home mortgages, which offer customers a set schedule to pay off their loans. Critics say this practice creates a debt trap — which is profitable for companies and bad for consumers like Ball.

TMX Finance did not respond to repeated requests for comment on a detailed list of questions about the company’s operations.

“Privately there is not a legislator in Georgia who doesn’t feel like it is a scourge on our state, but publicly there aren’t many willing to take on” the title-lending industry, said Liz Coyle, the executive director of Georgia Watch, a consumer advocacy group that has pushed for regulatory reform for title lenders for roughly 15 years. “Their clout is too great, and political will is too weak.”

State Sen. Lester Jackson, a Black military veteran who represents Savannah, has voted against more regulation for his hometown company, arguing that title lenders fill a necessary gap for his constituents, given the lack of equity in the traditional banking sector.

“Banking deserts are real” in Georgia, said Jackson, a Democrat. “Sometimes, this is all that the community has.”

​​For customers like Ball, the power imbalance favoring TitleMax in Georgia feels like being caught in an undertow.

At age 71, Ball declared bankruptcy, seeking relief from his debt burden. Even then, TitleMax pursued him. The company threatened to repossess his car, sell it and keep the profit. It then went to court to assert its right to do so — and won.

Past the gilded dome of Savannah’s city hall and along the azalea-lined Johnson Square sits an unobtrusive two-story brick building from which privately held TMX Finance and its founder and sole shareholder Tracy Young run the nation’s largest title lender.

Unlike other Savannah-based corporations, TMX Finance and its biggest brand, TitleMax, keep a low profile. No corporate sign graces its headquarters. The company rarely sponsors local charity events. When TMX Finance needed money to expand its business operations, it turned to private investors rather than a public stock listing. When it’s sued, the company moves swiftly to seal documents that might reveal even its most mundane business details.

Young, a one-time pawn shop owner, relied on this impenetrable business culture as he built the company from two retail locations in Savannah and Columbus, Georgia, in 1998 into a national juggernaut. The company now operates in 16 states and has nearly 1,000 stores. In 2019, TMX Finance reported its most successful year ever, according to S&P, with revenue topping $900 million that year. (Revenue dropped to $753 million in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then to $712 million in 2021, after the company closed operations in three states after regulations there were tightened.)

Georgia has emerged as a critical profit center for TitleMax, with some stores making more than $1 million in gross revenue per year, according to tax documents and former store managers who requested anonymity to speak about internal company procedures. That’s despite Georgia’s history as a vanguard against some parts of the fringe financial services industry.

In 2004, Georgia lawmakers cracked down on payday lending, an industry that offered triple-digit-interest loans to people in need of cash in between paychecks. They closed loopholes that had allowed the industry to evade long-standing usury laws in the state and made offering payday loans a felony. The lawmakers — many of them proud churchgoers — considered such loans to be both unchristian and unfair, according to Chuck Hufstetler, a Republican state senator who has voted for more regulation for title lenders.

The Georgia Department of Banking and Finance regulates and licenses other subprime lenders that offer loans to customers considered high risk. For instance, the 166 installment lenders working in the state are subject to Georgia’s usury cap of 60% annually, including interest and fees.

Yet lawmakers in Atlanta also passed a law that allowed the burgeoning title-lending industry to operate outside these regulations. Since then, TitleMax and at least 90 other title-lending companies in Georgia have operated under state pawn shop statutes, rather than financial or banking laws.

The bar to open a title-lending business in Georgia is low. A company must apply for a pawn shop license for their employees from the local government in the city or county where they work. With that in place, “title pawn” stores can offer customers a 30-day contract at an interest rate up to 25%. State law allows these contracts to be renewed for an additional two months at that same monthly interest rate. After that, additional renewals have a lower interest cap of 12.5% per month, but that combined rate — up to 187.5% annually — is still far above the usury caps for other types of lenders in Georgia. Title lenders have no obligation to assess customers’ credit or their ability to repay what they borrow or to report the number of title pawns issued to state regulators.

Only a few states offer similarly permissive operating landscapes for title lenders. Alabama, the only other state where the industry works under pawn shop statutes, allows title pawns with up to 300% annual percentage rates. Texas also permits triple-digit rates, with no caps on the total amount of title loans or their fees.

At least 20 states have laws that cap interest rates at 36% or less per year for title lenders — or 3% per month. Several other states have set loan terms for fixed periods or require the principal to be paid down as a condition of renewal, which limits customer costs of borrowing and title lenders’ maximum profit.

The increased regulations coincide with a growing body of evidence about the harm that subprime lenders like title-lending companies have on local communities and economies.

Illinois’s path to regulating the industry is instructive. In 2012, when TMX Finance executives identified the state as a growth market, regulators were already putting into place rules that mandated reporting from subprime lenders like title-lending companies working in the state.

In 2020, Illinois church groups and state lawmakers reviewed nearly a decade’s worth of data and became alarmed. High interest rates and fees charged by title lenders were exacerbating pockets of poverty, especially in minority neighborhoods, according to Brent Adams, the then-state official who helped devise the reporting regulations. Individual families were more indebted, and fees they paid were largely going to out-of-state lenders, leaving less money to be spent in local businesses. Moreover, customers who couldn’t keep up with their payments to title lenders would lose a working family’s most important asset: their vehicle. Without a car, a parent could be unable to hold down a job or get children to doctors or school, he said.

“It is difficult to craft a data argument for these products. Practically everyone you talk to pays three times the amount of the loan to get out of a title loan,” said Adams, who is now senior vice-president for policy and communications for the Woodstock Institute, an Illinois-based economic think tank. “Some people will say they had a good experience, but the percentage of people who report an abusive relationship with title lenders is so much higher. The disparities are extreme.”

In early 2021, the Illinois legislature passed a 36% interest rate cap, dismissing arguments from TitleMax and its industry that such a move would put them out of business. That year, TMX Finance stopped making new loans in the state. Virginia and California passed similar interest rate caps, moves that led TitleMax to close operations in those states as well, according to state officials and the company’s website.

A similar attempt in Georgia in 2020 died after TMX Finance’s then-chief legal officer testified at a state senate committee hearing that TitleMax needed to charge high interest rates given the risk profile of its customers. State senators did not press the company for more detail, nor did any senator offer up dissenting data.

Over the last 16 years, at least five attempts in Georgia to pass legislation regulating interest rates charged by title lenders or reclassify them under financial lending rules have wilted under industry pushback. TitleMax, for one, says strict interest rate caps would endanger the approximately 700 jobs the company provides to Georgians.

Tameka Rivers, a middle-aged Black woman who lives in east Savannah, has been paying off a TitleMax pawn for more than two years. Rivers said she was desperate for $2,000 back in 2019 to help her adult daughter, who was expecting a baby and needed a place to live. A single mother working two jobs to provide for an extended family, Jones didn’t have savings to help provide her daughter with a security deposit for her apartment lease. She also didn’t have relatives she could rely on for help.

Rivers remembered hearing TitleMax’s signature advertisement on the radio: “Get your title back with TitleMax,” goes the catchy jingle. That was enough for her to drive over to the TitleMax store on Skidaway Road, a mile from Georgia’s oldest historically Black university, to see if they could help.

“It seemed straightforward enough at the time,” Rivers said. “They didn’t ask me a lot of questions about my life, and, boy, we needed the cash.”

Consumer advocates in Georgia have long argued that struggling families like Rivers’ deserve better financial options than the one TitleMax and its industry offer. Yet revealing the scope of the impact title lenders have on these families is challenging because of the lack of public data on the industry.

The Current and ProPublica identified roughly 500 title pawn stores, which span the majority of Georgia’s 159 counties, including at least a dozen locations in Atlanta and Savannah, as well as in rural areas in and around Ellijay and Vidalia.

Georgia does not officially track the number of title pawns issued by these stores. The analysis of the records of vehicle liens placed by these companies reveals new title pawns for roughly 75,000 vehicles per year since mid-2019, when the state implemented a new system for tracking vehicle ownership information. That figure is likely an underestimate of the total number of title pawns, since the analysis does not include repeat customers.

The industry is thriving at a time when the number of traditional banking locations in Georgia has declined by 22% in the last decade, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. A 2021 FDIC survey found that 6.7% of Georgians lack bank accounts. That statistic is roughly twice as high — 13.3% — for Black households.

Title lenders are disproportionately located in communities of color and low-income areas, according to an analysis by The Current and ProPublica. Roughly three-quarters are in ZIP codes with incomes below the state’s median income.

But the industry’s impact on these communities isn’t captured fully by where they have storefronts. Equally crucial is how many months customers continue to pay, according to current and former industry officials.

Back in 2009, then-TMX Finance President John Robinson explained to the company’s creditors that repeat customer fee payments were the crux of TitleMax’s business plan. We “recover in excess of 100% of the face value of the Customer Loans,” he wrote in an affidavit. “The average thirty (30) day loan is typically renewed approximately eight (8) times, providing significant additional interest payments.”

Rivers told The Current and ProPublica that she wasn’t offered a formula describing how she would pay off her pawn. Instead, she said, the store manager emphasized the relatively low monthly payments of $249. Rivers said she doesn’t recall anyone explaining the difference between a payment that covered interest and one that included paying down her principal. After the manager talked through the monthly payment, she signed a contract on the store’s digital tablet. She had access to her data via a company app, which also allowed her to make payments electronically. But she rarely used the app and generally paid her monthly payments in cash.

Ten months later, after Rivers had paid TitleMax more than the $2,000 she had borrowed, Rivers talked to the manager who had set up her contract. That’s when she realized that she had only been paying interest and still owed the original pawn amount.

When Rivers complained about feeling deceived and asked for help working out a repayment plan to get out of debt, TitleMax wasn’t willing to help, she said.

District directors have the authority to rewrite contracts, but rarely do, according to two former managers who worked in Savannah and Columbus and who requested anonymity to speak about internal company procedures.

In October, Rivers’ daughter went to the hospital for a cesarean section, and now Rivers is helping care for a newborn, as well as four other grandchildren, while trying to juggle vocational school courses. She doesn’t know where she’s going to scrape together money to get rid of the TitleMax debt, she said.

Consumers who feel taken advantage of by title lenders in Georgia have a very narrow avenue for pursuing their complaints.

The CFPB, the federal agency created to protect consumers from big financial organizations in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, launched its investigation into TMX Finance, in part, due to consumer complaints amassed by Georgia Watch, the state’s most prominent consumer advocate. The company denied any wrongdoing, but the CFPB ruled in 2016 that it had deceived customers in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee by masking the true cost of title loans. This did not impact individual cases, however, and the company’s $9 million fine was not paid out as restitution for individuals, instead going into an agency-controlled fund.

At the state level, the website for the Consumer Protection Division of the Georgia Attorney General’s Office has a whole page devoted to title pawns — but it is not directly linked from its homepage.

On that page, the agency categorizes title lenders as a fringe banking product similar to a “payday loan,” a product illegal in Georgia. It recommends that Georgians in need of emergency finance consider multiple alternatives, such as asking a relative for money or approaching a credit union, before turning to subprime financial products like title pawns.

For those who don’t find alternatives, the agency’s website offers straightforward guidance: If customers think their title lender violated the law, they “should notify the local criminal authorities for the city or county in which the title pawn company is doing business.”

Outside of metro Atlanta, few law enforcement bodies across Georgia’s 159 counties have robust white-collar or financial crime department or an investigator specialized in such crimes. LaGrange Police Chief Louis Dekmar, who has led the northwest Georgia department for nearly 30 years, said he doesn’t know of any local district attorneys who have filed charges against title lenders. The probability of that happening is slim, according to Dekmar and two other veteran Georgia police officials. Title pawn customers who may be victims “generally don’t know how to report something like that,” said Dekmar, a former president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Meanwhile, the state attorney general’s office has not investigated TitleMax, despite the CFPB findings of abusive practices and that agency’s ongoing investigation, according to an official in the office.

The attorney general’s office has taken action against two other title lenders. In 2017, it settled with a TitleMax rival, Tennessee-based First American Title Lending of Georgia, for more than $220,000 to resolve allegations that the company had threatened individuals who were delinquent in repayments with criminal arrest warrants and by marketing its products as “loans” instead of “pawn transactions.” In the settlement, First American admitted no wrongdoing.

In 2018, the attorney general’s office reached a settlement with Georgia-based title-lending company Complete Cash Holdings and its owner Kent Popham, who agreed to pay a total of $35,000 “in response to allegations that it engaged in unlawful practices” against customers who had defaulted on their title pawn contracts. The company earlier denied wrongdoing.

“Consumers who seek out title pawns are already in financial straits,” Attorney General Chris Carr said in a press statement at the time. “Our office is committed to protecting vulnerable consumers from companies that try to take advantage of them through illegal actions.”

On other occasions, however, Carr’s office did not act. For instance, a testy five-year civil lawsuit in Fulton County Superior Court between TitleMax and subsidiaries of Alpharetta-based Select Management Resources surfaced a number of allegations of illegal behavior, including bribery and stealing customer information. TitleMax denied the allegations, and the two sides ultimately settled and moved to dismiss all allegations with prejudice in 2019. Kara Richardson, a spokesperson for the attorney general, said her office was aware of the case but declined to comment on specific allegations against those two companies.

Coyle, the head of Georgia Watch, said she’s disappointed that weak consumer laws tie prosecutors’ hands. “Municipalities can only do so much,” she said, referring to what she calls abusive behavior by the title-lending industry.

Sitting at his tidy ranch house in a leafy neighborhood in south Savannah, Robert Ball has a difficult time describing just how shocking it was when he realized in the summer of 2019 the extent of his debt with TitleMax.

Ball had become his wife’s full-time caregiver. Gloria was frail and barely had energy to get out of bed. Doctors had told him she had little time left. His sorrow was compounded by a second fear. Amid their increased medical bills, Robert had fallen behind on their mortgage payments. “When I was coming up, there were not a lot of Black folks who owned their home. If you have that roof, that is a sacred thing,” he said. “I was facing the loss of my wife. No way I could handle losing our home as well.”

On July 1, 2019, before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, Ball went to the TitleMax store on Abercorn Street to make his usual monthly payment. He asked the manager he had dealt with for two years just how much more was left on his debt. The manager looked up his account on her computer screen and delivered the crushing news.

Ball’s principal remained at $9,516 — just $2 less than the original amount of his pawn, according to court documents.

It had never occurred to Ball that his dedicated monthly payments weren’t paying down his principal. He assumed that, like a bank loan, if he paid what TitleMax told him to, he would eventually pay off the debt.

“It was a terrible feeling. I mean, I worked my whole life, for 38 years. I thought we were going to enjoy our retirement together. Instead, we were facing this kind of catastrophe. It’s a shameful situation for people like us — to be in debt,” Ball recalled.

He argued with the manager, but that didn’t change the ledger on her computer screen.

Ball didn’t know how to get his financial affairs in order, all while tending to his dying wife. He then got some unsolicited advice from a friend: Declare bankruptcy and try to get into a debt repayment plan. In Georgia, individuals who file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy work through a federal trustee to create a court-approved plan to repay creditors, often at steeply reduced rates. This was a solution, his friend advised, to keep the family house safe.

Ball, who spent his life as a medical tech delivering blood for the Red Cross, swallowed his pride and did it.

But the U.S. trustee appointed to Ball’s case had some more unwelcome news. His TitleMax pawn couldn’t be wrapped into a settlement with creditors. The company had status as a secured creditor due to Georgia’s pawn statutes, and would have to be paid back first and at the original terms of the title pawn.

Lorena Saedi, a bankruptcy lawyer and managing partner of Saedi Law Group in Atlanta, said stories like Ball’s are not unusual. At least once a week, she sees clients who are struggling with debt traps set by title lenders, and around a third of her bankruptcy cases include title lenders.

“There is no recourse. Title lenders operate a business that, while obviously immoral, is entirely legal in Georgia. It’s a terrible place to be powerless, poor or just down on your luck,” Saedi said.

Six months after Robert Ball filed for bankruptcy, Gloria died. Ball eventually paid off TitleMax.

Now, the 75-year-old spends his time trying not to drown in bitterness. Spending time with his daughter and grandchildren helps. Yet as he crawls out of the seven-year credit shadow caused by his bankruptcy, Ball prays that his old car doesn’t break down, and that he doesn’t need any expensive medical help himself.

“I have no safety net. I only have Jesus,” Ball said.

After jetting into the capital of Ghana, the international arms broker who called himself “Excellence” greeted his buyers at the Golden Tulip hotel and proposed a secret sale: millions of dollars in missiles and grenades for use against American forces.

“Who else knows I’m with Hezbollah?” Faouzi Jaber asked as night fell on the four-star hotel with a life-sized sculpture of a giraffe in the lobby.

Jaber, who was representing a top operative for the Iran-backed terrorist organization, offered to sweeten the deal. He would help the buyers secure coveted positions as special diplomats — known as honorary consuls — who can travel easily through airports and transport their bags without law enforcement scrutiny.

“I will make you a consul in your country,” Jaber said. “All of your friends will be consuls because when we travel —”

His associate cut in: “You’ll have a diplomatic pass.”

Jaber’s covert offer in the fall of 2012, recorded by federal investigators, promised protection through a little-known international program that gives countries large and small the ability to enlist private citizens to serve as volunteer diplomats around the world.

Founded centuries ago, the honorary consul system was meant as a lifeline for countries unable to afford foreign embassies but has since broadened into a mainstay of international relations, embraced by a majority of the world’s governments.

Unlike ambassadors and other professional emissaries, consuls work from their home countries, drawing on connections and clout to promote the interests of the foreign governments that appoint them. In exchange, consuls gain entry into the lofty world of diplomacy and receive some of the same protections and perks provided to career diplomats.

Under an international treaty, their archives and correspondence cannot be seized. Their consular “pouches” — bags, boxes and shipping containers of any weight and size — are protected from searches. The title and swag, which can include special identity cards, passports and license plates, open doors in industry and politics.

But corrupt, violent and dangerous appointees, including those accused of aiding terrorist regimes, have turned a system meant to leverage the generosity of honorable citizens into a perilous form of rogue diplomacy that threatens the rule of law around the world.

A first-of-its-kind global investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists identified at least 500 current and former honorary consuls who have been accused of crimes or embroiled in controversy. Some were convicted of serious offenses or caught exploiting their status for personal gain; others drew criticism for their support of authoritarian regimes.

These numbers are almost certainly an undercount — no international agency tracks honorary consuls, and dozens of governments don’t publicly release their names.

ProPublica and ICIJ found that convicted drug traffickers, murderers, sex offenders and fraudsters have served as honorary consuls. So have weapons dealers and those who have advanced the interests of North Korea, Syria and other corrupt governments.

Thirty honorary consuls have been sanctioned by the United States and other governments, including 17 who were designated while they held their posts. Some were members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle blacklisted after Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year.

Nine current and former honorary consuls identified by ProPublica and ICIJ have been linked to terrorist groups by law enforcement and governments. Most were tied to Hezbollah, a political party, social services provider and militant group in Lebanon designated by the United States and other countries as a terrorist organization.

Hezbollah’s attacks in Israel, Argentina, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere have wounded and killed hundreds, including 241 U.S. Marines, sailors and soldiers who perished during a 1983 peacekeeping mission in Beirut when a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into their barracks. Earlier this year, a Hezbollah operative was convicted in New York for receiving weapons and bomb-making training from the organization and casing targets for future attacks, including the Statue of Liberty and Times Square.

Former U.S. officials who have investigated Hezbollah’s financial network said the use of honorary consul status by the terrorist group is intentional, well organized and woefully unexamined. In March, the Treasury Department sanctioned a prominent businessman in Guinea, accusing him of funneling money to Hezbollah and using his honorary consul status to move in and out of the country with little scrutiny.

“Hezbollah has realized that if they use these honorary consuls … they can basically move stuff with impunity and no one is ever going to bust them — you flash your diplomatic passport, no questions asked,” said David Asher, a former senior counterterrorism finance adviser for the Department of Defense assigned in 2008 to help oversee a federal investigation of Hezbollah’s criminal network. “It’s a huge seam in our international law enforcement capabilities sweep.”

To identify terrorist operatives and other honorary consuls accused of wrongdoing, ProPublica and ICIJ reviewed court records, government and public policy reports and news archives from six continents. Reporters from more than 50 international media organizations and student journalists from Northwestern University also probed cases.

Some of the identified consuls were accused of wrongdoing previously and named to their diplomatic posts anyway. The majority of the consuls drew scrutiny while they held their positions.

In North Macedonia, intelligence officials found that two consuls allowed their offices to be used as a base for a Russian propaganda operation aimed at limiting the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In Myanmar, a consul sanctioned by the U.S. and other governments reportedly used his connections to help supply weapons to the brutal military junta during its genocidal campaign against ethnic minorities.

The consuls in North Macedonia have denied wrongdoing; the consul in Myanmar could not be reached for comment.

Once accused, some consuls have tried and sometimes successfully dodged criminal inquiries through bogus assertions of sweeping legal immunity that have confused or obstructed police and prosecutors.

The lawlessness and claims of impunity have largely been met with silence: Few governments have publicly called to put safeguards in place, despite warnings from law enforcement and others.

“Consuls act completely autonomously and are not controlled by the State they represent. … The Spanish government has no chance of intervening in their affairs,” investigators in Spain wrote in a confidential 2019 report about three honorary consuls under investigation for laundering money for a suspected drug trafficker.

The handful of governments that have stepped in to review the honorary consul system, including those in Canada, Bolivia, Costa Rica and Montenegro, have reported lapses in oversight or dangerous breakdowns. Liberia once dismissed nearly all of its honorary consuls, citing reports of criminal activity.

After reporters raised questions, Germany and Austria dismissed a consul in Brazil. Another in Switzerland announced his resignation.

Thousands of honorary consuls remain active around the world, though there is no reliable count or any way to determine how often they break laws or abuse their privileges.

Retired Drug Enforcement Administration supervisory special agent Jack Kelly, who helped bring Jaber to justice, worries that dangerous consuls go undetected.

“What people actually do with that diplomatic immunity,” Kelly said, “most of the time we’ll never really know.”

A System to Empower and Protect

Honorary consuls date back at least to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when Greece, China, India and countries in the Middle East appointed volunteer foreign liaisons to expand commerce. The arrangement caught on around the world.

In the United States, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the late 1700s referenced the use of consuls — one in London was tasked with intelligence gathering, records and studies show.

The U.S. government, however, stopped appointing its own honorary consuls overseas in 1924, opting to rely exclusively on career diplomats. It was a prescient move: Three years later, an international panel warned that awarding special advantages to private citizens enabled them to compete on an “unfair basis” with business rivals.

Honorary consuls, the panel said, should “no longer exist,” adding that most “are far busier with their personal affairs than with those of the country which has conferred the title upon them.”

Concerns about exploitation mounted, according to hundreds of pages of notes and documents from the United Nations archives. In 1960, an expert on the subject appointed by the United Nations warned that honorary consuls were not subject to disciplinary controls in the same way that career diplomats were.

Still, when dozens of governments gathered a few years later in Vienna, they enshrined in international law a valuable set of benefits that included few protocols for oversight.

Under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, honorary consuls were guaranteed the “freedom of movement and travel” in the countries where they served. They could communicate without restraint, their consulate records and correspondence protected from searches and their offices protected from “any intrusion … or impairment of … dignity.”

Consuls received legal immunity in matters involving their work. Though immunity was not extended to unrelated offenses, the treaty stipulated that honorary consuls would be entitled to criminal proceedings “with the minimum of delay” and “the respect due … by reason of his official position.”

Some countries, troubled in part by the secrecy rules for consular pouches — which can be moved by plane, train, car, ship or courier — insisted they would not protect them. Other countries have opted out altogether, declining to appoint or receive consuls.

But diplomacy is a delicate affair: Restricting another country’s representatives, volunteer or otherwise, can produce a reciprocal response. The vast majority of countries have signed on, and though some apply privileges and immunities differently in practice, the overarching rules have remained unchanged in the nearly six decades since.

Honorary consuls say they do valuable work for little or no pay and want to rid the system of abuse.

“Does it worry me? Absolutely it does,” said Louis J. Vella, who represents Malta in California and oversees a national association of foreign and honorary consuls in the United States. Vella has greeted visiting dignitaries and supported Malta’s Special Olympics team when it competed in Los Angeles.

“If you have a bucket of nice Granny apples and you put in a bad one, the Granny apples are going to be very upset,” he said. “It’s very bad because of the tainted image that it will give to everyone else. The greatest majority of honorary consuls do honorable work.”

Last year, the U.S. State Department pressed states to stop issuing vanity license plates to honorary consuls to prevent “further fraud or abuse.” The department pushed back, however, when members of Congress years ago cited terrorism concerns and recommended reviewing the use of diplomatic bags.

The worry among those who have long questioned the honorary consul system is that countries anywhere in the world can put a diplomatic shield around private individuals thousands of miles away simply by naming them consuls.

The title has become so coveted that an industry of online consultants emerged, promising to help deliver honorary consul appointments for tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

“Travel through diplomatic channels as a VIP-person, often with visas,” one international company, Elma Global, boasts online, saying that perks can include no “annoying customs checks” and “unlimited entry and exit privileges.”

“It’s just amazing that you can become the honorary consul tomorrow, if you want to and you’re willing to pay the money,” said Bob Jarvis, an international and constitutional law professor at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University, who has argued for overhauling the system for almost 40 years. “People buy these things or get them as a reward for supporting a political candidate, and people have no idea what they are supposed to be doing. And no one is busy checking them out.”

Elma Global said in a statement that it does not guarantee honorary consul appointments, adding, “We know that there is much scam on the Internet regarding the honorary consul or diplomatic appointments but we are very far from that.”

Around the world, media outlets and governments have occasionally described isolated incidents of wrongdoing among consuls. ProPublica and ICIJ compiled the most comprehensive accounting to date, including consuls identified in criminal or civil cases that have never been publicly reported.

The investigation, which included cases of consuls scrutinized individually or through their affiliated companies, also drew on findings from human rights groups, the United Nations, anti-corruption watchdogs and media organizations. ProPublica and ICIJ were able to identify 57 consuls who were criminally convicted while holding their positions.

The reporting not only showed how frequently the volunteer diplomats get into trouble but also how widely they have exploited their status.

Consuls have invoked diplomatic credentials to avoid searches and arrests — even to avoid tax bills and parking fines. They have stood accused of hiding cash and contraband in their offices and pouches.

One former consul in Egypt was convicted of attempting to smuggle more than 21,000 antiquities out of the country in a diplomatic container, including mummy masks and a wooden sarcophagus, a coffin used by ancient civilizations to honor their dead. Ladislav Otakar Skakal, who was sentenced in absentia to prison, could not be reached for comment.

The use of the system by terrorist financiers and supporters, experts say, is most alarming, threatening the United States and its allies.

“This honorary consul thing — that’s the theme,” said former DEA supervisor Kelly, who spent a decade investigating Hezbollah until his retirement in 2016. “It shows a real organized approach to how you’re conducting your activity in Africa and probably around the world.”

“You Are the Consul Official”

Kelly knew very little about honorary consuls in late 2008, when numbers on a cellphone being tracked by the U.S. government led him to an elusive Lebanese businessman who would quickly become a top DEA target.

Kelly was helping to lead a federal operation known as Project Cassandra, established to dismantle Hezbollah’s sprawling criminal empire. From a cubicle in a secret government facility in Chantilly, Virginia, Kelly had studied contacts on a phone used by a Hezbollah envoy suspected of helping to advance Iran’s secret nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Kelly eventually settled on a single phone number in Lebanon.

The number was for Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi.

“‘Hey, I got this guy. He’s got to be incredibly significant,'” Kelly recalled telling Asher, the Department of Defense adviser who was also overseeing Project Cassandra.

Kelly and Asher suspected that Bazzi was a top Hezbollah financier closely affiliated with the Iranian regime who was laundering illicit money through his companies in Lebanon and Africa.

In Gambia, Bazzi was a petroleum importer and associate of then-President Yahya Jammeh, a former military officer accused by a Gambian government panel of kidnappings, rape, murder and torture. Jammeh has denied wrongdoing.

Kelly and his colleagues were focused on Bazzi’s alleged criminal activities but eventually discovered that Bazzi was an honorary consul, appointed by the government of Gambia in 2005.

Bazzi presented himself as a consul in 2017 when he stood before the Gambian government panel, accused of paying bribes to Jammeh and contributing to what officials called the “near ruin” of the country. Gambian officials said that Bazzi’s honorary consul status had been revoked several months earlier.

“He had no respect for Gambians or Gambian institutions,” authorities concluded in a final report. “In his quest for wealth, he focused only on profits mostly unlawfully obtained.”

That same year, Bazzi sought to install his son as a consul because he could “exert his influence” over him, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Though Bazzi was never criminally prosecuted in the United States, he was designated a Hezbollah financier and sanctioned in 2018. His son was sanctioned one year later for allegedly working on his father’s behalf.

An attorney for Bazzi declined to respond to questions. Bazzi’s son, Wael, could not be reached for comment. In 2019, the men separately sued the U.S. government, seeking to overturn the U.S. sanctions. In court records, the elder Bazzi said the government exaggerated transactions and events that had occurred years earlier and failed to provide evidence that he financed Hezbollah.

Bazzi said that one of his duties as honorary consul was to “strengthen foreign investment ties between Lebanon and The Gambia” and that he ended his relationship with Jammeh in 2016 after a series of threats. He also said he had previously agreed to work as an informant for the U.S. government and was told that he would not be sanctioned.

In 2020, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit brought by Bazzi’s son. Last year, Bazzi settled his own lawsuit with the U.S. government. Bazzi and his son remain under sanctions, and the State Department is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information on Mohammad Bazzi and others that leads to disruption of Hezbollah’s financial network.

As Project Cassandra pushed forward, honorary consul status emerged again — this time during the operation that netted Jaber, the Hezbollah-affiliated arms broker who met with buyers at the hotel in Ghana in 2012.

The buyers were DEA informants posing as representatives of an internationally known guerrilla group in Colombia seeking to overthrow the government and strike at the U.S. forces stationed in the country.

“We fight against Americans … they are invading my country,” one informant told Jaber, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by ProPublica and ICIJ and described in a subsequent indictment. “What we need exactly … is a good person that can provide us with weapons.”

“Hezbollah sells,” Jaber said. “… What kind of weapons?”

“You know, M14, M16?” the informant said, referring to rifles. “Grenades, pistols, rifles.”

“Explosives,” Jaber said. “Dynamite and stuff … pow, pow, pow, pow.”

For protection, Jaber offered consulships, saying, “All the high people, all the rich people, [are] all consular.”

“The best is Africa,” Jaber said, adding that “many European white men work as [consuls]” from their home countries when there are no embassies nearby.

At a second meeting with buyers three months later, Jaber said: “We go to any country in Africa. We make you consul of Equatorial Guinea [or] Guinea-Bissau. … You pay 200,000 dollar[s]. You are the consul official of the country. And you have other passport.”

In 2014, Kelly flew to Prague, where another meeting had been planned, to ensure that Jaber, associate Khaled el-Merebi, as well as the DEA’s top target, Lebanese-born arms dealer Ali Fayad, were taken into custody. Fayad and Merebi were later released by the Czech government, reportedly in exchange for five Czech nationals kidnapped in Lebanon.

Jaber, who had promised to supply surface-to-air missiles, assault rifles and grenades, move and store cocaine in West Africa, and launder the proceeds through bank accounts in New York, was extradited to the United States. He pleaded guilty in 2017 to conspiring to support the Colombian terrorist group and was sentenced to prison.

At the hearing, he pleaded for his freedom, saying he was under the influence of drugs at the time and made a “once-in-a-lifetime mistake.”

“I admit that I committed a crime, but I didn’t do it thoughtfully,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was eager to commit that crime. … I’m asking forgiveness from you and from the American nation and from the U.S. government. I do love the American people.”

In an interview from federal prison in West Virginia, Jaber acknowledged offering honorary consul posts but said the U.S. government doctored the transcripts of meetings to “entrap” him. He added that he opposes Hezbollah.

“Honorary consuls, I know how they work, I know how they are created,” he said. “Honorary consuls move drugs, money. I know many honorary consuls who get up to all kinds of foolishness.”

Quest for Justice

As the agents of Project Cassandra hunted Hezbollah’s arms and drug traffickers, New Jersey attorney Gary Osen was immersed in accounts of Hezbollah’s deadly campaign against U.S. service members in Iraq.

Osen and his legal team gathered death records, studied battlefield forensic reports and interviewed the families of fallen soldiers. The research turned up references to honorary consuls who had been linked to Hezbollah’s finance networks.

“Everybody who is a big shot in that world is an honorary consul,” he said. “It is not necessary to their operation. But it is a further lubricant.”

In 2019, Osen filed a lawsuit on behalf of more than 1,000 Americans, including members of the military killed or wounded in Iraq by roadside bombs and other weapons that the complaint links to Iran and Hezbollah.

The active case in federal court in New York accuses 13 Lebanese banks of violating anti-terrorism laws by knowingly managing and moving money for Hezbollah during the deadly attacks, including one that killed U.S. Army Capt. Shawn English while he was riding in a Humvee outside of Baghdad in 2006. The father of three had been nearing the end of a 10-month deployment in Iraq.

“Is something wrong with Dad?” 7-year-old Nathan English had asked after saluting the two Army officers who arrived at the family’s Florida home to break the news.

The complaint alleges the banks provided “extensive and sustained material support, including financial services, to Hezbollah … and its operatives, and facilitators,” as well as “vital access to the United States financial system.”

The banks have denied wrongdoing, saying in court documents that they “categorically abhor terrorism and all unjustified acts of violence. But they are not legally or factually responsible for plaintiffs’ battlefield injuries.” The banks also said the complaint did not identify transactions for anyone connected to Hezbollah.

Fransabank in Beirut, one of the lenders named as a defendant in the lawsuit, was acquired by Adnan Kassar and his brother, Adel, who has served as the bank’s deputy chairman and CEO and has been Hungary’s honorary consul in Lebanon since at least 2002, records show.

Bazzi, the sanctioned former honorary consul for Gambia in Lebanon, held an account at Fransabank and another Lebanese bank named in the case, according to Osen’s complaint.

“It’s dirty money. At what cost? How many lives?” said retired Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bartlett, a plaintiff in the case.

Like English, according to court documents, Bartlett and his convoy in Iraq were struck by a particularly lethal variation of a roadside bomb known as an explosively formed penetrator, or EFP.

The bomb in 2005 cut through the door of Bartlett’s Humvee, shearing his face from temple to jaw as smoke choked the vehicle and diesel spilled to the ground. The staff sergeant next to him was decapitated and the gunner between them would lose his legs. Bartlett, 31 at the time, has since had 40 medical procedures, including 12 major surgeries, and managed to regain some function in his face, body and hands.

“The devil wanted me dead,” he said.

The Kassar brothers and Fransabank did not respond to requests for comment.

A Power Center for Consuls

In Lebanon, where Hezbollah operates as a major political party, a provider of popular public services and a feared militia force, honorary consul titles are widely considered a sign of status.

“It’s something like lordships in the British system,” said Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “If you have a connection to another sovereign state, whether you know the president or someone in his entourage, you get this honorary consul title. It’s one Lebanese way of saying, ‘I’m important.'”

One writer for a Hezbollah-affiliated newspaper in 2015 quipped in a column titled “The Homeland of the Consuls” that becoming a consul in Lebanon is secured first by “finding an independent island beyond an ocean that no one may have heard of. Second, discovering the most appropriate way to reach its king: a rare diamond, a Rolex watch, or tens of thousands of dollars a year.”

One of Lebanon’s honorary consuls is Ali Myree, nominated by South Sudan in 2019.

Born in Lebanon, Myree was living in Paraguay in 2000 when he was charged with pirating CDs, video games and software. Authorities suspected he was funneling some of the proceeds to Hezbollah, according to Paraguayan media reports.

During a police raid, authorities reportedly found film footage of terrorist attacks and interviews with suicide bombers.

Myree left Paraguay and eventually reemerged in South Sudan, where he became a prominent business leader in the long-troubled country. Myree struck a mining partnership with the president’s daughter and sent a series of payments to a general sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council and others for destabilizing the country, according to a 2021 report by The Sentry, a Washington, D.C.-based group that investigates the financing of armed conflict.

Myree was nominated to become the country’s honorary consul in 2019.

“Since the first day we had assumed this responsibility and trust,” Myree said during a celebration of the consulate’s opening in Beirut, where he posed with diplomats and a white cake that bore the flags of both countries.

Myree, who has noted that his motto in life is “the sky is the limit,” denied in a statement ever having a relationship with any terrorist organization. Myree said that piracy was common in Paraguay at the time of his arrest and that he “lacked guidance, education, legal exposure, and experience. … I am also not ashamed of my bad experience, and I do not ignore or hide it.”

He said he was named consul in South Sudan by the country’s president and that his relationships with all of his clients are “merely professional.” “I am proud of the son, husband, father, businessman and honorary consul I am today,” he added.

The Lebanese government did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did a spokesperson for Hezbollah or a local association of Lebanon’s honorary consuls, which published a list of consuls online that included Myree and Fransabank’s Adel Kassar.

That list also included a celebrated businessman in West Africa: Ali Saade.

“To Serve Guinea”

In the teeming African port of Conakry, shoeless men haul sacks of rice off the backs of flatbed trucks and stack them floor to ceiling in a cavernous depot owned by the Sonit Group, the company that made Saade one of Guinea’s richest men.

Saade, 80, was born in the impoverished nation on West Africa’s Atlantic coast, but his mother and wife are from Jwaya, one of a string of villages surrounded by olive and fig trees south of Beirut that has long been a power center for Hezbollah.

In Guinea in 1992, Saade opened Sonit after working in his father’s textile business. He settled into a pristine neighborhood several miles from the Conakry port, where women smoke sardines on abandoned oil drums and children play with crabs plucked from dirty water.

In 2006, Saade was named by the government of Guinea as its honorary consul in Lebanon, where Saade’s wife and daughter live.

Earlier this year, the U.S. government alleged that Saade and another prominent businessman in Guinea, Ibrahim Taher, were key Hezbollah financiers. The government also noted that Taher was an honorary consul for Lebanon in Cote d’Ivoire and used his status to travel in and out of Guinea with “minimal scrutiny.”

Saade stands accused of initiating money transfers from Guinea to Hezbollah and providing “unrestricted access” to the highest levels of the Guinean government for Kassim Tajideen, who was sanctioned by the United States in 2009 for financing Hezbollah. Tajideen was later imprisoned in Maryland for violating the sanction by helping to move more than $1 billion through the U.S. financial system. In 2020, he was released and sent back to Lebanon. He could not be reached for comment.

The U.S. government also alleged that Saade, Taher and others traveled in 2020 to Lebanon on a special flight with a “large amount of money” that the group claimed was for COVID-19 relief. The coronavirus had been used before as a cover for transferring funds from Guinea to Hezbollah, authorities said.

Both men were sanctioned in March.

After the sanctions, prosecutors in Guinea launched a criminal investigation.

In an interview, Saade said he acted in his capacity as honorary consul when he connected Tajideen to Guinea’s former president.

“‘Listen, Ali, as honorary consul you should do something to encourage investment,'” Saade recalled the former president saying.

Saade said he did not know that the U.S. had sanctioned Tajideen. In a statement, Saade added that he carried only $800 when he flew to Lebanon with Taher and others in 2020. “I never gave or transferred one dollar to Hezbollah,” Saade said.

Taher, 59, did not respond to requests for comment. He has previously denied the allegations, saying in a statement that he has no connection to Hezbollah and has “never used any illegal means to transfer funds out of Guinea.” He also said he has never been an honorary consul.

In July, an appeals court judge in Guinea closed the criminal investigation, saying there was no evidence of terrorism financing. The judge also pointed to a Guinean government investigation showing that Taher was not an honorary consul.

Guinean authorities have appealed the court’s ruling, according to an official.

Saade said that the Guinean government suspended his honorary consul status after the U.S. sanction but that he’s not concerned about what comes next. He said he met with Guinea’s new president shortly after the sanctions were announced.

“He reassured me that there will be no acts of injustice,” Saade said. “I acted as a consul to serve Guinea. It’s to help the country.”