Around the time that he canned Mike Offit, Mitchell organized a corporate getaway for hundreds of employees. The retreat was in a luxury resort overlooking Lake Maggiore, in the foothills of the Italian Alps. The bankers flew into Milan, and a fleet of Mercedes sedans chauffeured them into the mountains.
The first night, there was a party in the hotel’s event center. An executive, Mark Yallop, took the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he thundered, “I’d like to introduce you to Edson Mitchell!” Onto the stage strode a short black man with dreadlocks. It was a Caribbean reggae singer named . . . Edson Mitchell (stage name: Ajamu). Yallop had flown the performer to Europe. The crowd erupted. For once, Edson the banker seemed to be at a loss for words. He laughed. And they all partied as Edson the musician jammed.
For the next eighteen months, Deutsche Bank boomed—and Mitchell’s crew, its collective id unleashed, celebrated its newfound clout.
Mitchell had always been an intense competitor, but colleagues started noticing him taking things to a new level. When he learned that a large German bank, Commerzbank, was trying to poach some of his employees, he retaliated by severing Deutsche’s trading lines with the smaller lender. That had the effect of cutting off Commerzbank from a significant portion of the global financial system. It was the nuclear option, and it had the potential to destabilize an important bank. “That was a kindergarten-like attitude and not worthy of a professional,” Commerzbank’s chairman hissed. Perhaps more revealing, at a company event in Bermuda, he organized a staff sailboat race and hired a former America’s Cup sailor to captain his boat. When the sailor was too drunk to take part and Edson’s boat lagged behind, he powered on its engine to beat the other crafts across the finish line.
On a Sunday night in February 2000, Mitchell got a phone call from Breuer, the bank’s de facto CEO. He had big news: Deutsche planned to merge with Dresdner Bank, Germany’s second-largest lender. The deal, Breuer informed him, would be announced on Tuesday. Mitchell didn’t like being blindsided, and he and his colleagues feared that an influx of German bankers would dilute their power within the organization, especially since Dresdner had a large investment-banking business that overlapped with what Mitchell had built.
Two days later, Edson gathered his entourage at his Chelsea cottage. He was scheduled to fly to Frankfurt the next morning to attend a press conference about the deal, and his participation would signal the buy-in of Deutsche’s London-based investment bankers. The men drained quite a few bottles of wine. The more they drank, the angrier they became. They wanted no part in this German deal.
Edson’s boss, Joe Ackermann, had joined the bank in 1996. A Swiss native, Ackermann spoke fluent German, but he was more closely aligned with the American traders than he was with the stuffy German overlords. That night, Mitchell reached Ackermann on his car phone. Edson said that he and his team were opposed to the Dresdner deal. “Please don’t underestimate, Joe, how difficult this will be,” he warned. If the deal went through, Edson threatened, he’d quit. On the other hand, if Ackermann helped torpedo the deal, Mitchell said, he could count on the support of Edson’s squad in his quest to become the bank’s next chief. The next day, Edson skipped the Frankfurt press conference; the men instead golfed thirty-six holes at the Wisley.
Edson’s message received, the Dresdner deal soon fell apart. When word reached Deutsche’s London offices, a wave of cheering washed over the trading floor. It was a crucial turning point. Breuer had lost the respect of his investment bankers, who realized that they could call the shots. A healthy fear, a sense of restraint, had been lost. Mitchell’s crew was on top of the world, and they knew it.
Mitchell remained closer with the Broeksmits than anyone else, save Estelle. Some nights, Bill and Alla would be surprised by a knock on their door. Outside was Edson, his Porsche parked on the street, asking what was for dinner. After initially disapproving of his affair with Estelle, Alla had resigned herself to the situation. The two couples vacationed together, staying at a ski chalet that Edson and Estelle had purchased in the Swiss resort town of Gstaad.
For her part, Alla had enthusiastically ensconced herself in London’s art scene and museums, taking classes and becoming obsessed with the works of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. She tried to figure out ways to incorporate their genius into her own painting. Bill, however, wasn’t as energized. His job was simultaneously overwhelming and boring. Once again, he felt that he was neglecting his daughters and that he was burning out. He believed the bank was getting so big that it no longer mattered what he did. In August 2000, he decided to retire—for the second time in five years. Mitchell pleaded with him to stay, trying to impress upon him that he served as Deutsche’s keel, preventing the huge ship from tipping too far in the wrong direction. Broeksmit equivocated, but eventually concluded that he needed to get out. He agreed to withdraw over several months. He told perplexed colleagues that he wanted to spend more time with his family and to study Shakespeare and to volunteer in a soup kitchen.
The fact that Broeksmit’s retirements were becoming a pattern suggested to some of his peers that he had trouble coping with the pressure, that beneath the cool exterior was a fragile man. Before Christmas, Bill and Alla had packed up their stuff and moved back to New York.
Mitchell, by now one of the top executives at Deutsche, spent much of his time on the road, visiting outposts in Asia and Latin America, where derivatives trading was just getting off the ground. He had traveled a long, long way from being a janitor’s son and working on the DeCoster egg farm. Over his five years at Deutsche, he had earned something in the vicinity of $50 million. American-style compensation had arrived on the shores of the River Thames, and bankers all over town were grateful for Edson’s inflationary role. Now he was poised to become the highest-ranking American at any European bank, ever.
Yet for all his success, Mitchell constantly flirted with disaster. One afternoon in the summer of 2000, he and Estelle were picnicking on a Maine beach. Edson noticed that his little boat hadn’t been properly moored to the nearby dock; the receding tide was sucking it out into the Atlantic. He jumped into the surf to retrieve the craft. He swam hard, but the boat was floating away faster. Never one to accept defeat, he swam harder still and was practically skimming through the chilly water. At some point, Edson realized that his considerable speed was not a product of his athleticism; he was caught in a riptide. A lobsterman spied the exhausted, flailing man out at sea and fished him out. Otherwise, Mitchell would have drowned.
When Edson had joined Deutsche in 1995, 70 percent of its investment-banking business came from within Germany. By 2000, that ratio had flipped. That June, Mitchell and Philipp were promoted to become members of the vorstand—the first Americans to ever sit on the insular executive board. Setting out to modernize things, they changed the weekly meetings to weekly conference calls. The vorstand had a tradition of a different executive acting as secretary at each meeting, taking notes and typing them up into minutes. When it came Philipp’s turn in the rotation, he made sure his notes were completely illegible. The vorstand hired a professional secretary to take notes going forward.
More broadly, having transformed Deutsche into a Wall Street operator, Mitchell decided it was time to start focusing on other parts of the bank, where he could make his mark and expand his empire. Its retail-banking and wealth-management businesses, for example, were a mess. Philipp was dispatched to clean things up—a sign that the entirety of Deutsche was coming under Edson’s spell. In September 2000, Ackermann was anointed as the incoming speaker of the vorstand—essentially the CEO—thanks in part to the support of Edson and his clique. Ackermann wouldn’t take the job for another two years, but his ascent meant promotions for Mitchell’s subordinates. He told his lieutenants that they all should expect to be elevated in the near future.
Throughout it all, Mitchell couldn’t help flaunting his success. One day he bumped into Flavio Bartmann, a rare Merrill derivatives whiz whom Edson had failed to lure to Deutsche. Back then, Bartmann had warned Mitchell that there was no way he could turn the sleepy German bank into a Wall Street power. “Flavio, you were fucking wrong,” Edson gloated now.
That was Mitchell in a nutshell. He viewed the bank as a means to an end, a vehicle to achieve his ambitions and prove that he could beat long odds. And now—with his mission arguably accomplished and his best friend quitting—he was growing restless again. A couple of weeks before Christmas in 2000, Edson invited Bob Flohr in for a meeting. The bank had recently moved into a modern sand-colored building decked out with modern art, the London headquarters to perhaps 10,000 employees. The two men sat in Edson’s office, just off the trading floor. Family photos lined the walls, and smoke from Edson’s Marlboros swirled in the winter sunlight. He alternated between puffing on his cigarette and eating a sandwich. Across the street were the ruins of the London Wall, built by ancient Romans—a centuries-old reminder of how seemingly invincible global empires, their leaders certain of their superiority, tend to overextend themselves and then disappear into history.
Mitchell told Flohr that he had heard that Stan O’Neal was next in line to become president of Merrill Lynch. “I’m better than Stan O’Neal,” he asserted. “That should be me.” Flohr was puzzled but remained quiet. Edson kept talking: “That’s a job I would take. If you’re any good at your job, you’ll find a way to go to [David H.] Komansky,” Merrill’s chairman and CEO, who controlled the selection process. Flohr made plans to sit down with Komansky early in the new year.