Anyone know your typical steps for this process? I guess your first step is to contact your embassy, then look for a local lawyer, then what comes next?
Well, in this case, it involved hiring mercenaries, arranging an elaborate heist involving traditional Lebanese musicians and bribing airport workers in at least three different countries. I think the ability to improvise is crucial.
Willing and able to apply pressure on both private and public sector officials in different countries, and if that fails, willing to take extra-legal steps as long as that's what's required.
Even if that boils down to hiring one specialist to coordinate and do that, you'll have to sign off on various steps of the process, and make the decision if/when to pursue certain avenues, even if it's with recommendations from others.
That's the point of the test... There is no one guaranteed path. Each situation will be different in a thousand different ways. It requires someone very "resourceful" to be able to navigate and handle all of the unknowns.
At that level you are going to start with agencies that have an existing K&R team, potentially from your insurance underwriter (because if you are the sort of person who needs to consider or plan for this threat then you also have insurance for it.) The steps past that point are beyond me but probably involve both political contacts as well as consultants/contractors with specialized skills -- I would expect that one of your various law firms is probably going to be your primary interface.
It's still bribery in a developed country, there just might be some effort made for plausible deniability. It's partly why kids are told "networking" is so important in developed countries. Because when they grow up, it's a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" world.
I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of corruption—skimming money, creating unnecessary "jobs" for friends, family, or co-conspirators, kickbacks, that kind of thing—in the US, it's just that most of it doesn't reach the "retail" level, if you will, and mostly occurs within and between bureaucracies both public and private, without directly affecting ordinary people outside those organizations. So it might be quite difficult and rare to bribe a person to do something for you, or to have a bribe solicited, but fairly common to interact with organizations that have tons of internal corruption going on that's hard to see from the outside.
In short I think we have a lot of corruption, we just don't let the poor or low-status participate.
I'm thinking of the guy working at the garbage dump who lets you drop off commercial trash if you slip him $20; the small business owner firing his office manager to he can hire his wife instead; the guys on 3rd shift at the industrial paint shop getting their friend's cars painted for $50, etc.
Corruption like this is all around. It just doesn't rise to the level of anyone not directly affected being concerned about it.
That sort of stuff is the borderline corruption that's the grease that keeps things working. Then there is stuff like promoting the do nothing nephew of one of the board members over someone competent.