After that, Italian authorities arrested him on charges he assaulted officers on board a refugee ship bound for Italy, and was there until his extradition on the U.S. indictment.
Police in New York pulled him off his Paris-bound flight and charged him with sexually assaulting a hotel chambermaid. (The charges were later dropped, and prosecutors said they doubted the maid's reliability.) An aide phoned Ms. Merkel at her central-Berlin home that Saturday and told her the news.
The bank had vowed to fight the charges, claiming that because it only had branches in Switzerland, it was bound only by its home country's relaxed banking laws.