Bull Street (3 page)

“A Clio isn’t just ‘some award.’” That was like saying Institutional Investor’s “Deal of the Year” award was like a gold star in grammar school.
Who does he think he is?

LeClaire now put Richard’s resume down on the desk and looked at it. “But it was not sufficient to achieve one of the top American business schools that Wall Street gets its real talent from. Do you disagree?”

“I see a different picture. A hardworking kid with solid Midwestern values excels in public school…”

LeClaire interrupted, “Have you ever met anybody from your American boarding schools?”

“A few, but…”

“It is my experience that they are better educated.”

The hell they are.
Could this guy be more of a stiff? “Public schools teach people how to think, too. Besides I’ve met some boarding school types who may know how to say the right thing, but haven’t had an original thought in their lives.”

“Point taken. So why are we here, thinker?” He was sitting up straight in his chair, hands clasped and resting on his desk blotter.

Richard leaned in toward him for emphasis. He felt himself starting to breathe faster. “Because I gave up a promising career in advertising…” He heard his voice rising.

“How much were you making?”

“A hundred and twenty thousand.”

“That is considerable for advertising. They pay poorly.”

“I know. I was worth more. But I still gave that up to—”

“To crunch numbers until 2:00 a.m. most nights, put together pitch books for people like me you will perhaps learn to hate, and if you are very, very lucky, carry bags for senior officers such as Jack Grass and Mickey Steinberg?”

“No, to learn the business. To be
like
Jack Grass or Mickey Steinberg, or if I can pull it off, like the guy they’re outside having breakfast with, Harold Milner.”

“That is ambitious.”

“I am ambitious. And Milner’s only one of the deals guys I studied who got me interested in this business.”

Richard realized he had leaned in so far forward that his hands were on the edge of the desk.

“Today it is my job to see if you are ambitious enough.” LeClaire slouched in his chair and smiled for the first time.

Richard now felt perspiration on his upper lip and realized his pulse had quickened. He used the pause to settle back into his chair. He’d let this guy get under his skin right away and he was disappointed in himself.
Calm down, this isn’t gonna get it done. You need to get past him.
He smiled back, then tried to lighten it up. “So did I get past the first hurdle?”

“You did that two weeks ago.”

Richard raised his eyebrows as if to ask how.

“You beat down the door.”

“I guess I was a little persistent. It took a few calls.”

“Six. So, my young friend, let’s talk.”

This time he smiled like he wasn’t afraid it would make him soil himself. Maybe it meant LeClaire had just been testing him. But “my young friend?”
Gimme a break.
The guy was barely 35.
At least he didn’t call me “old sport.”

Then he said, “You know what? I have time. Would you like something to drink?”

“Coffee would be great.”

LeClaire seized the phone handset and chattered in staccato French to someone named Marcel. He turned back to Richard. “So how is it going?” Now warm, like they were colleagues. Richard couldn’t figure this guy.

Richard said, “I haven’t got the job offer I want and it’s mid-March. Two fallbacks. Corporate finance offers from BFGoodrich and Procter and Gamble. Good jobs, but backups.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“You said it yourself. My resume doesn’t fit the mold and I didn’t go to a B-school that’s a main Wall Street feeder.”

“Your resume has neither a comfortable, aged patina nor crisp, institutional packaging.”

Richard chuckled at that. “That’s one way of putting it.”

LeClaire laughed, too. “Something I wrote down from an article on recruiting. It sounds even stupider said aloud than read.” Finally starting to let his hair down? LeClaire said, “You have no idea how sick I am of seeing these pretty boys come in here and fill me full of perfectly useless theories and impractical business school nonsense.” His face softened, like he really was loosening up.

LeClaire continued, “But when it comes down to this business, real financiers feel something in the pits of their tummies
when they think about money and bonds and stocks. That has nothing to do with business school theory.”

Somebody knocked on the door. “Who is it?” he called.

“Marcel,” came the answer in heavily accented English. A demure woman in a white outfit entered and served them from a tray. It was real china. Richard took a long, grateful swallow of coffee and noted that LeClaire had chosen tea. LeClaire seemed to go someplace else as he took his first sips. He turned and admired the photos on his credenza.

“Three kids?” Richard asked.

LeClaire swung back, looking like he’d been caught. “Yes. Girls. For years I did not bring any pictures of my children to the office because I was afraid I would never get any work done. I thought I would just spend all day staring at them.” He seemed embarrassed, then straightened his back and went on, “When I said institutional packaging earlier, I meant, of course, the right Ivy League undergraduate school, then two to four years of an Analyst position at an investment bank, prior to attending one of the top business schools.”

“Uh-huh.” Richard was wondering where this was going.

“Let me tell you my primary role as head of recruiting. The elite schools are easy. The recruiting infrastructure, the inertia takes care of itself. My real job is to research people from the second-tier schools, ferret out the good ones and convince them to join us. Are you one of the good ones?”

Of course he was. But how to convince this guy?

The more Jack watched Milner, the stranger he thought he was acting today. It wasn’t like him to just blurt out that he wanted
to IPO Southwest like he did. Milner was anything but impetuous. And if Jack didn’t know better, he’d say Milner was actually nervous. He’d never sold anything on this scale before. Hell, it was 15 to 20% of his empire, and he’d sell at a discount, no less. What was up?

Yeah, Milner was acting strange today. But Jack would think about that later. Right now he was doing his own math. Walker & Company’s fees were close to $100 million for selling all of Southwest. That 100 million bucks would do a lot for his budget this year. Not to mention the 5% of Southwest that he and Mickey got as part of the fee for helping Milner buy it years ago. They’d each make 35 million bucks on that when it went public. Jack felt his fingers tingle, then his balls.

“Might be one of the year’s hottest deals if we play it right, Harold,” Jack said. He looked at Mickey. “The scarcity and exclusivity value of a Harold Milner deal.”

“Jack, I’m already sold. You trying to convince Mickey or yourself?”

Mickey said, “Not himself. You know Jack. He believes in everything.”

“God help us all. A man who still believes his own bullshit.”

Jack laughed along with them but he was thinking about the fees again. And what they would do to the bonus pool, and his bonus. And there wasn’t anything Sir Reginald Schoenfeld could do about the $35 million each he and Mickey would make. Sir Reginald had put an end to taking pieces of deals instead of cash fees shortly after the foreign partners invested their $250 million into Walker & Company four years earlier. Looking over at Milner, thinking about Sir Reginald struck him: what a contrast. Milner knew how to become somebody, big time, but still be a normal guy. He was someone you could have a mano-a-mano
with. But this Brit, Sir Reginald, born into it, running Schoenfeld & Co. after his old man died. He was a fourth-generation idiot who inherited his living instead of hitting the streets to make one. But he walked around all haughty like he earned it and deserved it.

Milner sailed right through Jack’s Peter Luger Steak House test; Sir Reginald flunked it before he even got out of the car.

A year after doing the Caldor deal with Milner, Jack and Milner drove over the Williamsburg Bridge from Manhattan into Brooklyn and up to Peter Luger in Milner’s Mercedes 500 series. “They’ve got valet parking,” Jack said, as Milner pulled up to the restaurant. Milner watched the lead kid come around to the driver’s side. The kid was wearing a tan shirt, black slacks, black bow tie, same as Jack set it up when he was 16. Jack was watching Milner. Milner was looking at the kid, smiling, probably wondering
is this kid even old enough to drive, and how’s he gonna see over the wheel of this big Mercedes?

Milner didn’t flinch, not even glancing at Jack with a questioning look like most guys. He rolled down the window. “Good evening, sir, welcome to Peter Luger,” the kid said. The kid had it down: polite and respectful, in the tradition, doing Jack proud even though the kid had no idea who he was. “You gentlemen can get out and we’ll take it from here.”

They got out, Jack still watching Milner, Milner handing the kid a few bucks, then seeing a different kid, the car hop, jog up and get into the car. Then Milner asking the lead kid, “Don’t I get a ticket?”

“No, sir, we take it to the lot and then bring your ticket back to you in the restaurant. After dinner you can pick your car up yourself or one of my boys will bring it back to you.”

Milner shrugged. “Alright, my man, we’ll be inside.” No fuss, no attitude, not talking down. Passed.

The valet parking routine was the same as when Jack hatched the idea with Mickey “Splits” Duncan, Lionel Preston, Booker T. Wilson and Moravian White, buddies from the neighborhood in Canarsie. It took Jack three weeks to work the deal out with the maitre d’ at Peter Luger, selling him on the virtues of a “seamless entry for his clients,” pitching himself as “in the process of earning my diploma.” Then he lined up the four surrounding parking lots. What a pain in the ass, three different parking companies, days to find the managers, get them to agree. One of them even insisted he meet the Peter Luger maitre d’, who was off that day, and came back three more times before clinching the deal. Then Booker T. saying, I ain’t wearing no bow tie. Jack telling him, Then you aren’t in the deal. Then Booker T., seeing that the other three car jockeys cleared 200 bucks between them the first weekend, even after Jack took his 25% off the top, finally joining in.

The lead kid trotted up to the front door as Milner and Jack walked toward it, held it open, Milner smiling back and thanking him. It was the same as when Jack used to hold the door and watch the mob guys pile out of their Cadillacs, the young ones flashy with gold chains and parading girls from New Jersey with big hair. The old mob bosses were quiet and classy except for their ugly ties and shirts and smelly one-dollar cigars, and sometimes those shiny sharkskin suits. And usually they had young babes on their arms chewing gum and looking cheap with their tits hanging out of skimpy dresses. Jack knew he didn’t want to be like them.

He didn’t want to be like the lawyers, either. The partners were abusive, never making eye contact, lousy tippers and their
shoes scuffed and suits wrinkled. The young lawyers looked whipped, eyes lowered, cowed in front of the partners.

It was the Wall Street guys he liked to watch, learn from their subdued movements. Not the young ones, they were assholes—loud, like saying, “Look at me, see how much money I make, how big I tip,” making a display of it. They treated Jack and his boys like pieces of car parking machinery. And they always had newspapers and sweaty workout stuff on the back seat—loose, not even stuffed in gym bags—candy wrappers on the floor, some times cigarette ashes and butts, real slobs. You could tell a lot from how they kept their cars.

But the older ones from Wall Street, they were established and comfortable inside their skins, walking erect but relaxed, like they didn’t need to impress anybody. Suits with smooth fabrics that hung like silky elegance on their bodies: super lightweight worsteds in the spring and summer; lush, beautiful cashmere in the fall and winter. Their shoes were always shined like glass. Those were the guys he studied, went to school on. They had something to show him. They glided with the understatement of power. Sure, some of them were arrogant, barely noticed him. But the ones who did speak to him didn’t try to act all friendly and chummy like the young mob kids, or disdainful like the young Wall Streeters. And every once in a while one of them would stop and strike up a conversation, shoot the shit just to pass the time without being condescending. And always, always they were good tippers. Sometimes they arrived in cabs or limos, but usually because it was Brooklyn they drove. And those cars were clean; big Mercedes, BMWs, occasionally Cadillacs or Lincolns and even sometimes Rolls-Royces, but always spotless, chrome shining and no papers or shit lying around inside. And when they brought their wives, they were
classy with good perfume, tasteful jewelry, modest but elegant dresses. And polite. Even when they were tight-assed bitches they were at least polite. That’s what Jack was shooting for: Wall Street.

And Sir Reginald, when they were negotiating the deal for the Brits and the Frogs to buy into Walker & Company, sitting in the passenger seat of Jack’s BMW 760, name-dropping all the way out to Brooklyn. And as they pulled up in front of Peter Luger, saying, “My goodness, they’re using child la- bor.” Then when Jack stopped the car and without hesitation got out, handed the lead kid his key and five bucks, then headed for the entrance, Sir Reginald saying, “You’re just going to leave the car with
him?”
Jack turning back to see Sir Reginald get out of the car, the lead kid already around to open his door, Sir Reginald looking through the kid like he didn’t exist; no “thank you,” nothing. Jack knew then that this guy Sir Reginald was a douchebag. But Sir Reginald Schoenfeld and Philippe Delecroix, Walker’s other foreign partner, just happened to have $250 million they were willing to invest in Walker & Company. Sometimes you just had to suck it up and live with it.