Then, one early spring day four years ago, Walter Krueger had lost it all. The investigation was born from a trivial act of spite—a low-level clerk, terminated for failing a drug test, had before he was sacked manipulated routing numbers and forged his supervisor’s signature, having the effect of diverting the bank’s entire quarterly tax disbursement to a vice president’s personal brokerage account. The mischief was quickly sorted, but not before the bank examiners had stuck their noses in. During the course of their inquiry Krueger fell under separate scrutiny, in particular his dealings with a wealthy Israeli, rumored to be an arms dealer, who generated great sums of dollars to be legitimized in the form of Swiss government bonds and U.S. Treasury certificates. With the bank regulators circling, Krueger was called to a meeting with the firm’s board—his father-in-law centered between four equally unsmiling men. Krueger walked out of that meeting unemployed. He was permitted by the bank to keep the contents of his desk, and by his father-in-law to keep his wife and children. The client in question was quietly asked to do business elsewhere, and the sated bank examiners flapped onward to the next carcass. With Walter Krueger sacrificed, everyone went back to the business at hand.

This was where Krueger had surprised many of those who knew him. At the age of forty-one, and shored comfortably by his wife’s fortune, he could well have retired to the chalet with Greta and their six children. He did not. Perhaps harboring an ill vision of some kind of Von Trapp existence in the Tyrolean Alps, Walter Krueger took a different path. If his reputation was ruined, his qualifications remained intact, and he struck out to open his own private bank, leasing a small suite in a bland building in the shadows of the Bahnhofstrasse giants.

His first client, by no coincidence, was a wealthy Israeli looking for less obvious rinse cycles for his soiled assets. His name was Benjamin Grossman, and he was indeed an arms merchant. Krueger set out by retaining a good lawyer, actually an entire firm, and was soon testing the curbs of law and privacy to manage Grossman’s money. It was a delicate operation, but the fees and margins Krueger demanded, and that Grossman allowed, were percentages that would have given his father-in-law palpitations.