On a cool, cloudy morning in October 2014, in a white-brick townhouse in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, Calogero Gambino hung himself from a banister on his second-floor balcony.
Gambino, whom everyone knew as Charlie, was forty-one, the father of two young children. A lawyer, he had spent the past eleven years working in Deutsche Bank’s New York offices. His title was associate general counsel, which meant he was one of the bank’s top attorneys working on the multitude of investigations and other legal problems dogging the company. Gambino was popular with his colleagues. Some of them knew he suffered from depression and worried that he’d been pushing himself too hard; among other things, Gambino had been enmeshed in the Libor case, a topic he had discussed with Bill on at least a couple of occasions. Now, less than nine months after Broeksmit hung himself in London, Gambino had done so in New York. Despite Deutsche’s staunch efforts to deny it—tearful public relations employees insisted that there was no way Gambino killed himself because of work issues, and they continued to assert that Broeksmit’s suicide, too, was not connected to the bank—there was no avoiding the appearance of a deadly pattern.
That’s certainly how it looked to Val. As the high wore off from having planted a story on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, Gambino’s death was the equivalent of another hit, giving Val the energy to push forward in his personal investigation into the reasons for his father’s death. Solving that puzzle—or even being able to determine its outer boundaries—became Val’s addiction. “Think of suicide as the most rational act a human can make,” Val explained to me at one point. “Then work backwards from that. . . . Sure, it’s an emotional act, which is why many get lost and explain it away as ‘crazy’ or ‘unknowable.’ But if you look at the reasoning, it makes sense. Unfortunately my father didn’t leave a reason. But he left clues.”
Those clues, though, were like hieroglyphics to Val. He found help on his iPhone, which came pre-installed with an app called iTunes U, which offered free university classes. Val downloaded an introductory finance course, taught by a Yale professor named John Geanakoplos. “Why study finance?” Geanakoplos asked in the first session. “It’s to understand the financial system, which is really part of the economic system. . . . The language that you learn is the language that’s spoken on Wall Street.” Val binged on the classes. Before long, he could explain what a derivative was, at least in fuzzy terms. He grasped the concept of leverage. Finance was filled with jargon and acronyms, but they often served to obscure more than illuminate. Val called the curly-haired professor’s classes his “finance decoder ring.”
A few weeks after Gambino died, a shadowy group of hackers, calling themselves the Guardians of Peace, penetrated the computer systems of Sony Pictures, the giant movie studio. It was the work of North Korea, whose government was irate about Sony’s planned release of a Seth Rogen comedy that depicted the assassination of Kim Jong Un. Sony raced to pull its entire global computer system offline, but it was too late. The hackers already had made off with a devastating cache of materials: hundreds of gigabytes of internal files, emails, and unreleased movies.
When Sony employees switched on their computers after the hack, they were greeted with a jarring image: A demonic red skeleton appeared under the heading “Hacked by #GOP.” “We’ve obtained all your internal data,” the warning from the Guardians of Peace read. “If you don’t obey us, we’ll release data shown below to the world.” At the bottom of the image were links to a few different hacker websites.
The hack became public a few days before Thanksgiving 2014. Val—having dabbled in TV work and mingled over the years with film people—watched with fascination. “Amazing,” he tweeted on November 24. “They shut down a massive studio with a keyboard and a bag of crisps!” He read a story about the hack that included a photo of the image and links that had flashed on Sony employees’ screens. Out of curiosity, he typed one of the links into his browser. A bare-bones website came up, containing little more than a link to another page. Val clicked and then followed instructions to download a zip file (a compressed package of other files). Normally, this would be a reliable recipe for getting your computer infected with a virus, but Val lucked out. The files were filled with computer code, and at the bottom of one, Val found three words he understood: “For more information,” it said, and then listed a few email addresses.
Val had spent the past forty-eight hours wondering: If Sony’s computer systems were so porous, did other global corporations have similar vulnerabilities? Could this be a way to figure out what had been going on inside Deutsche? It was early evening, and Val was alone in the Strawberry Manor house. He typed a message to one of the Guardians of Peace addresses: “I’m interesting [sic] in joining your GOP, but I’m afraid my computer skills are sophomoric at best. If I can help in any other facility please let me know.”
Val doubted the hackers would reply, but a day or two later, an email arrived with a primer on how to access Sony’s stolen documents, which the hackers were preparing to release in the near future. Val had been added to the hackers’ email list—a feat that had eluded many journalists who were covering the electronic attack. On December 11, Val received another email from the Guardians of Peace, this one with links to several anonymous websites. Sony’s internal materials were there for the taking. Val started downloading the enormous files. While he was waiting for the process to complete, he emailed the hackers: “Hey, you guys ever thought about going after Deutsche Bank? Their [sic] tons of evidence on their servers of worldwide fraud, some of it even contributed to the very sad and tragic suicides of two of their employees.” Val knew the FBI was pursuing the Guardians of Peace, and now he was encouraging them, in writing, to go after another global company. He was relieved that the hackers never responded.
Val meandered through the Sony files. In email after email, executives trash-talked movie stars and discussed their studio’s budgets and upcoming films. Val took to Twitter, where his Bikini Robot Army account had several thousand followers. He posted screenshots of internal Sony documents and emails: deliberations over who—Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola—might direct a planned remake of Cleopatra; Brad Pitt freaking out about the edit of the World War II film Fury; a confidential three-year schedule of Sony’s planned movie releases. His tweets reached larger and larger audiences as people shared them across the social network.
Val was hardly the only one disseminating Sony’s salacious materials, but his prolific postings set him apart. A week later, Sony’s outside lawyer, the hyperaggressive David Boies, sent Twitter’s general counsel a letter warning of legal action if it didn’t shut down the @bikinirobotarmy account. Twitter forwarded the letter to Val, who received a similar missive from Sony’s vice president for content protection. Sony warned it would “hold you responsible for any damage or loss” stemming from the materials he had published.
Val now had a choice. He could delete his fifty or so posts that contained Sony’s materials. He could keep them up but stop tweeting new stuff. Or he could just thumb his nose at Sony and its fancy lawyers and keep posting materials. Val chose option 3—and then shared with me the lawyers’ letters he had received. A few days before Christmas, the Journal published a story about Sony and David Boies threatening this random musician.
The article made Val a little famous. (The legal threats fizzled.) “What about freedom of speech? What about First Amendment rights?” an anchor on the Fox Business Network asked during an “exclusive” phone interview with Val. She invited him to describe Boies’s letter, and Val, pacing in the backyard of the Strawberry Manor house, gave a creative rendition: “He said, ‘Stop tweeting or we’re going to come over and kill your hard drive and bury it underground and beat it with baseball bats.’ ” As Fox rolled footage of Val’s Twitter feed, another anchor chimed in: “It seems like somebody’s trying to make you the fall guy, doesn’t it, Val?”
“A little bit, yeah!” he agreed.
The lesson here for Val was powerful: The public had ravenous appetites for documents that exposed the inner workings of giant corporations. Spreading such materials seemed virtuous. And Val had plenty of stuff to spread.
Weeks earlier, Val had received an out-of-the-blue email from a reporter at Reuters, the business newswire, named Charles Levinson. “I’m writing because a source of mine told me that you might be looking for a reporter to talk to,” Levinson explained cryptically. “I believe it possible that, if senior Deutsche officials believed your father might be able to tell investigators something that could be used against them or the bank, they might be willing to find ways to exert pressure to prevent that from happening,” Levinson wrote. “I suppose it’s possible that they found some means of exerting pressure, some threat, that could have driven someone to despair.”
This was catnip to Val’s conspiracy-inclined mind, and he said he’d be willing to meet Levinson, who promptly booked a flight to California. They met at the Mountain Home Inn, a rustic hotel on the slope of Mount Tamalpais. It was a chilly November afternoon, and they sat alone on the hotel’s patio. Levinson drained a few beers, while Val chain-smoked Marlboro Reds. He told Levinson his father’s life story. Levinson said that he would like to write about Bill and his role at Deutsche. To do that, he explained, he would need to explore a little in Bill’s emails.
Val was game. About a month later, Levinson returned to San Francisco. It didn’t take him long to find something juicy in Bill’s accounts. There were lots of email chains from about a year earlier in which Broeksmit had browbeaten his DBTCA colleagues for their haphazard approach to the Federal Reserve’s stress tests. It was a clear example of how Deutsche seemed to be trying to pull the wool over regulators’ eyes, so much so that a prominent and well-regarded (and soon-to-be-dead) executive had expressed grave concerns.
Levinson’s story ran in March 2015, under the headline “Former Risk Chief Warned Deutsche Bank on Stress Tests, Emails Show.” The article quoted Bill’s writing to his colleagues that they needed to “stress harder,” that their financial forecasts were “way too optimistic,” and that the losses they were anticipating in an economic storm were “way too small compared to history.” With The Wall Street Journal, with the Sony hack, and now with Levinson, Val had possessed something valuable. At long last, he was not only seen as an adult—he was a player.