Sean Fitzpatrick is Ireland\'s most controversial banker. He took an obscure bank, Anglo Irish and turned it into Ireland\'s 3rd biggest with an international reputation for extraordinary profits. He was the darling of the Celtic Tiger. However, when the world\'s economy faltered, the true nature of what had happened behind closed doors at Anglo was revealed and Fitzpatrick resigned in disgrace. One day in May 2009, Sean Fitzpatrick 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: a year when Ireland, its public finances ruined in large part by the cost of covering Anglo\'s losses, went bust itself. 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 Carey, who have been covering the Anglo story since the bank\'s crisis began in 2007, have drawn on Fitzpatrick\'s tapes and on their many sources within Anglo, the state and the business community to tell the story of the crisis and of the man who became the face of it. This is a tale of toothless regulators, hopeless accountants, politicians and civil servants out of their depth, and businessmen in denial about the crash. Above all, it is the story of Sean Fitzpatrick: the man who built the bank that has been at the centre of Ireland\'s economic meltdown.
