David Montero

David Montero is a journalist and producer. His second book, published in 2024, is The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations, with a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson, Ph.D. It traces how white corporate directors and Wall Street magnates plowed the wealth they stole from the labor and life of enslaved Black people – the equivalent today of trillions of dollars – into modern industries and corporations that built America; how they did so utilizing many of Wall Street’s biggest banks before, during and after the Civil War; and why corporate reparations and radical reparative justice are critically necessary.

Montero has documented the impact of corruption in South and South East Asia. His first book was 2018’s Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network, which investigates the devastating impact of Western corporate bribery on the developing world.

Formerly a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and a regular producer for PBS’s flagship investigative series, Frontline, his work has twice been honored with an Emmy Award nomination as well as the South Asian Journalist Association’s Daniel Pearl Award. Montero has also written for The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, Harvard Business Review, The Globe & Mail, Le Monde Diplomatique, and many others.

Montero has received the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, the Investigative Reporting Fellowship at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, the International Reporting Project’s Health Fellowship, and several grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.