Toward the end of 2012, the wretched selection/rejection pattern repeated itself. Anshu proposed giving Bill the job of running Deutsche’s so-called noncore division—a part of the bank belatedly set up to get rid of its mountains of money-losing assets, including its misvalued derivatives. The job wasn’t glamorous, but it was vital to the bank’s prospects. Once again, BaFin said no.
Passed over for yet another high-profile gig, Broeksmit was relegated to the board of an obscure U.S. legal entity—Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, or DBTCA. This was the corporate husk of the old Bankers Trust business, and it had long been a dumping ground for unsavory businesses. The tax-avoiding trades with Renaissance Technologies were housed there. So were the loans to Donald Trump. Executives in London and Frankfurt weren’t paying much attention to what happened inside this squirrelly unit. In fact, nobody was: DBTCA had barely a hundred employees, compared to the tens of thousands in other divisions, and it didn’t have its own chief financial officer or risk department. But it had become a crucial holding company, through which almost all of its American businesses channeled their transactions.
For the past decade, the bank’s U.S. operations had been run by Seth Waugh, whom some underlings derided as a lightweight. Waugh certainly hadn’t kept a sufficiently close eye on what was happening in his division, preferring to spend his time hobnobbing on the golf course and promoting Deutsche’s brand instead of toiling on important but mundane managerial tasks.
In 2012, with Jain and Fitschen poised to take the reins, Waugh decided to step down. He told acquaintances that Jürgen was a nice enough fellow but that Anshu wasn’t trustworthy. Waugh’s successor as CEO of the American business was the veteran investment banker Jack Brand, and he and Waugh recruited Broeksmit to the DBTCA board as part of an effort to improve the talent pool. Brand didn’t know Broeksmit well, but he was aware of his reputation: a sharp mind, an honest man, a nice guy. Bill accepted the gig, telling Jack that it would give him an excuse to return to New York more frequently to visit his daughters.
Broeksmit and Brand were stunned by what they found inside DBTCA. Some problems were idiosyncratic, like the investment banker who was caught receiving kickbacks from a car-service company in exchange for extra business from Deutsche. Others were existential. State and federal regulators were crawling all over the place and had been for a decade—yet Deutsche hadn’t seemed to do anything to address their concerns, as if the bank was determined to see how long it could get away with its bad practices before someone actually came down hard on them. Its relationship with the Federal Reserve, in particular, was awful.
Regulators feared DBTCA didn’t have any systems in place to ensure that employees followed the law. They fretted that DBTCA didn’t have the wherewithal to figure out its own finances, much less to ensure their soundness. Its technology dated back to the Bankers Trust era. Many DBTCA employees relied on an ancient version of Lotus Notes. Others were manually entering the details of bespoke transactions into Excel spreadsheets; nothing was automated. When you pulled the bank’s financial data from one computer program, it would spit out different numbers than if you pulled them from another system. The technology was such a mess, DBTCA’s financial reporting so jumbled, that nobody really understood the underlying numbers. Officials from the compliance department sometimes resorted to asking executives to perform manual spot checks on their voluminous trading data to see if they were adhering to the law.
This all represented a very big problem, and not just for DBTCA. Because it was Deutsche’s main vehicle for operating in the United States, the entity had the potential to get the entire bank in serious trouble. The worst-case scenario—which struck some executives as well within the realm of possibility—was that if the feds grew sufficiently angry, Deutsche might get kicked out of the world’s biggest economy.
Broeksmit’s mandate—in addition to continuing his regular risk-optimization job in London—was to help clean up this unholy mess. He confided to Alla that after being humiliated by BaFin, he hoped that taking this thankless assignment might restore some of his lost status.
Around the time he took on the DBTCA role, Bill reconnected with Edson’s son Scott Mitchell. They had been out of touch for years, their relationship torched by the Broeksmits’ support for Estelle, which the Mitchell clan viewed as an unforgivable act of disloyalty. But more than a decade had passed, and Scott realized that life was more complicated than he had understood as a teenager. It was time to move on.
In the spring of 2012, Scott was in London and visited Anshu. The framed photo of Edson was now perched on the top of a bookshelf, just above Jain’s cricket paraphernalia. At the end of the meeting, as Scott got up to leave, Anshu suggested that perhaps it was time to rekindle the old Mitchell-Broeksmit friendship; he offered to have his assistant set up a meeting. Scott agreed, and Anshu’s office booked a lunch for Scott and Bill at a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in London.
When the date arrived, Scott flaked out. He was overcome with anxiety about seeing Uncle Bill, a man he had been trained to practically worship, and worried about his reaction when he learned that Scott had never amounted to much professionally. Scott knew that in certain situations—partly because of his physical appearance and partly because Edson’s magnetism still had its pull—people saw his father in him; he could see the look in their eyes, the yearning in their voices, and it made him miserable.
A couple of months later, Scott and Bill tried again. This time it was Broeksmit’s assistant who prodded the two men. After they both kept trying to reschedule, Bill’s daughter Alessa took control and reserved a table at an expensive Japanese restaurant, 15 East, in New York’s Union Square. Alessa planned to come to the dinner, and since Bill would have a wing-woman with him, Scott decided to bring one, too; he enlisted his younger sister Ellen, who lived in New Jersey. Scott flew in for the reunion.
It had been twelve years since Scott and Bill had last seen each other. Scott had indeed grown into a spitting image of his father, albeit a few inches shorter and with slightly redder hair. Bill rose to greet him when he spotted Scott walking to their table. “He’s Edson, holy shit!” Alessa blurted. Trying to tame his nerves, Scott had downed several shots at the hotel before coming; now he was drunk and sweating. As the group sat at a polished wood table, it took a while for the two shy men to open up. But Bill selected some nice wine, and the more they drank, the more the tension eased. Scott fondly impersonated Anshu telling him that he had not lived up to expectations: “You are smarter than hell and talented,” he said in a faux Indian lilt. “How do we get you up to your metrics?” Broeksmit loved it. Soon he and Scott were bantering about banking and politics. Bill lit up, as if a long-severed electrical connection had been soldered back together. As the dinner ended, Alessa pulled Scott aside. “This is him,” she whispered, nodding in Bill’s direction. “I haven’t seen my father like this since Edson.”
Late that summer, Bill and Alla invited Scott up to their place in Maine. They spent the day drinking and reminiscing, the old family bond now restored. Broeksmit joked about how he had dodged a bullet by not getting the chief risk officer gig. He said he was contemplating a third and final retirement. He asked about estate planning. He kept saying how much he still missed Edson.
Scott was a keen student of the banking industry, especially when it came to the institution that his father had helped build. He asked Bill what would have happened with Deutsche if Edson hadn’t died. Would it be in better or in worse shape today? Bill paused for a moment, tugging at his eyebrow the way he did when he was deep in thought. “We would’ve made less money during the boom,” he eventually answered. “But we would’ve lost less money during the bust.”