An informant, who reportedly provided federal authorities with a number of confidential documents regarding Deutsche Bank, was discovered dead Monday at a Los Angeles high school campus after missing for a year.
Sgt. Rudy Perez of the Los Angeles School Police Department told the Los Angeles Times that shortly before 7:00 a.m. Monday, the body of Valentin Broeksmit, 46, was discovered by cleaners at Woodrow Wilson High School in the El Sereno neighborhood. He noted that the informant looked homeless.
As the investigation is ongoing, the coroner’s office has not disclosed Broeksmit’s cause of death, though Capt. Kenneth Cabrera of the LAPD said no evidence has pointed to foul play, according to the Times.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) previously said Broeksmit, who reportedly had a history with opioids, went missing over a year ago and was last seen driving a red Mini Cooper on Riverside Drive in Los Angeles at approximately 4:00 p.m. on April 6, 2021. The vehicle was recovered, but his family remained concerned.
The L.A. Times noted:
Broeksmit, the son of Deutsche Bank executive Bill Broeksmit, handed off a trove of confidential documents to federal authorities who were investigating the troubled financial institution, according to a 2019 profile in the New York Times. His father had killed himself in 2014, and Valentin Broeksmit went on to share his father’s files with numerous journalists and government investigators, including a trip to an FBI office in Los Angeles, the newspaper reported.
Authorities on the state and federal levels were looking into the bank’s “long history of criminal misconduct,” as the New York Times reported in 2019. Additionally, authorities were also interested in former President Donald J. Trump’s association with the bank, according to the outlet.
Broeksmit met with FBI agents in February of 2019, where he spent three hours vaping and snacking on raspberry fig bars as the thought of helping federal authorities topple Deutsche Bank executives began to enthrall him, the New York Times reported.
Following the meeting, he feverishly called David Enrich with the outlet and expressed a commitment to being a federal informant.
“I am more emotionally invested in this than anyone in the world,” he told Enrich. “I would love to be their special informer.”
The New York Times noted that the informant also connected with Glenn R. Simpson, who ran Fusion GPS, the company that was the source of the Steele Dossier.
As Breitbart News reported:
The dossier falsely alleged the Trump campaign was engaged in a years-long conspiracy to collude with Russia to win the election, and contained the outlandish claim that Trump had paid prostitutes in Moscow to urinate on a bed in a hotel room once used by Barack and Michelle Obama.
Simpson was in the market for “more dirt” following notoriety from the illegitimate Steele Dosier, the New York Times said. The informant told the outlet that Simpson agreed to pay $10,000 to Broeksmit for the Deutsche Bank documents. The pair met in the Virgin Islands, where they began scouring the files that failed to produce any significant revelations, according to the Times.
After Broeksmit brought the documents to a Senate investigator and later to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office — only after taking a snort of heroin — the files ended up with agents at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the Times said. Deutsche Bank was fined $41 million months later for infractions made under Broeksmit’s father’s department, though it is unconfirmed if Broeksmit’s documents were the catalyst for the repercussions, per the outlet.