‘It’s not black and white’: is Carlos Ghosn a victim or a villain?

A new four-part Apple TV+ docu-series charts the rise and fall of former Nissan and Renault boss turned disgraced international fugitive

It has been said in newspapers, cable news and by the wanted man himself: Carlos Ghosn’s story was made for the screen. The disgraced former Nissan and Renault boss’s escape from Japan while awaiting trial for alleged financial misconduct in December 2019 seemed like a sequence ripped from a Hollywood heist film – a meticulously arranged plot involving an audio equipment box, a private jet and a close call with Japanese airport security. Its success was an embarrassment for Japanese authorities and the subject of both international consternation and intrigue.

Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn, a new docuseries from Apple TV+, does indeed dramatize the plot (including Ghosn’s POV in the box, scrunched in the dark with holes poked for air) with commentary from Ghosn and his smugglers: Mike Taylor, a Massachusetts-based ex-Green Beret with ties to Lebanon and, to a lesser extent, his son Peter. (Both Taylors were later extradited and convicted in Japan, where they served nearly two years in solitary confinement, while Ghosn remained free in Lebanon, which has no extradition treaty; the tension from such reversed fates animates the final episode of the series.) But over four episodes, the Apple series, based on the book Boundless: The Rise, Fall and Escape of Carlos Ghosn by the Wall Street Journal reporters Nick Kostov and Sean McLain, also explores the vast, murky terrain of international megawealth, corporate intrigue and shady financial dealings. Ghosn, who has dismissed the charges in Japan as a conspiracy to prevent his merger of Nissan with Renault, still faces an arrest warrant from France alleging misuse of corporate funds and money laundering, among other financial crimes.

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