[inaudible conversations] welcome to politics politics and prose so we will jump right in. Please silence your cell phones we will be recording audio and video. To ask the same questions there will be a signing behind the register and then he will sign them and just prop them against the surface when were done thank you. Finance editor from the New York Times reporter and editor at the wall street journal david enrich before that and a reporter in new york winning numerous journalism awards previously the author of the Spider Network how the scheming bankers pulled off in history which was the book of the year so his newest book dark towers donald trump and the epic trail of deception and its relationship with us president and then to demonstrate the evolution and character to become the global face of financial malfeasance please welcome david enrich to politics and prose. [applause] hello. Ive had a lot of book events im not kidding six people in the room this is awesome so i will take a picture because my wife will not believe this. [laughter] so thank you all for coming. It is extremely gratifying to see a turnout like this for a book about a European Bank nobody has ever heard of. [laughter] for those books people do not read to start that will just take a couple of minutes just to set the scene and i will explain why and how i got to writing this book in the first place. Little before 1 00 p. M. Into a drizzle the type that earns the reputation during the long winter months the man looked around sloan square this sunday 2014 he did not feel well he had woken up groggy and with that on his way to chelsea jilted by a surge of negative energy. And head down in a futile attempt to stay dry the last time he saws parents was a month earlier before they set off for the caribbean. He just turned 38 while a talented musician with 34 albums to his name then charttoppers but his father was a Senior Executive at Deutsche Bank one of the largest Financial Institutions tall and skinny and scraggly and to be determined not to get in your full not to look like a slob he wore a blue blazer and slacks and a black cap at exactly 1 00 oclock he arrived at the wall that snaked around the gallery and was notorious for never being on time but here he was with is obsessively punctual parents are nowhere to be seen. Where are you. She did not respond with the boutiques over by shops to come across the bookstore with the coffee table books about art and culture for the past couple years with those rare first editions and was so into the hobby to do volunteer work to gather unwanted books from the estate sales from ed children. Searching for hidden gems the bookstore is mostly empty. And then something caught his eye priced at 650 pounds a limited Edition Iconic photos of the be those including the Paris Hotel Room and was so metallic he could see the reflection he started to daydream about his parents buying it for him as a belated Birthday Gift but the call was from a blocked number pretty sure the housekeeper was on the line emergency emergency she shouted. Your father. He could not get a coherent answer though i thank you could think at his parents flat was a mile away so he went outside and hailed black cap the ten minute drive felt endless they seem to crawl through the streets with the locals that hurried along the sidewalks to keep pace with the taxi. Val went through the scenes maybe the father was hurt maybe it was locked out of his computer. And then allow cars to park on the side no addition to the bmws and mopeds he paid the cabbie and sprinted across the street his parents lived on a flat on the third floor and then went up two flights of stairs the door to his parents apartment was wide open in the middle of the hallway bill brooks was lying on his back and neck brace tilted his head back at an unnatural angle. And for the dark wooden floor head resting on the pillow next to her husbands face she was wailing what the f is this he screamed . He killed himself. He hung himself with daisies leash. That is the upsetting way to start the talk nine days after that i lived in london at the time and was a journalist working for the wall street journal and i got in touch with with val because i heard about the suicide as a Senior Executive at Deutsche Bank there were rumors flying that he had committed suicide in part in to be extremely close to the bank ceo at the time and i wanted to figure out what was going on. They had three children but val was his step one the stepson so we divide up the task of calling the widow and the colleagues with my colleagues fell had a very heavy social Media Presence was in a band and the band that i was active on twitter and val was a character he was posting a lot of pictures about doing wild and crazy stuff like drugs and vaguely pornographic pictures and was completely inappropriate there was an email address so i emailed and introduce myself i am looking into your fathers death of trying to understand what happened we had been a journalist for about 14 years and i had written a lot of emails of that nature and i have been conditioned to never get a response in that situation to send that initial because the tragedy but that was my opening salvo to make additional phone calls and send emails. And low and behold he responded and said what is it you want to know about my father . I said i heard rumors about what happened with his dad and then agreed to get on the phone with me a few days later and said that i had to stop resting the family and that was fair but that started a journey that led to this book because it turned out val had gotten on his dads computer very shortly after to figure out the passwords to his personal email address and inside of those would eventually find his father was sending and receiving thousands of emails in so doing research into who bill grossman was and to become the protagonist of this book he was american a ministers son and became a banker but not your normal reckless aggressive testosterone banker much more cerebral thoughtful and conservative and the first at Merrill Lynch we get started in the banking world as a man with the ethical compass so Everyone Wants to go go go and step on the gas shoot first and ask quotient and ask questions later this looks a little too easy should we ask more questions . To be smart enough and respected enough so what happened at Deutsche Bank over the years it is a parable for what happened in the Banking Industry so the banks went from being these companies to serve their customers. Not only their customers but the communities in which they operated, their employees, a government and shareholders and investors and owners. With a hold wide range of constituencies to one very narrow which was shareholders. That meant to do whats best for shareholders that meant maximizing profits as quickly as possible so with former colleagues and then got to know through reading emails to curtail the risktaking to remember the fundamental question is this best for clients and why are we doing it . And i keep thinking about this because the 2014 and 2015 Deutsche Bank word is an Important Financial Institution at the time but i was working for an american newspaper and this is a german European Bank no one really cared. And then and 2016 a certain someone started to run for president in a certain someone had a very special relationship with Deutsche Bank. Donald trump was completely offlimits to the mainstream financial world because he had a nasty tendency to default on every loan he ever received someone banks are looking for customers to have that well documented pattern is normally not your first point of call. Thanks would not touch him then to hear crazy stories of the great links they would go to avoid even his friends wouldnt touch him. There is one anecdote that i love see it based on what we know about trump these days but it is at bear stearns. It used to be a wall street bank but then it collapsed. So even bear stearns wouldnt touch donald trump and they knew is one of the top executives with ace greenberg to use that to bear stearns would let him 100 million and so the banker talks to donald trump is not a crazy pitch but as trump so they wont lend him anything so he says he will call you back when we make a decision and he will not call him back because trump is smart enough to get the message the lack of a return phone call that means we will not be loaning you 10 million the banker doesnt know how to say no so he took ace greenberg out to breakfast one day and said ace, why can i get my phone calls returned cracks its so rude so ace says why are you not returning his phone calls that is so rude and the banker says we could solve this by letting him 100 million or what you want me to do . He says obviously we are new not doing this so the banker thinks about it and finally decides he has a plan. He calls back donald trump and says im so sorry i havent returned your phone call is very rude but we cannot make the loan and trump says why . Because ace greenberg doesnt want to. [laughter] it gets better and ace greenberg or trumps is what are you talking about . We are buddies i just had breakfast with him this morning and the banker says that is the problem. He came back and said there are four people we can do business with henry kravitz, bill gates, warren buffett, and donald trump. [laughter] and trump pauses and thinks about it and says i can see that. That makes sense. [laughter] i heard that story and i thought to myself so to discount the value of the Investment Bankers provide and this gave me a whole new appreciation for Investment Bankers. Anyway Deutsche Bank did not have the scruples of bear stearns with whom to lend it to and was so eager to develop a foothold in a presence on wall street to pick up the scraps that other banks wouldnt touch so donald trump was one of those scraps starting in the late 19 nineties started to make about 2 billion of loans to trip over the next 20 years. He still owed 350 million Deutsche Bank by far was the largest creditor with all of the marquee projects that used to be the old cost one post Office Building and i was the trump hotel. So looking back at this relationship everything i learned about his fathers career and to be a voice for conservativism and management with this out of control bank that this was the vehicle to tell the story of how this random obscure german bank that nobody could pronounce became not only son ominous with financial destruction and economic doom and mayhem but to propel to the white house so i spent the past two years primarily focused on the trump relationship so i am a nerd i spent ten years on Deutsche Bank so that such a pleasure to have a way to tell this story now amazingly that people seem to care. So thats my thing i would be happy to answer questions im sure people have a lot of questions about trump and i have a lot of answers. [applause] given your research on the origins and history of Deutsche Bank is it your view that the banks financing of auschwitz is crematoriums. Is not quite that simple but supporting the nazis was much more than financing auschwitz and with that chemical factory that supplies the poison gas. Yes you know this Deutsche Bank was the company that the jewish owned businesses and took over the local banks off the customer ranks and it took the goal the art of the jewelry boxes so in fairness what large German Companies were doing to survive at the time so thats not you need to do something evil but it is clearly a party to genocide and thats with the benefit that doesnt explain it away but the reality is we dont know for a fact we knew it was happening but i think we can apply the reasonable standard to this looking back. One of the Board Members was the ceo of Deutsche Bank. How could he not have known . But it is safe under the assumption that Deutsche Bank do about this and did it anyway and it is dangerous to make too many historical comparisons that is in comparable but it is true there is a 150 year history it is the 150th anniversary by the way over and over they have done the expedient thing to increase profits and that has led them to commit many many times per take on partaking of genocide is uniquely evil and generally it is because they rush to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible consequences be damned. Thank you. Thats probably more than what you are looking for. First of all thank you for writing the book of a financial regulator and somebody has needed to tell the story for far too long. I like to ask a question that im sure you are aware was active on social media that youre not actively portraying his version of events so thats the question of Money Laundering to pay off trump. He is pretty adamant you dont touch on that. Could you comment on that. Im going to answer your question i promise but let me just a back a little bit first so we go back about six years. One of the things im good at his people who werent supposed to talk is talk im not good at a lot of things but thats what i am good out one good at. So val far and away no close competitors to the most intense source relationship i have ever had its partly because i have known in the context of this awful tragedy and also because val is a complicated person shoved into foster care at a very young age and basically left there by his family between ages five through nine at his formative years and has had a lot of problems with Substance Abuse and addiction so he is the troubled complicated person to have a tremendous amount of respect for and sympathy for we are not getting along that well right now. I will be honest thats an understatement. In october i wrote a story for the New York Times that described that relationship that i alluded to with a history of Substance Abuse and credit card theft and one of the things that was motivating val is that he really wanted to make a name for himself he was trying to get a film deal. He lives in l. A. Now so i told him then that i actually regret what i wrote it was accurate and honest but it was a little too hard and a little too mean. I told him im sorry and i am. I told him im sorry and i am. Is i has a deutsche bad trump has spent much of the last probably five years or four years of searching for proof of this elusive rumor that its not really Deutsche Bank that is financially supporting trumpeters russia and there is a tremendous amount of smoke and tons of circumstantial evidence and everyone is looking for the fire. To stand here and say i found that i didnt and neither did the news outlets that hes been talking to. Its the most accurate description of circumstantial evidence is and how to interpret it but if you are reading things like the kremlin bank that was financing the loans, that may be true. I wish i did have proof of it. There is a lot of news about the tax return that theyve been subpoenaed and you would imagine they have a lot of financial documents so what is your take on whether they are going to produce them. They probably dont have them. This is another one where my reporting and my life is intersected. Theres a couple of congressional committees here that have the Financial Service committee and House Intelligence Committee that are both conducting investigations that involve Deutsche Bank and its relationship with donald trump and both of those committees last spring were seeking everything they had on donald trump which includes and that includes his tax returns and any Financial Statements they have. During the period when all of these loans were made as a part of the Due Diligence process. Its the first several pages of i cant even remember the formula, its been a long day but coming back from 2011 to 2014. But these people have seen them in the banks possession and then in the Court Hearing as they sued the bank to prevent it from complying thereve been legal wrangling going on. He saluted them to block them from compliance and so in the Court Hearing the lawyers said we do have some tax returns, but we dont have the personal tax returns and this left me scratching my head because i talked to people who had said they have seen them, so i called were actually texted one of these people and i said you are not going to believe what happened in court. They said they dont have them and he said, im not even going to say it because we have cameras here that there were bue obscene words he used and he said they are lighting. I dont know if they destroyed them or returned them. It sounds like they gave them back and i dont know what would usually happen in these circumstances but usually what would happen if the client has the right to request they be returned. I dont know when that happened. Certainly in the past couple of years, but i dont know if that predates or postdates. I imagined but i dont think even reckless criminal Deutsche Bank would do that after a federal subpoena, but i dont know. Anyway, point being it sounds like they do not have the personal tax returns. They do have some that include the family members. The tax returns i always thoug thought. They are not going to show the sources of income or the business partners. They are not going to give the view of the assets he has that are valuable in the countries outside of the united sta