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Former international banker and Time correspondent, bureau chief and senior editor who co-wrote Time's 1991 BCCI cover story and The Outlaw Bank, later executive editor of Texas Monthly and a historian. | Austin, Texas |
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2026-09-23 | 2026-09-23 |
S. C. "Sam" Gwynne is an American journalist and author who worked as an international banker before joining Time, where he was a correspondent, bureau chief, national correspondent and senior editor. With Jonathan Beaty he wrote Time's July 29, 1991, cover story on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), "B.C.C.I.: The Dirtiest Bank of All," and the book The Outlaw Bank (1993). He was executive editor of Texas Monthly from 2000 to 2008 and later wrote several histories, among them Empire of the Summer Moon.123
Banking and Selling Money
Before his career in journalism Gwynne was a French teacher and an international banker. An earlier book, Selling Money, concerned what his own biography calls "Sam's adventures in the international loan trade." He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Princeton University and a master's degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under the novelist John Barth.1
Time and BCCI
At Time Gwynne reported from across the United States and from England, Austria, France, Belgium, Spain and Russia. The cover story he wrote with Beaty, bylined from New York, stated that "From interviews with sources close to B.C.C.I., TIME has pieced together a portrait of a clandestine division of the bank called the 'black network,'" which it said operated "primarily out of the bank's offices in Karachi, Pakistan." The report of Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown later stated that none of the BCCI officers the Senate interviewed claimed knowledge of such a network.124
The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, written with Beaty, was published by Random House in 1993.3 Gwynne's biography lists among the awards for his Time work the Gerald Loeb Award, the Jack Anderson Award "as the best investigative reporter," the John Hancock Award for Distinguished Financial Writing, and a National Headliners Award for his coverage of the Columbine High School massacre.1
Later Career
At Texas Monthly Gwynne wrote cover stories on the White House adviser Karl Rove, NASA, the King Ranch, the football player Johnny Manziel and Southwest Airlines; his 2005 story on the Houston surgeon Eric Scheffey was reprinted in The Best American Crime Writing, 2006, and in 2008 he won the National City and Regional Magazine Award as writer of the year. He has written for Outside, The New York Times, Harper's, the Los Angeles Times and other publications.1
His Empire of the Summer Moon spent 82 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed by Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson (2014), The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football (2016) and His Majesty's Airship (2023). He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, the artist Katie Maratta.1
Footnotes
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Gwynne, S. C. "S. C. Gwynne," author biography, scgwynne.com, accessed September 23, 2026. https://scgwynne.com/author/s-c-gwynne ↩︎
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Beaty, Jonathan, and S. C. Gwynne. "B.C.C.I.: The Dirtiest Bank of All," Time, July 29, 1991. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,973481,00.html ↩︎
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Beaty, Jonathan, and S. C. Gwynne. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993. Internet Archive catalogue record, identifier outlawbank00jona. https://archive.org/details/outlawbank00jona ↩︎
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Kerry, Senator John, and Senator Hank Brown. The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate. December 1992, ch. 4, "BCCI's Criminality." https://irp.fas.org/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/04crime.htm ↩︎