Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction

"In Dark Towers, David Enrich tells the story of how one of the world's mightiest banks careened off the rails, threatening everything from our financial system to our democracy through its reckless entanglement with Donald Trump. Darkly fascinating and yet all too real, it's a tale that will keep you up at night." -- John Carreyrou, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood A searing exposé of the most scandalous bank in the world, including its shadowy ties to Donald Trump's business empire On a rainy Sunday in 2014, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank was found hanging in his London apartment. Bill Broeksmit had helped build the 150-year-old financial institution into a global colossus, and his sudden death was a mystery, made more so by the bank's efforts to deter investigation. Broeksmit, it turned out, was a man who knew too much. In Dark Towers, award-winning journalist David Enrich reveals the truth about Deutsche Bank and its epic path of devastation. Tracing the bank's history back to its propping up of a default-prone American developer in the 1880s, helping the Nazis build Auschwitz, and wooing Eastern Bloc authoritarians, he shows how in the 1990s, via a succession of hard-charging executives, Deutsche made a fateful decision to pursue Wall Street riches, often at the expense of ethics and the law. Soon, the bank was manipulating markets, violating international sanctions to aid terrorist regimes, scamming investors, defrauding regulators, and laundering money for Russian oligarchs. Ever desperate for an American foothold, Deutsche also started doing business with a self-promoting real estate magnate nearly every other bank in the world deemed too dangerous to touch: Donald Trump. Over the next twenty years, Deutsche executives loaned billions to Trump, the Kushner family, and an array of scandal-tarred clients, including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Dark Towers is the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality--the corporate equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. It is also the story of a man who was consumed by fear of what he'd seen at the bank--and his son's obsessive search for the secrets he kept.

About the Author :
David Enrich is the financial enterprise editor of the Wall Street Journal, heading an elite investigative unit at the paper. He previously served as the Journal's European banking editor in London. Enrich's coverage of the Libor scandal, based partly on years of secret access to Tom Hayes and his family, won him the Gerald Loeb Award for feature writing in 2016. Since iTunes named his as one of the top podcasts of 2007, BJ Harrison has continued to wow audiences with his voicing skills. Now, over 475 audiobooks later, he still impresses critics and listeners alike. From eldritch witches to young ingenues, from marble mouthed gangsters to Shakespearean Danes, BJ has an astounding array of character voices, dialects, and accents at his fingertips, coupled with an impressive depth of interpretation.

Review :
"Dark Towers is a mystery, a thriller, a father-son drama. Did I mention Donald Trump? It's a distinctly American drama of greed, hubris, and power that kept me racing to the finish." -- "James B. Stewart, #1 New York Times bestselling author" "In this masterful account of a bank gone bad, David Enrich turns financial journalism into gripping, page-turning crime reporting. Tracking the sordid history of Deutsche Bank--from financing robber barons, Nazis, and rogue states to laundering Russian money to underwriting Donald Trump to threatening global economic security--Enrich deftly delivers a compelling narrative that intertwines harrowing institutional corruption and engaging personal tales. It's a wild ride and a great read." -- "David Corn, #1 New York Times bestselling author"