An electrician’s odd plot to make $607,933.50.
By Thomas RogersThe bombs were ready to detonate when the black-and-yellow bus pulled into L’Arrivée Hotel & Spa, on the outskirts of Dortmund, Germany, on April 11, 2017. The driver, Christian Schulz, had arrived to take the players of Borussia Dortmund, one of the country’s best soccer teams, to their Champions League tournament quarterfinal in nearby Signal Iduna Park. Dortmund was set to play AS Monaco and hoped to move a step closer to Europe’s most prestigious club trophy.
Shortly before 7 p.m., the players climbed aboard the bus. On schedule, Schulz set off on the 15-minute drive to the stadium near the center of Dortmund, a city of 600,000 that’s considered the faded capital of the German rust belt. Matthias Ginter, a soft-spoken 23-year-old center back, settled into a seat in the rear. Since joining the team in 2014, Ginter’s strong play has helped keep it near the top ranks of European soccer. He’d already lived through one of the most traumatic recent moments in the sport. Two years earlier, Ginter was playing in an exhibition match between the German and French national teams in Paris when three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the stadium, marking the beginning of a terror attack that killed 130 people across the city. He rationalized it as the kind of thing that happens only once in a person’s life.
The three bombs in Dortmund were filled with metal pins and hidden on the side of the driveway, about midway between the hotel and the street. As the bus approached the road, the bombs exploded, sending a cloud of heat, dirt, and metal shooting through the air. One of the bus’s windows was punctured, and glass splinters flew through the interior. A pin shot into a headrest near center back Marc Bartra, barely missing his head. Schulz stepped on the gas and stopped a few hundred feet away. It seemed like a miracle: Aside from Bartra, who was put into an ambulance with an injured wrist, nobody was hurt. Most of the pins were scattered across the pavement.
No soccer team had ever been assaulted like this. In previous months in Germany, Islamic State terrorists had set off a suicide bomb at a music festival, killed nine people with a truck, and attacked train passengers with an ax. Two years earlier, a match between Germany and the Netherlands was called off after Israeli intelligence suggested an imminent bombing by Islamic extremists. Many in the German media assumed the same groups were behind this attack.
As police arrived, they had no way of knowing the bomber was in L’Arrivée’s restaurant, eating steak and sweet potatoes.
The lead investigator from the State Office of Criminal Investigation got to the scene a few hours later. “There were a lot of places where there might be clues, because everything had been launched far by the explosion,” he said later in courtroom testimony. They found remnants of an antenna and a cellphone. Each of the three bombs had consisted of a self-made explosive, 30 metal pins, and an electronic fuse that could be triggered from a distance—and which could have been assembled by an Islamic terrorist.The search also uncovered three copies of a letter near the bomb site claiming the attack on behalf of Islamic State. But it perplexed investigators. It didn’t have an Islamic State logo. It was riddled with simple spelling errors yet used an advanced vocabulary, as if a native German speaker might have written it with the intention of sounding foreign.
A passerby came across a charred site in the nearby woods where the attacker had apparently assembled the bombs. The location was burned, seemingly to hide evidence, but the site was also oddly obvious. Another letter appeared on a far-left website claiming the attack had been carried out by “anti-fascist” activists. The Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel got an email stating that the bombing had been a far-right attack on “multicultural” Germany. Police searched the apartment of an Iraqi man suspected of being an Islamic State follower and interrogated a Middle Eastern man with a L’Arrivée umbrella at home, but none of the leads went anywhere.
For Dortmund players, the period after the bombing was a blur of anxiety. Ginter said he considered giving up the sport altogether. “I was worried whether it would be worth going through this risk over and over again,” he said. Management told players that the quarterfinal could be delayed by only a day. “Nobody from the team wanted to play the next day,” Ginter recalled. But, he said, “it was a Champions League quarterfinal.” Dortmund lost 3-2.
The German media debated who would deign to attack such a German institution as soccer. Founded in Dortmund in 1962, the German Bundesliga is among the most popular and profitable leagues in the world. The team, known as BVB in Dortmund, is the city’s most cherished icon and one of its few bright spots. Almost the entire city center was obliterated during World War II. On Westenhellweg, Dortmund’s pedestrian shopping street, it’s impossible to walk more than a few feet without seeing the BVB logo.
The city loves soccer so much that in 2009 it was selected to become the home of the German Football Museum. Its four floors hold hundreds of items and one unlikely clue to what motivated the attack: a display showing BVB’s publicly traded shares, with a green line tied to the team’s wins and losses that zigs up and mostly down from 2000 to 2015.
In 2000, Dortmund became the first and only club in Germany to list itself on the stock exchange, in an effort to compete with top-tier teams in signing expensive players. From 1995 to 2017, average player salaries in the Bundesliga almost tripled. BVB’s chief executive officer, Hans-Joachim Watzke, told Business Insider in 2013 that the team was like a factory that churns out victories and “the players are the equivalent of the machines. The only problem is that other teams are constantly trying to buy away the machinery.” Going public gave Dortmund about €140 million ($152 million) to secure its roster.
Shortly after the attack, BVB’s lawyer got an email from a man named Rudolf, a Dortmund fan and sports stock trader in the Austrian town of Bad Ischl. “Yesterday, strange ‘certificate option’ purchases took place on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange,” it began. On the day of the attack, he wrote, someone had purchased 60,000 BVB put options—a wager that the shares would fall below a certain price by a certain date. “A purchase like this is only rationally explainable,” he wrote, “if the buyer was expecting the stock value to go down very rapidly.” This kind of drop, he pointed out, wouldn’t happen if Dortmund lost a game. It would require something more serious, like losing players, or the entire team, in a terror attack.
Most short sellers are just looking for shares they expect to fall and trying to profit from the downward spiral. The classic example is Jim Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates Ltd. (“cynic” is derived from the Greek word kynikos), who shorted Enron Corp. stock before the company collapsed in 2001. But it’s not unheard of for someone to try to create a catalyst to sink stocks. Earlier this year, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman exited a $1 billion bet against Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. after he spent years unsuccessfully trying to convince regulators that it was a pyramid scheme that should be shut down. More recently, Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk alleged that short sellers had hired people to sabotage robots at the company’s Fremont, Calif., plant, though there’s no proof. There may not be a direct parallel to bombing a soccer team, but in February 2017 a Florida man was charged with attempting to blow up Target stores. He planned to tank the company’s stock by putting explosives disguised as food items on shelves.
Investigators contacted Commerzbank AG, the German bank whose subsidiary, Comdirect, processed the options. Dortmund wasn’t a commonly traded stock, so purchasing €40,000 worth of BVB derivatives was unheard of. Put options are high-risk. They decrease in value as they approach their expiration date, in this case in June, and can depreciate dramatically if the stock price rises. Even more suspicious, one of the purchases had been made online only a few hours before the bombing, using an IP address at L’Arrivée Hotel....MUCH MORE
