In 2005, Deutsche Bank was minting money. In just 10 years, this once sleepy lender to German car companies had transformed itself into a force in financial engineering, selling interest-rate swaps, credit derivatives and opaque tax-slashing investment vehicles to the world’s wealthy elite. In the view of one senior executive, it all came down to masterly salesmanship by a single man - Anshu Jain - the chief promoter of the bank’s hottest product: RISK.

“The size just kept mounting and mounting,” this person marveled, referring to the growing demand for some of Deutsche’s raciest fare. And it was Mr. Jain, the bank’s eventual leader, who “dramatically accelerated that delivery of complex structures to the broader client base.”

Today, these words read more like an epitaph than a commemoration. On 12/22/16, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $7.2 billion to settle a claim with the Justice Department that it pushed toxic mortgages on investors in the years leading up to the American housing bust. It was also a fitting coda to a turbulent 21-year run by the trading and banking unit at Deutsche that was inspired by 3 derivative specialists who had been poached from Wall Street years earlier:  (i) Edson Mitchell;  (ii) William Broeksmit;  and, (iii) Anshu Jain.

Edson Mitchell, a charismatic builder of businesses at Merrill Lynch who, in 1995, was given a mandate by Deutsche to create a world-class investment bank in London and spare no expense in doing so. Mr. Mitchell recruited 2 colleagues from Merrill to help him in his task –

• William Broeksmit, a derivatives trader with a risk manager’s nose for spotting financial dangers .
• Anshu Jain, then just coming into his own as a purveyor of the exotic to hedge funds around the world.

Today, 2 of these three men are dead. Mr. Mitchell died in a plane crash in 2000 at age 47. Mr. Broeksmit committed suicide in 2014 at 58. Mr. Jain, 53, was ousted from Deutsche Bank just 3 years after taking the reins. [on 1/3/17, Financialish reports that Mr. Jain will join Cantor Fitzgerald.]

Deutsche has been a primary offender in 2 of the biggest banking scandals of the past decade: (i) promoting toxic mortgages to unwitting investors; and, (ii) manipulating for profit the main lending rate for banks in London. In the process, it has agreed to pay over $9 billion in fines and consumer relief.

The bank has sold tax-reduction products to hedge funds, and is alleged to have helped Russian investors illegally move money overseas. Deutsche also marketed complex derivatives to Europe’s sickliest bank, Monte dei Paschi in Italy. And it is one of the largest lenders to Donald Trump, having extended roughly $300 million in loans to the president-elect’s businesses.

For all its efforts, Deutsche Bank’s trading and banking unit has earned about 20 billion euros in profits since 1995. But as much as 15 billion euros will ultimately be returned to regulators via fines and penalties. That said, the investment bank that Mitchell, Broeksmit and Jain created remains a power in bond and foreign currency trading worldwide.

Now, under the stewardship of Mr. Jain’s successor, CEO John Cryan, Deutsche Bank is being restructured and formatted for simplicity, less risk, better internal controls and reduced reliance on derivatives.