The Book: Tainted Trust

The Author: Stephen Douglass

The Story: Prepare yourself for the one of the most exciting rides of your life.

Volume Two of The King Trilogy, The Tainted Trust is, in addition to a great crime and romance thriller, a brilliant depiction of what perfectly normal people will do for love and money. It is the continuing story of an inconvenient fortune and its catastrophic impact on a loving family.

No one wept when Jim Servito died. He left an estate amounting to $325,000,000 when his wife, Karen killed him in Caracas. He had accumulated the fortune the old fashioned way: he stole it from the U.S. and Canadian Governments using a brilliant gasoline tax evasion scam. The money is hot, deposited in a Cayman Island bank, and its cursed. It has a profound affect on everyone who touched it. It is managed by Alfred Schnieder, an aging and unscrupulous Caracas banker.

Mike King, the love of Karen’s life, and nearly ruined by the Feds’ scorched earth efforts to recover Servito’s fortune, convinces her to keep the money, instead of returning it to its rightful owners. With the assistance of Schnieder, they form The King Trust, a near fatal mistake. Desperate to recover the money, the Feds continue to spare no expense and effort to do so. Phillip, the only child of Karen and Jim Servito, assumes he is the natural heir to his father’s fortune, and has his own greedy plans for the money. Aging Alfred Schnieder relinquishes the trust’s management to Louis Visconti, a thirty-two year old Wall Street whiz kid and brilliant financial engineer. Dubbed ‘The Crown Prince of Wall Street,” and substantially more unscrupulous than Schnieder, Visconti takes The King Trust to bewildering heights, then fails, miserably.

Kerri Pyper, Mike King’s twenty-three year old estranged daughter, has not seen or communicated with her father since she was nine. She discovers the existence of The King Trust and is shocked to learn that her natural father is its Trustee. Visconti, desperate and assuming he is still the smartest man in the room, embezzles the fortune and flees to Monaco. He made only two mistakes: he deceived both Mike King and Alfred Schnieder and fell in love with Kerri.

About Stephen Douglass:

Born and raised in Canada, Stephen spent the first half of his career working for the two largest oil companies in the world: Exxon and royal Dutch Shell. He spent the second half working for one of the smallest oil companies in the world; his own. Now retired, he spends his summers with his wife, Ann, at their Canadian home near Niagara Falls. He winters at their Florida home in Port St. Lucie. When he is not writing, he is reading, traveling, or playing bad golf. He plans to write until the day he dies, probably longer.

For Stephen, writing was an accident. When his friends in Muskoka and Florida became aware of the story of his incredible life in the Canadian oil business, they encouraged him to commit it to writing. They insisted it was a story that must be told. Reluctantly, he did, and after more than twenty years the story of AN ENDLESS AND CONFLICTED LOVE, A MAN WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE AND NEARLY LOST HIS LIFE DOING IT, and ONE OF THE LARGEST AND MOST AUDACIOUS THEFTS IN CANADIAN HISTORY, was finally made public. Stephen has entitled the book: The Bridge to Caracas, for reasons that will quickly be obvious to readers. The genre is romance crime fiction, if there is such a genre.

The sequels,The Tainted Trust, (the story of what happened to the $325,000,000 stolen from the Canadian and U.S. governments), the second in The King Trilogy, and Kerri’s War, the third volume in The King Trilogy, are now live on Amazon KDP.

Stephen has said, “If readers have half as much fun reading The King Trilogy as I did writing it, they will be enriched.”

Review by Nancy of Utah:

This is another magnetic novel written by Author Stephen Douglass. It kicks off in New York City, 1980, with Louis Visconti, 33 years old, multimillionaire, living the lavish high life. His passion is possession and power, never interested in crossing the bridge into marriage. He is an investment broker for the Wall Street firm of Mara, Griesdorf and Visconti. In the previous novel,

Jim Servito’s death left more than 300 million dollars that was from unpaid petroleum taxes money laundered from Canada and the United States. Mike King maneuvers that money back from the Cayman Islands into the United States as a trust fund managed by Louis Visconti. Karen Servito, Jim’s widow, and Mike King are now married and Mike has legally adopted Phillip, Jim’s son at 10 years of age.

Though Phillip is the sole beneficiary of his father’s estate, Mike and Karen are overseeing the management of the trust fund. Move on to 1987 and the situation in the Middle-East is threatening to explode like a drum of oil. They’ve produced more oil than there are buyers.

OPEC’s control has weakened because of greed and the oil prices rise. Suddenly, almost without any warning or symptoms, on October 19, 1987, the great fall of Wall Street occurs, known as Black Monday. Visconti has been in the Bahamas in isolation from news and phones.

When he returns, King’s trust, which had climbed in value to over 800 million, has now been reduced to the original 300 million. But he does not divulge this loss to King … Visconti has mismanaged the trust all along, and he also knows of the secrets of how the money was laundered. Soon, Jim Servito’s daughter, Kerri Pyper, 21 years old, married to Brian, a profession football player, arrives in New York City and is looking for a job. Disaster strikes her husband on the football field, the marriage fails, and before long she becomes romantically involved with … Louis Visconti.

This novel reveals the highs and lows of Wall Street, and how it impacts so many lives which seem to rise and fall just like Wall Street. From cover to cover, this story is extraordinary, finely honed, suspenseful, romantic, and a total thrill ride. I’m looking forward to reading the last of The King Trilogy. Highly recommend this powerful story.