Nothing to see here, Part ∞
So, here’s a curiosity (NBC News):
A reputed federal informant and whistleblower who went missing after he was reported to have turned over a trove of secret files about Deutsche Bank was found dead at a Los Angeles school this week, a police official said Wednesday.
The body of Valentin Broeksmit, 46, was found Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School shortly before 7 a.m., Sgt. Rudy Perez of the Los Angeles School Police Department said in an email.
Records of the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner do not list a cause of death. Los Angeles Police Capt. Kenneth Cabrera told the Los Angeles Times that authorities do not suspect foul play.
Broeksmit was last seen driving a red Mini Cooper on the afternoon of April 6, 2021, on Riverside Drive and was later reported missing by relatives, Los Angeles police said.
His vehicle was found, the department said, but Broeksmit remained missing.
Perez said Wednesday that he appeared to be homeless.
According to a 2019 profile in The New York Times, Broeksmit was a musician and the son of a Deutsche Bank executive who died by suicide in 2014.
After his father’s death, Broeksmit gained access to his father’s email account and found hundreds of files related to the bank, including board meeting minutes, financial plans, spreadsheets and password-protected presentations, the newspaper reported.
The 2020 red Mini Cooper was found running with the keys in it, per another unsourced account. Odd vehicle for a homeless person.
Unusual name, Broeksmit. Where have I seen it before? In that NYT piece from 2019. And in this January 3, 2020 piece in Forensic News that begins (I fixed the broken Business Insider link):
Deutsche Bank’s loans to Donald Trump were underwritten by Russian state-owned VTB Bank, according to the whistleblower whose collection of thousands of bank documents and internal communications have captured the recent attention of federal investigators.
Val Broeksmit acquired the emails and files of his late father, Deutsche Bank executive William S. Broeksmit, after Broeksmit tragically took his own life in 2014.
Regular readers may remember that Hullabaloo drew a threat of a defamation lawsuit on August 28, 2019 from a Trump Organization attorney simply for repeating a “single-sourced and unconfirmed” report from MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell from the evening before about Russians something-something, Trump something-something, and Deutsche Bank. O’Donnell never said who his inside source was for his information. An FBI source just turned up dead.
And the Broeksmit name appeared here in 2014 in connection with other deaths and disappearances.
Wall Street Murder Mystery
Published by digby on February 6, 2014
Wall Street Murder Mystery
by digby
Via Dave Dayen and Gaius Publius we have a mystery, worthy of Hollywood:
The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.
Just two days after Broeksmit’s death, on Tuesday, January 28, a 39-year old American, Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. According to Magee’s LinkedIn profile, he was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.”
Magee’s parents, Bill and Nell Magee, are not buying the official story according to press reports and are planning to travel from the United States to London to get at the truth. One of their key issues, which should also trouble the police, is how an employee obtains access to the rooftop of one of the mostly highly secure buildings in London.
One day after Magee’s death, on Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 50-year old Michael (Mike) Dueker, the Chief Economist at Russell Investments, is said to have died from a 50-foot fall from a highway ramp down an embankment in Washington state. Again, suicide is being presented by media as the likely cause. … According to a report in the New York Times in November of last year, Russell Investments was one of a number of firms that received subpoenas from New York State regulators who are probing the potential for pay-to-play schemes involving pension funds based in New York. No allegations of wrongdoing have been made against Russell Investments in the matter.
Oh, and did I mention the missing Wall Street reporter?
The case of David Bird, the oil markets reporter who had worked at the Wall Street Journal for 20 years and vanished without a trace on the afternoon of January 11, has this in common with the other three tragedies: his work involves a commodities market – oil – which is under investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for possible manipulation. … Bird left his Long Hill, New Jersey home on that Saturday, telling his wife he was going for a walk. An intentional disappearance is incompatible with the fact that he left the house wearing a bright red jacket and without his life-sustaining medicine he was required to take daily as a result of a liver transplant.
As GP points out all this happened in one 18 day stretch. Could be coincidence, of course. Maybe it’s even probable. But it’s very intriguing.
Cuddle up of the couch, download the story and read the whole thing.
Bird’s body was found in the Passaic River months later. Accidental drowning, they said.
Pretty sketchy reporting on how Broeksmit’s body ended up at a high school. CBS News reports, “School police said that they had no video that shows him coming onto campus and are unsure how long he’d been on the campus.”
But a local outlet called the L.A. Taco adds these details:
A source who says they work at the school tells L.A. TACO:
“All the teachers were shocked when they quickly removed the body and admin told us to hold classes as usual.” At this point, the faculty were under a mistaken belief that the body belonged to “a homeless man who died of natural causes.”
“We all thought it was ridiculous to have students on campus but once the kids were there, it was a done deal,” the sources continues. Once they learned the corpse belonged to a whistle blower in a Deutsche Bank corruption case involving Trump, they say, “It was even more odd that very little investigation was done and the entire area was quickly pressure washed.”
Here’s something odder. It comes from Twitter, so buyer beware. But here goes.
Per my Google Maps, 642 Moulton Ave. in L.A. seems to be a series of artists’ spaces. Might not be connected to the string below.
UPDATE from the Forensic News reporter:
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