This was not the usual raid on an ordinary tax dodger: yesterday, prosecutors and police raided home and office of Klaus Zumwinkel, CEO of Deutsche Post, the still quasi-monopolist for German mail affairs. After posting bail he was allowed to return to his home.

Today, he backed out of his management positions, and it will be just a matter of a few days to watch decreasing the number of his influential friends. (Some politicians are already claiming about the loss of trust in Germany's elite, but this isn't up to much. Sorry politicians, no bonus points for you available here!) Zumwinkel is no leightweight: he's one of Germany's longest-serving top-managers and head of various supervisory boards. He planned to finish his career at the end of this year, but obviously not this way.

I've watched the photos of his detention. After bailing out and returning home to Cologne, he was alone with his family and his advocate, and I wonder what might have been happening that night. Did his family, especially his wife, address reproaches to him? Or didn't they know what was happening at all? Was he trying to save his lifework (or at least parts of his fortune) and permanently making phone calls? Is there a closed drawer at his desk with a tool to be used as last resort? Would this be enough for a Tennessee Williams like family drama? Who knows?

In the end, it's probably just another chapter in Germany's white-collar crime history. But if I was a filmmaker, I'd had an idea for my next movie. It would be an intimate play about an industry giant who had been nabbed with both hands in the cookie-jar, just a few hours after releasing him from jail and just hours before his total breakdown.