Owning Mahowny by Gary Ross

Dan Mahowny was one of the brightest stars at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, a brilliant young banker on his way to the top. To his colleagues he was a workaholic. To his customers he was astute, decisive, and helpful. To his friends he was a quiet, humorous man who enjoyed watching sports. To his girlfriend he was shy but engaging. None of them knew his other side--the side that executed the largest single-handed bank fraud in Canadian history. But unlike Barings' Nick Leeson, he didn't pour the money into over-ambitious speculation on the futures market: he used it to fuel his compulsive gambling, which had taken over his sense of reality. In the boom years of the early eighties, this made Dan Mahowny something of a folk hero. It was a time when, paradoxically, people didn't like banks but were obsessed with money. All the newspapers were celebrating a man who had just committed a crime. I was a magazine editor in Toronto when I read about a young bank employee who'd been charged with embezzling more than $10 million from his employer. When I learned that the money had mostly gone to Caesar's in Atlantic City, my antennae twitched. I myself had spent too many hours in Las Vegas and understood the casino's allure. When it became clear that the banker was an otherwise exemplary young man in the grip of a gambling obsession, I approached his lawyer about the possibility of doing a book. The banker wanted no part of it. Two years later, however, while he was doing a six-year term, I heard from him. Other inmates assumed he had Swiss bank accounts, and he realized most people didn't have a clue about compulsive gambling. He had also married his girlfriend, and they were expectinga baby. These two factors, I think, made him decide that full disclosure was the best way to go. I began interviewing him for this book while he was out on supervised release. Gary Stephen Ross wrote a wonderful book about a complicated man's obsession with gambling and the international fallout from it. It's not easy to make even real people come alive on the page, but Gary does it seamlessly. The result is a fascinating story told expertly.--P.W.