In 2023, Robert Fico became Prime Minister of Slovakia for the fourth time. He had previously been forced from office after journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were brutally murdered — an assassination for which Marian Kočner, a man who called Fico his "boss," faces trial to this day. Before that trial even began, Slovak journalists received an unexpected gift: a leak of the entire investigative file — more than 70 terabytes of data, much of it seized from the villas of Marian Kočner, a man notorious for collecting compromising material on the rich and powerful. What journalists uncovered from that trove revealed not only the character of the man charged with ordering a journalist's murder, but the character of the system that had flourished beneath him. Slovakia was a captured state. These are the stories from that captured state.