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    Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
    Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
    Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
    Audiobook13 hours

    Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction

    Written by David Enrich

    Narrated by BJ Harrison

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    “In Dark Towers, David Enrich tells the story of how one of the world’s mightiest banks careened off the rails, threatening everything from our financial system to our democracy through its reckless entanglement with Donald Trump. Darkly fascinating and yet all too real, it’s a tale that will keep you up at night.”
       — John Carreyrou, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author of Bad Blood

    A searing exposé of the most scandalous bank in the world, including its shadowy ties to Donald Trump’s business empire

    On a rainy Sunday in 2014, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank was found hanging in his London apartment. Bill Broeksmit had helped build the 150-year-old financial institution into a global colossus, and his sudden death was a mystery, made more so by the bank’s efforts to deter investigation. Broeksmit, it turned out, was a man who knew too much.

    In Dark Towers, award-winning journalist David Enrich reveals the truth about Deutsche Bank and its epic path of devastation. Tracing the bank’s history back to its propping up of a default-prone American developer in the 1880s, helping the Nazis build Auschwitz, and wooing Eastern Bloc authoritarians, he shows how in the 1990s, via a succession of hard-charging executives, Deutsche made a fateful decision to pursue Wall Street riches, often at the expense of ethics and the law.

    Soon, the bank was manipulating markets, violating international sanctions to aid terrorist regimes, scamming investors, defrauding regulators, and laundering money for Russian oligarchs. Ever desperate for an American foothold, Deutsche also started doing business with a self-promoting real estate magnate nearly every other bank in the world deemed too dangerous to touch: Donald Trump. Over the next twenty years, Deutsche executives loaned billions to Trump, the Kushner family, and an array of scandal-tarred clients, including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

    Dark Towers is the never-before-told saga of how Deutsche Bank became the global face of financial recklessness and criminality—the corporate equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. It is also the story of a man who was consumed by fear of what he’d seen at the bank—and his son’s obsessive search for the secrets he kept.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateFeb 18, 2020
    ISBN9780062878847
    Author

    David Enrich

    David Enrich is the Business Investigations Editor at the New York Times and the #1 bestselling author of Dark Towers. He previously was an editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2016 Gerald Loeb Award for feature writing. His first book, The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off One of the Greatest Scams in History, was short-listed for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. Enrich grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated from Claremont McKenna Collee in California. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

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    Reviews for Dark Towers

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Quite a story. Helps explain relationship of DJT and Russia.

      4 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I can’t wait until part II plays out! Whether you like the facts or not, This a well researched book for a change.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Very in depth, but made me very distrustful of banking industry!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Fascinating account of a murky area and shows why legal investigators should drag all this into the light.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Complete mainstream brainwashing author. Its crazy how everyone can create a narrative and sell It in a book.
    • 1/5
      Liberal. Not interested. In another political coup, had enough of democrats investigations, rather read about their corruption
    • 4/5
      Deutsche Bank has loaned Donald Trump a lot of money. Some of it was unsecured. Some with his “personal guarantee.” Given that no major U.S. bank would be eager to loan Trump or members of his family money that gives the reader some idea of the judgement and decision making at Deutsche Bank.

      As I was reading of the corruption, bad judgements, poor management and greed at the Bank, I wondered how it has survived. Their technology and banking systems were described as antiquated. Employees were using Lotus Notes and Excel spreadsheets to track data. Sounds like one could not trust the accuracy of the financial reports of the corporation.

      So many suicides, divorces, drugs and aberrant behavior by executives of the bank! The author has detailed the “behind the scenes” behaviors at the bank.

      If you are a shareholder of the bank, this book is a horror story. Very well written. Entertaining.

    • 5/5
      Although the title references Donald Trump, his relationship with Deutsche Bank is not the main element in this story of the bank's rise and fall. It's primarily structured around the tale of one of its executives, Bill Broeksmit, whose 2014 suicide ultimately helped expose much of the bank's malfeasance.

      It's briskly written and doesn't get caught up in technical details of derivatives, credit-default swaps, and the Libor. Instead, Enrich structures the book around personalities: Broeksmit; his Merrill Lynch colleague and friend Edson Mitchell, who helped build the trading section of DB; Anshu Jain, a colleague and later DB's chair; Josef Ackermann, who became the leading figure (then CEO) at DB and pushed the bank into increasingly risky practices. His demand for short term profit above all else drove traders into creative strategies to hide debt.

      Trump's story, meanwhile, is partly largely known: he managed to get Deutsche Bank to loan him money when no one else would, even after he defaulted on loans with them. And in return, when he was elected, investigations into their behavior went away. There's also a hint that the Trump/Kushner connections with the Kennedy family (Justice Kennedy's son Justin worked for Deutsche Bank) may have played a part in the justice's decision to retire, though this is not explicitly stated.

      This book will not give you confidence in bank governance, our own watchdogs, or the finance industry.
    • 3/5
      Probably like a 3.5. Some swings and misses, but overall a fast, enlightening and infuriating read
    • 3/5
      A rambling hatchet piece on the big bad bank Deutsche and its nefarious deeds and criminal minds that masquerade as our banking system. And actually there probably is a lot of truth here. Deutsche might be the poster boy for bad bank behavior but let's face many banks do the same things. And the thing is they get away with it usually. Or at least no one goes to prison.So the book is a never ending compilation of the misdeeds and mayhem that was instrumental in several deaths amongst the bank officials. Not to mention the billions taken down in bad play derivatives they concocted and pedaled to the unsuspecting. Then of course there is the Trump tie in. So they go hand in hand supposedly the corrupt leading the corrupt, except it appears Trump got the better of it; so far at least. It will be interesting if the Southern District of New York hands down indictments in the near future, stay tuned.
    • 3/5
      Interesting read covering all things Deutsche Bank from its inception to approximately 2019. The chapters were short and punchy, and overall it was far more readable than I expected. It can be pretty depressing, though--the bank has always been rife with criminality, and it undoubtedly still is.
    • 5/5
      This is the book Trump should have tried to ban. Forget Bolton et al. It reveals the incestuous relationship between a bank, Russia, money laundering, and its most famous client. The bank that Donald Trump came to rely on to subsidize his shrinking empire after banks in the US refused to loan him money, having been stiffed by him too often. He had a habit of just not repaying the loans.(A running joke is that Donald had written many books on making deals and business, but they all ended with Chapter 11.)The bank itself, after having been taken over by US traders, was getting into trouble by emphasizing short-term profits through ever-increasing levels of risk. Traders were paid by the estimated return on a bet, usually using derivatives which formerly had been better used to lower risk. They would often over-estimate the return knowing that their compensation would not be adjusted downward if the bet failed to return their estimate. Many were earning millions every year in bonuses.Steve Bannon, quoted in Fire and Fury, noted that the Trump family was all about cash. Eric Trump had been quoted as saying they could get all the money they needed from Russia, and Bannon (who himself has been charged with stealing money from Wall donors) saw the insatiable appetite for money that the Trump family had. Bannon"s story was interesting in itself. He had been a trader at Goldman Sachs, but his father had suffered financial collapse in 2008 and that turned Bannon into a flaming revenge artist vowing to get the eastern bankers, i.e. a standard economic populist. He allied himself with Trump's populist rhetoric.It gets even messier as Enrich lays out the connections between Justin Kennedy to the Trump family. In case anyone has forgotten, Brett Kavanaugh clerked for Anthony Kennedy, Justin's father, who interceded with Trump on Kavanaugh’s behalf. The banks affairs became so entangled that there were several suicides of bank officers and lawyers who despaired of unethical and illegal machinations. Greed and money laundering would appear to be at the heart of much modern finance and Trump was right in the middle.The all consuming emphasis on profit meant that traders would go anywhere, to any country, that needed hard currency. Since most of the world's trades were conducted in US dollars, much of those transactions occurred through New York. And since Deutsche was trading with rogue countries under US sanction, like Iran, Syria, and Russia, interest was aroused in intelligence and legal quarters. When it became apparent that US soldiers were being killed in Iraq by weapons used by terrorists being supported by Iran, the families of the dead soldiers filed suit against Deutsche. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, money laundering became endemic and an audit revealed that Russian mafia money was pouring into the US through Deutsche's Eastern Europe connections, most of it being washed in New York's lucrative luxury real estate market. Guess who was a big player in that market? After the crash of 2008, caused in large part by the risky bets using unusual financial instruments of big banks, especially Deutsche, country leaders looked to those bank leaders for advice. In Germany, Merkle went to Ackerman, head of Deutsche whose advice profited no one more than Deutsche itself. Without going into too much detail and having no desire to spoil a great story, thousands of emails from a Deutsche banker who had committed suicide fell into the hands of reporters. They revealed that the loans Trump had personally guaranteed (meaning the bank could go after his personal wealth should he default on the huge number of loans he had with them) had been layered off to a Russian bank, meaning that the loans were actually coming from the Russians. (Remember that Eric Trump had bragged his family could get all the money they wanted from the Russians.) So you had a situation where a new American president owed millions of dollars to a Russian bank that was controlled by the KGB.A fascinating, if disturbing, read. Stay tuned, the story continues.
    • 5/5
      Outstanding book by David Enrich the Finance Editor of The New York Times. He describes the long history of corruption by the German Deutsche Bank headquartered in Frankfort, Germany. American bankers were hired to work in Germany. The German bank set up opertations in the United States and other countries all over the world. When Donald Trump could no longer borrow money from other banks Deutsche Bank continued to loan him millions of dollars on terms very favorable to Trump. The Kushner family also borrowed money for their over-priced purchase of the 666 building in New York City from this bank. Justin Kennedy, son of Supreme Court Justice Kennedy worked for the bank and had personal and business relationships with the Trump family. I read an Audiobook version from the library and at times followed along in the hardback version.
    • 3/5
      This book by the finance reporter for the New York Times tells the story of Deutsche Bank, from its origins as a sleepy provincial European bank to a power player on the world stage, as one of the most aggressive banks in the financial markets. The book opens with the 2014 suicide of bank executive Bill Broeksmith, and the implication is there that there will be a big reveal about the cause of the suicide as it relates to Deutsche Bank. The big reveal never comes, although it is clear that Broeksmith was troubled about his possible culpability for some of the bank's malfeasance.Much of the book details the efforts of Broeksmith's stepson Val over the four years following the suicide to instigate official investigations into the suicide. At the time of the suicide, Val, who was in his late 30's, a drug addict who had never held a job and was being supported by his parents, downloaded some Deutsche Bank information from Broeksmith's computer. Over the next several years, we follow Val in and out of rehab, through various scams (and outright thefts from his mother) as he tries to peddle information to the likes of Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS and Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee. I'm really sorry that the book focused so much on Val and his shenanigans, as I think it detracted from the seriousness of the topic.Of course, some of the present interest in Deutsche Bank is generated by the fact that it has made extensive loans to Donald Trump, as well as to the Kushner family, and also has extensive dealings with many Russian oligarchs. I don't think I learned much from this book on these topics that I have not already seen in the newspaper. So, although Trump's name appears in the book's subtitle, there isn't a lot of new information here.The author writes well, but this just isn't the book I wanted to read.2 1/2 stars
    • 5/5
      This is a well-researched and insightful look at one of the world's largest banks that found itself involved in scandal after scandal, including its ties to Donald Trump and his various family members. Deutsche Bank was involved with manipulating currencies markets, violating sanctions, laundering money (especially with Russians), deceiving customers and improperly peddling mortgage bonds. They became Donald Trump's bank when no other bank would touch him, especially after his four bankruptcies and numerous defaults on loans, as well as Jared Kushner's bank when other banks would not touch him due to his father's imprisonment for tax evasion and witness tampering. Reading this book just provided me with more information and reasons not to support Donald Trump.
    • 4/5
      Greed, fueled by corrupt practices and cover-ups, was the main motivation behind Deutsche Bank’s success. Enrich’s thorough accounting of this history leaves one wondering how this could have continued throughout the latter part of the 20th and the early 21st Centuries despite being bookended by two of the most egregious financial decisions of the period—to fund the concentration camp at Auschwitz and to act as a conduit for the Russian funding of Donald Trump.For those without a background in finance, the book can be a little dense. Often it seems like these convoluted practices are intentionally obscure to hide their true motivations—to create wealth out of whole cloth and to reward the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. There are no heroes in these dark tales. Instead we are introduced to people who will do just about anything to climb the corporate ladder, as well as to accrue more wealth and power for themselves and DB. None seem to have any remorse for their behavior. Indeed, even the suicides are unaccompanied by clear admissions of guilt or remorse. Instead one is left with the unsettling thought that they may have actually been cover-up conspiracies. In the final analysis, the book leaves one with the disturbing realization that this kind of thing continues unabated today.
    • 5/5
      Of all the tell-all Trump books, this one gets closest to revealing the details of his habit of borrowing from and stiffing lenders. The author shows how a mid-level German institution, the very same one that funded the building of Auschwitz and other Nazi horrors, gets seduced by the massive profits of the warped destructos on Wall Street and tries to emulate them. Caught up in the frenzy is a well-meaning internal regulator, Bill Broeksmit, who fails to put a stop to the Libor rate setting scandal of 2005-2009 that netted the mastermind a cool $100 million bonus (and five years in jail plus permanent banishment from banking). After Broeksmit's suicide, his n'er-do-well son Val tries to find out why his stepfather kept leaving and returning to Deutsche in various audit roles despite his fear of investigation and prosecution and his troubled conscience. Val contacts author Enrich (what an ironic name) and shares the information he finds, including the suicide notes. Enrich, in his role as Finance Editor for the New York Times, had already been looking into Deutsche's singular role as the ONLY bank that would lend to Donald Trump. Enrich also shares some details on the connection between the timing of the resignation of former SCOTUS Justice Anthony Kennedy, his longtime Deutsche executive son Justin Kennedy, Ivanka Trump, and Brett Kavanaugh, but this depths of this travesty remains unrevealed. And so do Trump's tax returns, no thanks to Deutsche lying about whether or not they had them, which they certainly would have in order to have loaned him $300 million. Other travesties include Trump's evil influence over all the departments in the government that are supposed to monitor financial institutions, including the CFPB and the Justice Department, where two prosecutors were previously employed by Deutsche are charged with investigating that same bank.All in all, there's a lot of information shared in a very readable fashion, but Enrich does not scream loud enough for me.
    • 3/5
      dull book, he does nothing with the son of the hero. who remains a drug obsesssed boy 'until the end. and who cannot turn his fathers private notes over to anyone who knows how to use them,