The FitzPatrick Tapes

One day in May 2009, Sean FitzPatrick - the disgraced former chief executive and chairman of Anglo Irish Bank - sat down to lunch in a Holiday Inn in Dublin. Across the table sat Tom Lyons, a business reporter with the "Sunday Times". Seven months later, the two met for the first of what would be seventeen formal, tape-recorded interviews over the course of 2010. In these interviews, FitzPatrick talked at length and in detail about his banking experiences and philosophy, his colleagues and clients, his investments, his public disgrace, his arrest and his bankruptcy. Lyons and his colleague Brian Carey, who have been covering the Anglo story brilliantly since the bank's crisis began in 2007, have drawn on the FitzPatrick tapes and on their many sources within Anglo, the state and the business community to tell the story of that crisis - and of the man who became the face of it.