Sex, scandal, suicide and murder: the real world of banking

Of course it does.

As Halloween approaches, I was reflecting on death and murder in banking. It is not a new thing for me, as it turns up quite often, but it hit me today with allegations that a former bank chairman arranged for his communications chief to be intimidated, in an operation that ended in his death.

People have been killing for money since money was invented, and probably long before that, when the argument was about who owned the land, the livestock or the food. Money simply gave us a convenient way of measuring what was worth stealing, fighting for or dying to protect, but something interesting happens when money becomes enormous wealth. It brings power, influence, privilege and the belief that ordinary rules no longer apply. It can also bring fear, jealousy, obsession and desperation, particularly when someone faces losing everything they have accumulated ... and sometimes people die.

The death of an Italian banker - was it suicide or murder? - made me consider a number of other events in the history of banking:

• a financier found hanging beneath a London bridge,
• a billionaire shot dead by his lover,
• another billionaire dying in a Monaco fire,
• an investment banker convicted of murdering two women in Hong Kong,
• a Wall Street banker whose relationship with Jeffrey Epstein destroyed his career; and
• a fintech executive who disappeared into the shadowy world of Russian espionage.

These aren’t characters from a financial thriller. They’re real people from the real world of finance which makes me wonder whether the greatest danger in banking is not money itself. It is what money does to the people who control it.

The banker who fell from a window

The latest extraordinary story comes from Italy, where Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest surviving bank, founded in 1472, has found itself revisiting one of the darkest chapters in its history.

On 6 March 2013, David Rossi, the bank’s 51-year-old communications chief, fell from a third-floor window at its headquarters in Siena. His death was investigated as suicide, but his family never accepted that explanation.

There were troubling questions about injuries to his body and CCTV footage showing people approaching him after the fall without calling for help. At the time, MPS was embroiled in the disastrous €9 billion Antonveneta acquisition, which had helped push the bank towards financial catastrophe.

Now, thirteen years later, an Italian parliamentary commission has alleged that former MPS chairman Giuseppe Mussari instigated an intimidation operation that resulted in Rossi’s death.

According to testimony presented to the Italian parliamentary commission, men involved in an alleged intimidation operation held Rossi upside down outside his third-floor office window. He reportedly struggled, they lost their grip and he fell to his death. Former chairman Giuseppe Mussari has been accused of instigating the operation, which he categorically denies. These claims remain unproven, and no criminal court has established that Rossi was murdered.

Nevertheless, imagine the scene. You’re a senior executive at one of Europe’s most historic banks, your employer is engulfed in scandal, investigators are asking questions about billions of euros, and suddenly you’re dead beneath your office window.

If I wrote that into a novel, my editor might tell me to make it more believable.

Except it happened.

God’s banker hanging beneath a London bridge

Then there’s Roberto Calvi, chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, the Italian bank with controversial financial connections to the Vatican Bank. In June 1982, Calvi was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, with bricks in his pockets and thousands of pounds in cash.

Calvi was nicknamed God’s Banker because of his connections with the Vatican Bank. His institution had become entangled in a spectacular financial scandal involving missing money, offshore companies and allegations of links to organised crime.

His death was initially ruled suicide, but subsequent investigations challenged that conclusion, and the case became one of the great unresolved mysteries of modern finance. The circumstances were so extraordinary that they inspired books, documentaries and conspiracy theories involving the Vatican, the Mafia and secret societies.

A banker hanging beneath a bridge with bricks in his pockets? Seriously?

You couldn’t invent a better opening for a financial thriller.

Billionaires, sex and murder

The story becomes even stranger when we turn to Édouard Stern, the French billionaire financier with family connections to Lazard Frères, the asset management company of the Lazard Group in France.

In 2005, Stern was found dead in his Geneva apartment, wearing a latex bodysuit. He had been shot four times by his lover, Cécile Brossard, during a relationship involving sexual domination and a dispute over a million dollars.

Brossard was subsequently convicted of murder.

Here was a man who had accumulated an enormous fortune through finance, yet whose life ended in circumstances that had nothing to do with interest rates, trading strategies or investment returns.

Money, sex, jealousy and power had become entangled in a relationship that ended in violence.

Then consider Edmond Safra, one of the world’s wealthiest bankers and founder of Republic National Bank of New York. In December 1999, Safra died in a fire at his heavily secured Monaco penthouse, alongside nurse Vivian Torrente. The fire had been started by another nurse, Ted Maher, who claimed there had been an armed intrusion. Investigators concluded that Maher had fabricated the attack and started the fire in an attempt to stage a heroic rescue.

Maher was convicted.

Safra had accumulated billions and surrounded himself with extraordinary security, yet he could not protect himself against the actions of someone inside his own home. Which raises an interesting question: when you become enormously wealthy, do you become safer, or do you simply create new reasons for people to exploit you?

When the banker becomes the murderer

Sometimes the banker is the victim. Sometimes the banker is the killer.

In 2016, Rurik Jutting, a Cambridge-educated former Bank of America Merrill Lynch trader, was convicted of murdering two Indonesian women, Sumarti Ningsih and Seneng Mujiasih, in his luxury Hong Kong apartment. The details of the case were horrific, involving torture, sexual violence and recordings of the crimes. Jutting received two life sentences.

This was not a murder committed to steal money, and it would be wrong to suggest that his banking career caused his crimes. But his case exposed a disturbing contrast between the outward appearance of a successful, highly paid investment banker and the violence he committed behind closed doors.

The respectable suit and prestigious employer told the world very little about the man wearing them.

The Rurik Jutting case reminds me of American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial 1991 novel, later turned into a film starring Christian Bale in 2000.

Bale plays Patrick Bateman, a wealthy Wall Street investment banker who inhabits a world of designer suits, exclusive restaurants, expensive apartments and obsessive competition over status, even down to whose business card looks best.

Behind this immaculate façade, however, lies a deeply disturbed man whose obsession with wealth, power and appearances descends into sadistic violence and murder. Ellis intended the story as a savage satire of the greed, narcissism and moral emptiness of 1980s Wall Street, and the film brilliantly captures the absurdity of a world where appearances matter more than humanity.

What makes the comparison with Jutting so disturbing is that Bateman was fictional, his crimes deliberately blurred between reality and fantasy, while Jutting’s murders were horrifyingly real.

Two innocent women lost their lives, and the respectable world of international investment banking provided no indication of the monster behind the expensive suit. It makes you wonder whether Bret Easton Ellis was exaggerating the darkness of Wall Street or merely anticipating what the headlines might one day reveal.

Sex, secrets and Jeffrey Epstein

Then there is Jes Staley, the former chief executive of Barclays and previously a senior executive at JPMorgan. Staley maintained a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose connections with powerful figures across business, politics and finance have generated years of investigations and revelations.

The relationship began during Staley’s time at JPMorgan and continued after Epstein’s criminal conviction. In 2025, a British tribunal upheld the Financial Conduct Authority’s decision to ban Staley from senior roles in financial services after finding that he had misled the regulator about the nature and duration of their relationship.

Staley’s regulatory misconduct was established, although that is not the same as finding him guilty of Epstein’s sexual crimes.

Nevertheless, the affair raises an uncomfortable question about the relationship between wealth, privilege and accountability.

How do people who occupy some of the most powerful positions in finance become involved with individuals whose behaviour should have raised the most obvious alarm bells?

And why do some relationships survive long after the warning signs become impossible to ignore?

And finally, the Russian spy

If all of that sounds like material for a Hollywood film, consider Jan Marsalek.

Marsalek was the Chief Operating Officer of Wirecard, the German fintech company once celebrated as one of Europe’s great technology success stories.

In 2020, Wirecard collapsed after auditors could not verify the existence of €1.9 billion supposedly held in trustee accounts. Marsalek disappeared as the scandal unfolded, reportedly escaping to Russia.

What emerged afterwards was even more extraordinary.

British prosecutors identified Marsalek as an intermediary directing a Russian espionage network operating across Europe. In 2025, six Bulgarian nationals were convicted or pleaded guilty in connection with that network.

Marsalek remains a fugitive, and the allegations against him have not been adjudicated in his own criminal trial.

Think about that. The COO of a major European payments company, handling billions in financial transactions, becomes a fugitive linked by prosecutors to Russian intelligence operations.

It’s James Bond meets The Big Short, with a little John le Carré thrown in for good measure.

And once again, the story is real.

So, does money make people kill?

Looking across these extraordinary cases, the answer is more complicated than the opening question suggests. Money can certainly motivate murder. People kill to obtain wealth, protect their fortunes, conceal wrongdoing or prevent others from exposing secrets. History is full of examples … but money can also create an environment in which people become intoxicated by power, convinced of their own importance and increasingly detached from the rules that govern everyone else.

Not every story here is a murder motivated by money. Some concern sexual violence, others corruption, espionage or deaths whose circumstances remain disputed. What connects them is the extraordinary concentration of wealth, power and influence surrounding the financial world and perhaps that is the real issue.

We spend enormous amounts of time discussing whether banks have enough capital, whether their technology is secure, whether their executives are sufficiently regulated and whether their balance sheets can survive the next financial crisis and yet one of the greatest risks in banking has always been something rather more difficult to regulate.

Human nature.

Greed, jealousy, ambition, fear, obsession and the desire for control existed long before banks, but finance can amplify their consequences because the rewards are so enormous and the stakes so high.

I have spent much of my career writing about banking. In fact, I once gave a presentation to a financial conference titled All Bankers Are Criminals. It didn’t go down well.

More recently, I’ve expanded on these themes by writing financial thrillers through my Pulp Finction series, and the more I research the real history of finance, the more I wonder whether my fictional characters are actually rather tame. After all, if I wrote a novel involving a banker hanging beneath a London bridge, another falling from a window in Siena, a billionaire murdered in a latex suit, a trader convicted of killing two women and a fintech executive directing Russian spies, my editor would probably tell me the plot was ridiculous.

Too many coincidences. Too much sex. Too much violence. Too many unbelievable characters.

Every one of these stories happened, although some of the most disturbing questions remain unanswered. The murders, convictions, corruption and scandals are real, and the fiction almost writes itself.

I thought I was writing financial fiction. It turns out I was just writing about real financial news.

 

Illustrative sources:

Italian bank chief linked to death of colleague who ‘fell out of window’

Rurik Jutting: A ‘narcissistic’ and ‘sadistic’ killer

The fugitive Jan Marsalek, former COO of Wirecard, was also a spy