Political rent-seeking is the act of diverting resources away from a productive activity towards cultivating connections with corrupt political agents. Yet it is difficult to observe. We create and conduct a novel rent-seeking laboratory game which captures real political dynamics of the behavior with actual political leaders in Mozambique and their citizens. We find that contrary to the one-shot subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium prediction, both citizens and leaders are willing to engage in and reward rent-seeking activity respectively. The result is a transfer of resources from poorer citizens to wealthier leaders. Critically these deviations are strongly correlated with real world behavior. Citizens engage in significantly more rent-seeking with leaders who are actually observed appropriating community money. Beyond this we find additional relationships with rent-seeking and leaders' willingness to engage in corrupt activities.