BERLIN (Reuters) – A senior Deutsche Bank regulatory lawyer has been found dead in New York after committing suicide, New York City officials said on Saturday.
Calogero Gambino, 41, was found on the morning of Oct. 20 at his home in the New York borough of Brooklyn and pronounced dead on the scene, according to New York City police.
Gambino was an associate general counsel and a managing director who worked for the German bank for 11 years, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported his death.
He had been closely involved in negotiating legal issues for Deutsche Bank such as a probe by regulators of banks over allegations they manipulated the Libor benchmark interest rate as well as currency markets.
Gambino was also an associate at a private law firm and a regulatory enforcement lawyer between 1997 and 1999, the Journal said, citing Gambino’s LinkedIn profile and conference biographies.
He died by hanging, said Julie Bolcer, spokeswoman for the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner. The manner of death was suicide.
“Charlie was a beloved and respected colleague who we will miss,” said Deutsche Bank in a statement. “Our thoughts and sympathy are with his friends and family.”
Deutsche, Germany’s biggest lender, has already paid 6 billion euros ($7.7 billion) in fines and settlements in the past two and a half years. It expects to post litigation costs of 894 million euros alone for the third quarter of 2014.
Earlier this year, former Deutsche Bank manager William Broeksmit, who had close ties to co-chief executive Anshu Jain, had been found dead at his London home in what also appeared to have been a suicide.
(NYPost) “Who is recommending that I do this? I am supposed to be an independent director and this puts me further into a role aligned with management,” he wrote.
Two years ago, the mystery of the banker suicides hit New York City. Calogero “Charles” Gambino, 41, a married father of two, was Deutsche’s in-house lawyer for 11 years at the bank’s downtown headquarters. He was working on defending the bank against Libor charges and other regulatory probes.
On Oct. 20, 2014, Gambino’s body was found by his wife, Maria, hanging from an upstairs balcony of his Brooklyn home, a neatly kept white brick townhouse in Bay Ridge with ornamental stone fretwork at the roofline. The rope was snaked through the banister and tied off on the newel post on the first floor.
There was no reported note and his tight-knit family has refused to speak about his death.
The Post reached out to the widow numerous times, only to be told by a Deutsche Bank spokesperson that his wife “did not wish to be disturbed and please remember she has two young children.”
The serious-looking, bespectacled banker was a New York success story — a graduate of St. John’s University and St. John’s Law School who spent two years working at the Securities and Exchange Commission as an enforcement lawyer. He then moved to the white-shoe law firm Skadden Arps as an associate for four years before taking the position at Deutsche Bank, where he moved up the ranks to become an associate general counsel and managing director.
In his work as corporate counsel for Deutsche, Gambino had dealings with many of the bank’s European executives — including Michele Faissola and William Broeksmit.
Mostly it was Gambino’s colleague, outside counsel Mark Stein of Simpson Thatcher, who had the direct contact. Stein, who declined to comment, advised Broeksmit and Faissola in 2012 and 2013 on the Libor probes. Deutsche Bank ultimately reached a settlement with the Department of Justice, paying $12 billion in fines, without any admission of liability.
Gambino’s death was ruled a suicide. In his case and in the cases of both Rossi and Broeksmit, probers never looked for, nor discovered, common threads.
But all three men worked for, or did business with, Deutsche Bank. Moreover, it appears that one or more of the scandals that enveloped Deutsche Bank and/or Monte Paschi since the financial crisis had crossed each of their desks.
It remains to be seen if the circumstances leading to Gambino’s and Broeksmit’s deaths will ever be reconsidered. But questions are being asked and answered in Rossi’s case.
Late last year, Italian authorities exhumed his body and reopened their investigation. A ruling on whether Rossi killed himself or was murdered is expected later this month.
