In Germany there was the "Berlin bank scandal" [1], which is one of the reasons of the dire financial situation the city of Berlin is in nowadays (not the only one though). There the head of IT of one of the involved companies, Aubius, was found dead (hanged) in the Grunewald. He was cooperating with law enforcement.
I decided to look for more evidence, and found a previous article David wrote about Val for the NYT. [0]
After reading it, my take is that the comments were hostile, but I don’t suspect any foul play between the two. Just two men who, despite not necessarily respecting the other, worked together to further their own agendas.
An excerpt:
“... the Broeksmit family have warned me that Mr. Broeksmit is not to be trusted, and, well, they might have a point. His drug use has sent him reeling between manias and stupors. He has a maddening habit of leaping to outrageous conclusions and then bending facts to fit far-fetched theories. He fantasizes about seeing his story told by Hollywood, and I sometimes wonder whether he’s manipulating me to achieve that ambition. He can be impatient, erratic and abusive. A few days ago, irate that he was not named in a blurb for my book on Amazon, among other perceived slights, he sent me a string of texts claiming that he’d taken out a brokerage account in my name and traded on secret information I’d supposedly fed him. (This is not true.) A little later, he left me a voice mail message saying it was all a joke.
Why do I put up with this? Because his trove of corporate emails, financial materials, boardroom presentations and legal reports is credible — even if he is not.
“
Probably more relevant that his father was a Deutsch Bank exec who committed suicide, and he seemed to be shopping the leaks around for some time. Or that he was an apparent opioid user.
One wonders who the assassins for hire are. Some powerful people, somewhere, are able to dispatch modern day assassins. Those assassins must have some sort of way of... advertising themselves. It's an interesting problem, since clearly they are doing this for some sort of compensation, i.e. it's a business.
Sometimes, reality is stranger than fiction. It'd be interesting to know what the inner workings look like.
Of course, one can't rule out the mundane explanation, that he went missing with his car keys in the ignition because he decided to get out and vanish for no apparent reason, without informing his girlfriend, and without using any of his credit cards that would immediately lead authorities to his location.
But not if there are any assassins. Of course that's not an option. Not on the internet.
With the exception of the utility the story might provide to finding this guy or his body, it's low value as a news item at the moment. It's fun to speculate, but ultimately pointless until there's more data.
There certainly are assassins. I recommend spending some time on liveleak. You'll get a healthy appreciation for civil society, and see some things you wish you'd never seen.
I remember someone in some sort of law enforcement position in some other country. The security camera footage showed two assassins come in with AKs and mow everyone in the room. The security guard standing by the door tried to run out behind them, but he was shot too. One assassin accidentally shot the other, but not fatally. He limped out. The target's wife was with him, and they both died.
I think the novelty of it is that this sort of thing, to us, only happens in foreign countries, not the mighty united states. Articles such as this one cast doubt on that theory.
My comment is about the lack of hard evidence, not the existence of assassins. While half the internet works themselves into an orgasmic frenzy of conspiracy theories, it's still possible the person in question killed himself, got
lost in the woods, took a road trip without telling anyone, fell down the side of a mountain while hiking, overdosed on heroin, got in a fistfight while drunk...
I wish I knew if that were true. Our world is complex and it's unclear how to calculate the odds of someone in his position killing himself, accidentally falling off a cliff, or being murdered.
Maybe someone assassinated him, maybe he had a heart attack. There are plenty of plausible scenarios.
I doubt multinational corporations are hiring assassins from the dark web.
I suspect if they are using assassins for hire it's most likely a person to person networking effort: They have a rich friend who has ties to shady ex-army guys etc.
No paper trail. No electronic receipts. Nearly no chance of anything legally provable. A minimum of 2+ degrees of separation etc.
I doubt it's Assassins As A Service: it's just knowing how to find a guy who for 100k doesn't ask questions and can't answer any if he's caught.
No one in their right mind would advertise themselves. It all stays "in the family". Do a job for your multi-millionaire friend, if you don't break you become the go-to guy for said friend and his friends.
Alternatively, the assassins/kidnappers are just people down on luck, in debt, addicted to drugs. They take care of the problem, then you take care of them... one way or another.
Oh yeah, I always wondered about those kinds of gangs/cartels that barely even try to hide. Could one just walk in and place an "order"? Seems pretty risky, even if they agree, you might end up owing them (or rather, being owned by them) forever.
I live in a country with extensive cartel activity, and can safely tell you that there's no need for them to hire specialized assassins from some shadowy international network. Instead, they simply use their own psychopathic people to get the job done as requested. Quality of killer (or group of killers) will depend entirely on how difficult the target is. The cartels have MANY members, direct members, who can be found for jobs of variable difficulty: a few random jacked up sicarios to spray a bar full of people where some low-level target who pissed them off is drinking, or for more protected targets in higher-level settings, a couple of ex military or ex police types (also very often employed by cartels as active members) who know how to use weapons well and with more subtlety, and target someone after some careful surveillance. Both happen often and sometimes a mix of the two kinds of killers is used, or other methods such as explosives..
Furthermore, nobody in their right mind would try to use such a favor against their cartel bosses as leverage. The police would likely never touch the case or care about it at all and the cartel bosses are in any case usually well known in ways that make new accusations of murder irrelevant, and very easily capable of butchering whichever random hired killer did indeed try to threaten them somehow.
Damn, I'm from ex-USSR but even we never had this kind of stuff (Russia did, however).
Bribes, intimidation and murder happened quite often (and still does), but it's hidden, few dare to do it out in the open, in broad daylight and/or with rifles/explosives.
Silver lining of the police being the biggest gang, heh.
Probably the number of times using the dark web for an assassin immediately gets people arrested?
It's basically all honeypots.
It doesn't make sense to generate a potential electronic trail when you can keep it all person to person, hard to prove and distant from yourself without needing to invoke the technical knowhow of not getting caught on the dark web.
Rich people tend to hang out toghether at the same places. Some get rich by having companies, others get rich by doing illegal stuff. So you could definitely find the right connections in those circles if you want to.
It's hard to imagine a situation in which a normal person would want to find a hitman where some law enforcement agency dedicated to posing as false customers wouldn't be able to find them first. And the opposite side of the equation seems like it would be easy to cover as well, with law enforcement posing as hitmen. Just ask Tim Lambesis how the process plays out.
I imagine that the only way that it works in practicality is through existing networks among extremely high net worth or government entities. I don't imagine it's easily possible to enter the network inorganically.
It describes Broeksmit as "an unemployed rock musician with a history of opioid abuse and credit card theft," so his disappearance could have any number of explanations.
The NYT is mostly shills and this is a perfect example...puts out an article discrediting the whistleblower rather than frame the negativity towards the big corrupt bank with lots of NYC connections.
And now you use the shill hit piece as a source when the guy goes missing.
Yup, the multiple felonious banks like DB, HSBC, and JPM that are still allowed to operate with slaps on wrists from US/German/British/etc regulators that are fractions of the profits received (and continued cash flows) from felonious activities all trace back to Russian control. No other explanations/theories of what is going on here are possible.
No I mean all world banks have a presence in NYC bc it's the finance capital of the world. NY Times in reality is a shill shop who caters to big money and in-vogue politics.
Russia's not as bad as the media makes them out to be.
I read David Enrich's book, Dark Towers. It was an easy read and he developed a close relationship with Val because he became a great source for the book. The book gave me the impression that Val likes spontaneity and doesn't seem to have much direction in his life.
This has a similar vibe to me.
[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/finance-scandal-did-berlin-bank-use-en...