Shoppers browsed a luxury Seoul department store while the ceiling cracked and loud bangs echoed from above. Executives held a secret meeting, did the math on the day's profits, and quietly fled, without sounding a single alarm. Within hours, the building pancaked into the earth in under 20 seconds.

This episode unpacks the 1995 Sampoong Department Store collapse, which killed 502 people, as a chilling case study in how unchecked greed and corruption erode the foundations of a modern building. We trace every fatal shortcut from blueprint to rubble and the forensic engineering that exposed them.

• How a chairman converted an apartment plan into a mall, cutting structural columns to add escalators and a fifth floor
• The flat-slab design weakened by thinner columns, half the required rebar, and concrete mixed with corrosive sea ...