Dark Towers

Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction

By: David Enrich

Narrated by: BJ Harrison

“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.

Riviting

A comprehensive examination of a complex and multifaceted issue. It was sublimely written and narrated.

Turn up the speed!

It’s a fascinating story, well written. All the comments about the performance are correct but it SOUNDS COMPLETELY NORMAL AND WELL READ at 1.25x.

Gripping tale of greed and power

Excellent complex story revolving around a bank who couldn’t quite keep itself on the straight and narrow of the law. Always pushing the envelope where money and profit was more important than integrity. No wonder Trump used these folks to garner his loans.
I would recommend this to anyone

Humdinger

Wow. This is one humdinger of a story. Not since the billion-dollar whale have I been so captivated by a financial crime story. Bravo.

audible

loved it.....reads like a good novel but it's all true! good for managers to read...lessons learned...