Amazing Investigation: How a Real Life James Bond Got Whacked by a Bag Lady Assassin

“Deak was incredibly charismatic, the ultimate old world aristocrat,” said Kuhlmann. “He had this imperial bearing and yet was very charming and equally comfortable with high financiers and arms dealers.”

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As the hard-line conservative movement aligned behind Ronald Reagan, things couldn’t have looked better for Deak. His reactionary mix of Spenglerian pessimism, Social Darwinism and Austrian School economics was coming back into vogue. His buddy Bill Casey was put in charge of Reagan’s CIA with a mandate to resurrect the Old Boys Network. People lined up around the world to buy golden  “Deak Coins”  stamped with his aquiline mug and the motto “Internationalization of Sound Money.” It should have been the start of a grand second act. But it was not to be.

The House of Deak began its rapid collapse in 1983 when a federal informant accused the firm of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in Colombian cartel cash. Leading the attack from Treasury was John M. Walker, a first cousin of the vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush, who served as CIA chief under Gerald Ford. Suddenly Deak’s decades-long relationship with Casey meant nothing. The knives were out. One of Deak’s executives, Theana Kastens, remembers dropping by 29 Broadway and seeing a freshman congressman named Chuck Schumer sitting in Deak’s office chair, his feet up on the desk, rifling through papers.

“He felt profoundly betrayed,” said Kastens, whose father, Pennsylvanian Rep. Gus Yatron, served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee during the Iran-Contra hearings. “He was bitter and despondent.”

When Reagan’s Justice Department established a presidential commission to investigate the charges, a furious Deak rejected participation in what he regarded as a show trial. He was summoned to testify in Washington and refused. Finally, on Nov. 29, 1984, the feds dragged him before the cameras under subpoena for a public dressing-down. Deak openly displayed his contempt for the proceedings. Sardonic and aloof, he responded to questions about his company’s Swiss-like policy of accepting all deposits by asserting that it was the job of law enforcement, not Nicholas Deak, to track drug money. His outrage at being singled out was understandable. At the time, CIA director Casey was funding Nicaragua’s contra rebels with the agency’s own cocaine trade profits. Of course, the exact justification for burning Deak didn’t matter. And as with the Church hearings, his company was never actually even prosecuted. The message to Deak and his underworld clients was more important: Deak-Perera had lost its protection and was in the cross hairs.

The fallout was immediate. Deak’s crime-commission appearance triggered a worldwide run on the company’s deposits. Crowds mobbed Deak offices in Argentina and Hong Kong. Millions of dollars in gray and black deposits vanished. Among the jilted clients were Macau Triads and Latin American drug cartels. A retired DEA official who worked in Hong Kong in the 1980s said, “Nick Deak screwed over a lot of people, including the Macau mob.” Philip Bowering, a Hong Kong correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review in the 1980s, said there’s no question Deak made a lot of enemies that year. “He crossed one of the Macau mafia,” he said. “But on what issue I have no idea.”

After a bankruptcy declaration in December 1984, Deak tried not to think about his new enemies and focus on sorting through his company’s remains. He spent 1985 traveling the globe with his son Leslie, trying ineffectually to revive the firm. Then one wintry afternoon, with the holidays approaching and the “Miami Vice” theme climbing the Billboard charts, a homeless woman from Seattle named Lang showed up at 29 Broadway and brought Nick Deak’s long and storied run to an end.