Val had rented a room in a ranch house on top of a hill in Culver City, California, not far from Sony Pictures’ studios. He had three roommates, no car, no job. He subsisted on the $2,800 that Alla’s banker wired him once a month; for all the trauma that had transpired, she couldn’t bring herself to pull the financial plug on her first-born child. Val stalked social media for clues about what his mother and sisters were up to. In the spring of 2018, he noticed that Alla had paid someone named Marie using the money-transfer app Venmo. The name sounded familiar, and Val realized he’d been following her on Instagram. She was an artist based in L.A. He started liking dozens of her old posts. Val thought that her art was beautiful and that she was, too. Maybe this was a way to infiltrate his mom’s life.
Marie had grown up in France and Australia. She’d met Alla in an art class in New York a couple of years earlier, back when Alla was in mourning. They had become friends, and Alla confided in Marie about Bill, the circumstances of his death, her attempts to bounce back, and her falling-out with her son. So when Marie noticed Val tracking her on Instagram, she was intrigued. Alla, however, demanded that Marie block him from seeing her account, and when Marie hesitated, Alla took her phone and did it for her. Marie’s curiosity was piqued by the intense reaction, and she unblocked Val later that day.
When Marie first heard from Val, she was in Australia to display a series of her surrealistic oil paintings. “Hi, is this Marie, who is also a friend of my mother?” Val asked her in an Instagram message. He had hatched a bizarre plan: He would befriend her, win her confidence, sleep with her, and lure her into spilling some of his mother’s secrets. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Marie had flirted with the idea of contacting Val. Now she replied swiftly. “Your mum is very against this,” she texted.
“She’s against everything,” Val replied.
“You seem like an interesting character,” Marie answered. Dozens of messages zipped between them. Then Val called her. He found her French accent sexy. She found his voice captivating. She also wondered if he might be a lunatic. She didn’t need that in her life right now; she was separated from her husband and was the primary caretaker of their six-year-old boy. When her plane landed in Los Angeles a few days later, Val called her at the airport. “I need to see you right now,” he insisted.
“No, I have to see my son,” she said, laughing. A week later, though, she got a babysitter and met Val at a trendy, pharmacy-themed bar called Apotheke. Marie sat in the club’s patio, smoking cigarettes, waiting for her date to arrive. When he walked in, one thought flashed through her mind: trouble. Val was tall and skinny and had a scraggly beard and a halfhearted ponytail. Marie thought he looked cool and handsome. He exuded charisma. Their conversation bounced along, Marie’s nervousness fading. Val made her feel at ease. So did the vodka and then the cocaine. They went home together.
Marie could tell that Val was trying to extract information from her about his mother. He wasn’t hiding it. He was furious with Alla and wanted to hurt her. “Fucking her good friend seemed like a pretty good strategy,” Marie smirked when I spoke to her later. Their relationship blossomed. In September 2018, Val took Marie up to San Francisco and introduced her to Pegi Young. The three of them spent hours at her ranch that afternoon. Marie could see how much Val and Pegi cared for each other; around her, Val seemed vulnerable—and happy. Back in L.A., Val moved into Marie’s apartment, in an artists’ commune near Chinatown, which she occupied with her son. Marie didn’t tell Alla that she was living with Val; instead, she engaged in long text message exchanges with Alla, trying to tease out information about Bill and Deutsche and Michele Faissola and her relationship with her lost son.
On November 6, 2018, riding a wave of anti-Trump anger, Democrats seized a majority in the House of Representatives. Republicans still controlled the White House and the Senate, but Trump for the first time faced an opposition party with tangible power. Nancy Pelosi became the House Speaker, and two of Trump’s most vocal congressional critics, Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff, took over powerful committees. Waters became chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, which was responsible for overseeing the banking industry, and Schiff took charge of the House Intelligence Committee. Running those panels, the two California Democrats now had the ability not only to advance their favored legislation but also to issue subpoenas. One of the first things they did was to announce that their committees would jointly investigate Trump’s relationship with Deutsche.
The investigation by Schiff’s panel—which wanted to know whether Trump was in hock to the Kremlin and if Deutsche had somehow served as a financial intermediary between Russia and Trump—would be led by a pair of former federal prosecutors in New York, Daniel Goldman and Dan Noble. The focus of Waters’s committee was Trump’s personal finances, including whether he or the bank had received special treatment at the hands of the other. The panel already had a large staff of finance experts, but it didn’t have anyone with a specialty in Deutsche. As it happened, Bob Roach was tired of languishing in the minority party. In early 2019, after decades in the Senate, he agreed to move to the other side of Capitol Hill, where he joined the Financial Services Committee. Twenty years earlier, he had started his pursuit of Deutsche by investigating the ties between a private banker and Mexico’s Raúl Salinas. Now he would rejoin the hunt for his white whale, investigating the ties between a private banker and Donald Trump.
Rosemary Vrablic figured it was only a matter of time until she was summoned to testify before a congressional committee about how she had stage-managed the bank’s Trump relationship. In private conversations with journalists and government officials, Deutsche executives had been downplaying senior executives’ involvement in, and even knowledge of, all the loans to Trump, insisting that it was Vrablic and her old boss Tom Bowers who had unilaterally masterminded the whole arrangement. Vrablic was still employed by Deutsche (Bowers was long gone), but she worried that she was about to be publicly hung out to dry. She took solace in the fact that she had extensive email chains and internal documents that showed how the loans to Trump and his family had been blessed up and down the chain of command. Just to be safe, she printed out some of the materials and stashed them in her Park Avenue penthouse.
On January 1, 2019, Pegi Young died of cancer. Val hadn’t realized she was sick, and he felt like he had, one more time, lost a family member without any warning. “The world is darker & colder without pegi,” he tweeted, posting a photo of them hugging. “I’m devastated & shocked & don’t know what to say.” He began sleeping all day and getting so stoned that he was “like a zombie,” Marie told me.
Besides searching for the truth about Deutsche Bank, Val had been trying to drum up Hollywood interest in his life story—a project that had ground to a halt when Pegi died. One evening, though, a film producer invited Val to a small dinner party at a house she was renting up in the Hollywood Hills. Among the guests was Moby, the electronic music legend. “The dinner had an accidentally survivalist theme, as we had to make dinner with whatever food the previous tenant had left behind,” Moby recalls. “So we had vegan spaghetti, slightly stale bread, and a surprisingly wonderful salad.” It turned out that Moby and Adam Schiff were pals; Schiff, a fellow vegan, was a regular guest at Moby’s plant-based L.A. restaurant, Little Pine. When Moby heard Val’s haunting story, and the fact that he was in possession of a trove of internal Deutsche materials, he made some introductions. In early 2019, Val and Daniel Goldman, the ex-prosecutor working for Schiff, had a preliminary phone call. Val outlined what he had and offered to help. Goldman, just starting to work on the investigation, hadn’t realized that one of DBTCA’s board members had committed suicide and that the banker’s son had retrieved his electronic files.
Goldman wanted those files—so much so that he sent Val to meet with Schiff in his district office in L.A. Val showed up wearing orange-laced sneakers and a Grateful Dead shirt. The congressman, in a suit and tie, ushered Val out after barely fifteen minutes. It was hard to believe that this guy was for real. But the intelligence committee needed information, and Val undoubtedly had some. The committee soon wrote Val a formal letter, signed by Schiff, requesting that he load his father’s materials onto “an encrypted thumb drive” and mail it to Washington.
Val, however, wanted something in return, preferably money. He pushed Goldman to fly him to D.C. and to hire him as a paid consultant as the committee combed through the Broeksmit files. Goldman resisted—there was zero chance that he was about to let Val hang around the committee’s heavily secured chambers. Instead, he appealed to Val’s sense of patriotism. “Imagine a scenario where some of the material that you have can actually provide the seed that we can then use to blow open everything that [Trump] has been hiding,” Goldman urged. “In some respects, you and your father vicariously through you will go down in American history as a hero and as the person who really broke open an incredibly corrupt president and administration.” But Val wouldn’t budge, insisting that he needed to supervise the committee’s work. Goldman finally snapped. “I can guarantee you that I have spent exponentially more time talking to you about getting these documents than I have to Deutsche Bank itself,” he hissed. “You are proving to be very, very difficult to deal with.”
Val wasn’t the only source of frustration. The two committees in April issued subpoenas to Deutsche for its records related to the Trump and Kushner accounts—everything from personal financial information to any records related to suspicious activity reports tied to the accounts. In the hands of congressional Democrats, the materials could become a Rosetta Stone to unlock Trump’s innermost financial secrets. For that reason, when the president learned of the subpoenas, his lawyers sued to block Deutsche from complying. The dispute spent months winding through the federal court system. In the midst of that process, the intelligence committee in June issued a new subpoena—this one to Val. It demanded that he promptly hand over everything in his possession related to Deutsche. Val grudgingly complied.
“My apologies,” the FBI special agent wrote, “but I have just been handed your information which you had sent some time ago via email to the U.S. Department of Justice.” More than two years had passed since Val submitted the form on the department’s website inviting someone to call him to discuss what he’d found in his father’s Deutsche files. Now a call was organized, and the FBI agent, based in Manhattan, told Val that he was interested, very interested, in taking a look at whatever he had retrieved from Bill’s accounts. The agent told Val that he and a partner would fly to L.A. in the near future to talk in person. He didn’t say what he was investigating, and Val couldn’t help but wonder if he was walking into a trap. Was he about to get busted for assisting North Korean hackers or stealing his mother’s money or moving drugs across international borders?
In February 2019, the two agents—both with backgrounds in counterintelligence and currently on a squad focused on banking malfeasance—flew to California. Their meeting took place the same day that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, testified on Capitol Hill that the president had routinely exaggerated his wealth in order to win loans from Deutsche Bank. Val, wearing a partly unbuttoned paisley shirt, arrived at the bureau’s field office in a federal building downtown. The agents met him in the tenth-floor lobby, where portraits of President Trump watched over visitors, and escorted him upstairs.
The meeting lasted three hours. Val munched on Kit Kats and raspberry-flavored fig bars and drank coffee and Coke and smoked his e-cigarette and unspooled his story a final time. The agents told him they had started out investigating Deutsche’s money laundering in Russia—the notorious mirror trades—but they had widened their scope to focus on an array of potential criminality at the bank. They were interested in DBTCA. They were interested in Monte dei Paschi. They were interested in the Fed’s stress tests. (Soon the same agents would be in touch with a number of Deutsche whistleblowers. One of the employees who had complained to the SEC about how the bank was hiding billions of dollars in losses on derivatives got a call. So did Tammy McFadden, the former compliance officer who had raised concerns about Kushner’s company moving money to Russians. These former employees were more than happy to help bring the bank to justice.)
If Deutsche executives had been listening in on Val’s interview, they would have been deeply unsettled. The bank’s confidence that the federal investigations into its crimes in Russia and elsewhere were wrapped up, neutered, had been misplaced. These two special agents, along with a team of their colleagues and federal prosecutors, were still on Deutsche’s trail—though it remained far from clear where this criminal investigation would go or whom it would touch. The agents didn’t think the crimes that occurred throughout the bank were the work of lone low-level employees—they suspected that this was the product of a culture of criminality that pervaded Deutsche. Tim Wiswell—Wiz, the supposed mastermind of the mirror trades—appeared to be a “fall guy,” a “scapegoat,” they explained. And now someone with a potentially valuable cache of documents was sitting in a large conference room in an FBI field office, being plied with sugary snacks—and the possibility of power.
“You’re holding documents that only people within the inner circle of Deutsche would ever see,” the first agent told Val.
“What we’ve been up against is stonewalling,” the other agent chimed in. “Clearly things went on in Deutsche Bank which weren’t kosher. What we’re up against is all those bad acts are being pushed down on the little people on the bottom.”
“The low-hanging fruit,” the first agent added.
“And the larger bank in its entirety is claiming ignorance and that it’s one bad player. But we know what we’ve seen, it’s a culture of just—”
“Fraud and dirt,” Val interjected, thrilled to be part of this. He called me from a Lyft afterward. His adrenaline was still pumping. “I am more emotionally invested in this than anyone in the world,” he said. “I would love to be their special informer.”
A couple of months later, a padded manila envelope arrived at Marie’s apartment, addressed to Val. The return address was the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters. Inside was a thumb drive. Val had concluded that the materials he’d guarded for the past five years belonged in the FBI’s hands—a decision made easier when the agents agreed to help Marie and her son secure visas so they could legally remain in the United States. The agents had told Val that once he had loaded his goods onto the miniature drive, someone would come by to pick it up. Val texted me a photo of the envelope. It had three postage stamps, each depicting a household pet: a mouse, a guinea pig, and a parrot.
“Guess I’m the mouse,” he wrote. I asked him why, and he responded within seconds, invoking a fable. “Because I can take down an elephant.”
In death, Bill Broeksmit became a symbol: of what ails Deutsche Bank, of the destructive power of institutional greed, of how Wall Street lures even well-intentioned people away from their moral and ethical principles, of the relentless pressure that bears down on those who stand up for what they believe is right.
Broeksmit was no saint, but he was a moral man—no easy feat in an amoral industry, one in which instant profits trumped all else. Survival, to say nothing of success, required constant compromises. Broeksmit had ethics, one of his former colleagues told me, but they were “trader ethics.” He didn’t want to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, but he did want to make money—for himself, for his employer, for customers, for shareholders—and that sometimes required being aggressive. Broeksmit wouldn’t kill an unethical transaction; he would tweak it. A little sleight of hand—with MortgageIT, for example—was acceptable if it was within the letter of the law.
That is part of what made his ethical code palatable to his peers. Being part of their system gave him the credibility to critique that system, to argue that sometimes everyone should take a step back from the system’s norms and revert to a more conservative baseline. The fact that Broeksmit ultimately failed—Deutsche’s mile-long rap sheet is testament to that—reflects less on him than on the institution and, in fact, the entire banking system.
Broeksmit may have found solace and discipline in his effort to walk the line at work, a way to sequester his inner demons and mental anguish. But that firewall seems to have ruptured as his fears grew that he, too, had been complicit in something shameful and that it would be exposed via government investigations. He absorbed his professional failures, took them personally, as if they belonged to him rather than to the out-of-control bank that would have been on an even more treacherous crash course had it not been for his periodic pumping of the brakes. With the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to imagine a worse place for someone like Broeksmit to have worked than Deutsche, with its endless cutting of corners and hostility to the rule of law. Then again, Deutsche might have been the industry’s worst offender, but it was hardly the only criminal entity. Just about every scandal that engulfed the bank during the past two decades also swept over at least one or two other rivals. Maybe Broeksmit was doomed the moment he entered the industry, long before he met Edson Mitchell and then followed him to Deutsche.
Ultimately, although his longtime employer played a role in his decision to die, Deutsche Bank did not kill Bill Broeksmit. Instead, the bank—through the years of recklessness, greed, immorality, hubris, and criminality that emanated from its dark towers—killed itself.