New York/ London – Leading drama producer Playground has optioned the rights to author and Wall Street Journal Financial Enterprise Editor David Enrich’s new narrative nonfiction book The Spider Network – The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History. The project will be shepherded by Scott Huff, SVP of Development and Production, and Elyse Dolbec, Director of Development and Production, in Playground’s US office.

Enrich won the coveted 2016 Gerald Loeb award for his series of Wall Street Journal articles The Unraveling of Tom Hayes, about a brilliant but troubled British trader subsequently convicted and imprisoned for his involvement in Libor-fixing, one of the largest financial scams in history. Expanding on those articles with exclusive access to Hayes and his family, The Spider Network is Enrich’s tell-all account of the characters at the center of the scandal. The book recently launched in the US and UK simultaneously, and has already been hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a gripping narrative that reads like a fast-paced John le Carré thriller.

“The Spider Network is a globe-trotting financial exposé in the vein of Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short, but with an enigmatic central character in banker Tom Hayes,” says Huff. “David Enrich’s book is a thrilling account of the Libor scandal and the man who took the fall for it that asks probing questions about who really pays the price for misconduct in a system that’s too big to fail.”