Too Big to Jail

In Too Big to Jail, journalist Chris Blackhurst tells the startling true story of HSBC's rise to become the Mexican drug cartel's bank of choice – and how the perpetrators escaped justice.

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'This is the inside story of how the City of London really operates and if it doesn't make you angry, you need to check your pulse' – Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland and Butler to the World

From journalist Chris Blackhurst, Too Big to Jail unveils how HSBC facilitated mass money laundering schemes for brutal drug kingpins and rogue nations – and thereby helped to grow one of the deadliest drugs empires the world has ever seen.

In pursuit of their goal of becoming the biggest bank in the world, between 2003 and 2010, HSBC allowed El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel, one of the most notorious and murderous criminal organizations in the world, to turn its ill-gotten money into clean dollars.

How did a bank that as recently as 2002 had been named ‘one of the best-run organizations in the world’ become so entwined with one of the most barbaric groups of gangsters on the planet?

From Hong Kong to London, Washington, the Cayman Islands and Mexico, where HSBC saw the opportunity to become the largest bank in the world, and El Chapo seized the chance to fuel his murderous empire by laundering his drug proceeds through the bank.

With an extraordinary cast of politicians, bankers, drug dealers, FBI officers and whistle-blowers, Too Big to Jail asks: what price does greed have? Whose job is it to police global finance? And why did not a single person go to prison for facilitating the murderous expansion of a global drug empire?

Too Big to Jail is an incredible story, brilliantly told by writer, commentator and former editor of The Independent, Chris Blackhurst.

'The sheer hubris, greed and arrogance of bankers is laid bare in shocking, and at times hilarious, detail' – Andrew Neil