Cognac and Concrete: Inside the Secret World of North Korea's Super-Rich

The Party That Shouldn't Exist

In late September 2019, somewhere in the Pyongyang district of Ryongsong — the so-called "Residence Number One" belt where regime loyalists cluster behind walls you're not supposed to photograph — a birthday party was held for the teenage daughter of a senior Korean Workers' Party official. There were imported French pastries. A DJ from a state-approved entertainment unit played remixed K-pop that, technically speaking, could get anyone in that room sent to a political prison camp. And according to a domestic worker who later fled to South Korea and spoke to me through an interpreter in a small apartment in Suwon last March, there was a chocolate fountain. An actual chocolate fountain. "I had never seen anything like it," she told me. "I thought it was a machine for something else at first."

North Korea Untold

Her name — the name I'm using — is Jisun. She's 34 now. She spent six years working in the homes of three separate elite families in Pyongyang before managing to cross the Tumen River with help from a broker network that charged her family the equivalent of about $2,000 USD. That's not a small number. That's years of savings for most North Koreans. But she'd seen enough to know she needed to leave. And the more she talked, the more I understood why.

Who Actually Are These People?

Let me be clear about something that gets muddied in a lot of Western reporting: North Korea's wealthy elite isn't just Kim Jong Un's immediate circle. It's a layered, complicated ecosystem of privilege that radiates outward from the Supreme Leader like rings in water. At the very center, yes, you have the Paektu bloodline loyalists, the core of the Organisation and Guidance Department. But surrounding that? There are generals, party secretaries at the provincial level, trading company executives who operate in the grey spaces between state commerce and outright smuggling, and — this part surprised me when I first started hearing it consistently across multiple defector accounts — a growing class of what you might call entrepreneurial insiders. People who figured out how to make the donju system work for them.

Donju. It translates roughly as "masters of money." They emerged from the economic chaos of the Arduous March famines in the 1990s, when the state distribution system collapsed and people were left to survive however they could. Most starved. Some traded. And a few — connected enough, ruthless enough, or just lucky enough to be in the right position — got rich. Really rich. And over the past two decades, that wealth has quietly consolidated into something that looks, from the outside, almost like a bourgeoisie. Almost.

"They are not free," one analyst who works with South Korea's Database Center for North Korean Human Rights was careful to tell me. "Their wealth exists entirely at the pleasure of the regime. One wrong move, one accusation, one shift in factional winds, and it's gone. They know this. That's part of what makes their behavior so — " she paused, searching for the right word — "frantic, sometimes."

What They Have. What They Spend.

Let's talk about the stuff. Because it's genuinely staggering when you lay it out.

Multiple defectors who worked in elite households have independently described similar consumption patterns. Hennessy Paradis cognac — reportedly Kim Jong Il's favorite, a bottle of which runs around $1,000 USD — is apparently still very much present at high-level social gatherings. One former state trading company employee I spoke with, who asked not to be named, said he personally arranged the import of over 40 cases of foreign spirits through a Chinese intermediary company in Dandong in the summer of 2018 alone. "Nobody asks questions in Dandong," he said, almost laughing. "Everyone knows what's moving through there."

And it's not just alcohol. Jisun described the kitchen of one household — she wouldn't give me more identifying details than "a man who worked in the Central Committee apparatus" — where she saw Norwegian smoked salmon still in vacuum packaging with Norwegian text on the label. Australian beef. Japanese Wagyu, she thought, though she wasn't certain. There was a second refrigerator, she said, a large American-style one, used exclusively for beverages, and it was always full. Always.

The cars. God, the cars. North Korea officially has some of the worst roads in Asia and a near-total ban on private vehicle ownership for ordinary citizens. But Pyongyang's inner streets — especially around the Pyongchon and Moranbong districts — tell a different story. A researcher at Seoul's Institute for National Security Strategy showed me traffic surveillance footage, obtained through sources I'm not going to specify, from 2021. I counted four Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedans in about ninety seconds of footage on a single street. There was also what looked very much like a Porsche Cayenne. In Pyongyang. You can't buy a Porsche Cayenne in Pyongyang. And yet.

According to one defector — a man I'll call Yongchul, early 50s, former mid-level bureaucrat who defected via the northeastern border in early 2022 — the going price for a foreign luxury car among the elite is somewhere between $80,000 and $150,000 USD, paid in U.S. dollars or Chinese yuan, through networks that would make a money launderer blush. "People know who can get what," he told me. "It's not spoken about openly. But everyone knows."

The Pyongyang Nobody Photographs

I want to try to describe a physical reality that most people never see. The Pyongyang that gets photographed — wide boulevards, synchronized mass games, pastel apartment blocks — is a kind of theater. It's real, but it's the part that's meant to be seen. There's another Pyongyang, slightly set back from the main avenues, behind gates and inside compounds.

Several defectors who lived in or worked in these zones describe amenities that would seem completely at odds with the country's global image. Indoor swimming pools in private residences. Saunas. Home cinemas — and not showing state films, apparently. Jisun told me that in one home, she dusted a shelf of DVDs that included South Korean dramas and what she believed were American action films, based on the cover images she could see. This is, to be absolutely clear, the kind of thing that gets ordinary North Koreans sent to a labor camp. In this house, it was just sitting on a shelf.

One of the more remarkable accounts I've collected came from a woman — I'll call her Mirae — who worked as a private tutor for the children of an elite family in the early 2010s. The children were being taught English, Mandarin, and piano. The piano was a Yamaha. She remembers the brand because she'd never seen one before and asked about it. "I was told to forget I'd seen it," she said quietly. She's now in her late 40s, living in the UK, and has never spoken publicly about this before. She asked me not to publish her real name or her city of residence. I won't.

The Underground Economy That Funds All of This

Where does the money come from? That question haunted me through probably sixty separate conversations over the past four years. The answer is, predictably, ugly.

Some of it is straightforward state corruption — officials using their institutional positions to skim from state enterprises, redirect goods meant for public distribution, and extract bribes at every level of the bureaucracy. North Korea is, by every serious measure, one of the most corrupt states on earth. That corruption isn't a bug; it's a feature. It's how the system maintains loyalty. You let your loyalists steal. They know you could prosecute them at any time. So they stay loyal.

But there are other revenue streams. The UN Panel of Experts reports — which have become increasingly detailed, even if North Korea dismisses them as "hostile fabrications" — have documented the regime's use of cyber theft, coal and iron ore exports through ship-to-ship transfers in violation of sanctions, and the overseas labor program that sends North Korean workers to Russia, China, and parts of Africa and the Middle East, where their wages are largely confiscated by the state. That last one is particularly grim. Workers living in near-slave conditions, their earnings funneled back into a system that then spends some percentage of it on Wagyu beef and Porsche SUVs.

And then there are the trading networks. Yongchul, before he defected, worked adjacent to one. He was careful about how much he told me — there are family members still in North Korea, and I understand that — but he described a structure where elite-connected merchants operate quasi-legally through a maze of shell companies, trading in everything from Chinese consumer electronics to methamphetamine. North Korean meth — locally called "ice" or sometimes "bingdu" when traded to Chinese buyers — has been documented in UN reports and multiple journalistic investigations. It's reportedly of extremely high purity and has been a significant hard currency earner for connected networks since at least the early 2000s.

"Everyone pretends not to know," Yongchul told me. "Everyone knows."

The Fear Underneath the Luxury

Here's what I keep coming back to, after all these conversations. The thing that strikes me most isn't the extravagance — though that is, in context, obscene. It's the terror that apparently underlies all of it.

Jisun described a dinner party she served at, maybe 2017 or 2018, she wasn't sure of the exact date. Eight or nine guests, all clearly senior figures of some kind. Good food, expensive drinks. And then, she said, the conversation shifted and the room went quiet and cold in a way she'd never experienced before. Someone had made a joke — about what, she didn't catch — and one of the guests had not laughed. Just like that, the temperature of the entire room changed. "I felt like I was standing in a room where everyone was suddenly waiting to see if something terrible was going to happen," she told me. Nothing did, that night. But she never forgot that silence.

The purges are real, and the elite knows it. Kim Jong Un executed his uncle Jang Song Thaek in December 2013 — described in state media in language so grotesque it was almost medieval — and had his half-brother Kim Jong Nam assassinated in Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017 with a nerve agent applied by two women who claimed they thought they were filming a TV prank. If he'll do that to family, what does that tell you about what these people lie awake thinking about?

Mirae told me she noticed something in the household where she worked. The adults never spoke freely. Not really. Even in their own home, even among what seemed like trusted friends, there was always a kind of performance happening. A layer of self-censorship so ingrained that she wasn't sure they were even conscious of it anymore. "They had everything," she said. "But they were not — " she stopped. "They were not relaxed people."

What This Means. Or Should Mean.

I've been doing this long enough to know that audiences have a complicated relationship with stories about elite excess in authoritarian states. There's a voyeuristic pull to it — the chocolate fountains, the Hennessy, the Yamaha piano gathering dust in a Pyongyang apartment. I get it. I feel it too, sometimes, when a defector is describing something so surreal it almost sounds invented.

But here's what I think matters most: this isn't just a story about inequality, though it's that too. This is a story about how a regime survives. The luxury goods, the stolen wages, the tolerated corruption — these aren't side effects of the North Korean system. They are the North Korean system. The elite is bought. The middle rungs of the bureaucracy are bought. Everyone is implicated just enough to have something to lose, which means everyone has a reason to keep the whole thing going.

And at the bottom of that pyramid, roughly 25 million people are living lives that the people eating Norwegian smoked salmon in Ryongsong district don't think about very much. At least, that's the impression I get. Though Jisun said something to me near the end of our last conversation that I've thought about often since. I'd asked her if the people she worked for seemed happy. She considered it for a long time.

"Sometimes," she said finally. "When they forgot to be afraid."