Nothing But Money (25 page)

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Authors: Greg B. Smith

BOOK: Nothing But Money
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Like most crusaders, Robert Grant had trained for years to get to this place. He’d completed undergraduate studies and then obtained a master’s in business administration. He believed he knew what he was doing. He could have gone to law school or med school or run a restaurant, but he chose Wall Street because that was where you made the most amount of money the fastest. Unlike for the knights of yore, this Grail was within reach, if you knew how to get it.
This was the time of year when everybody was done with the business of Christmas and Hanukah. This was January, that bleak series of dark days before the February trip to St. Bart’s. The big fir in front of the Exchange was gone, and the statue of George Washington a block away at the old Federal Hall looked particularly frozen. The idea was to get from the subway into your office as quickly as possible, even if all you had to look forward to the first thing in the morning was yet another wretched meeting. That was Robert Grant’s mission this morning. He’d been told to be on time.
Robert Grant was one of the new recruits at Monitor Investment Group’s new office at 30 Broad Street, just a block from the Exchange. Here was the heart of moneymaking in America, and as 1996 dawned, boy was there money to be made.
The Street was hot. The tech-stock boom was creating an atmosphere of adventure. When the wild 1980s came screeching to a halt in the Crash of ’87, Wall Street was seen as a volatile game of roulette, a kind of casino run by blue bloods. Now everybody had forgotten about that. Now Wall Street was the place to be. Innovation was rampant. All the way down in Mississippi Bernie Ebbers’s World-Com was buying up little phone companies created by the breakup of AT&T at a pace fast enough that Bernie got himself on the front page of
Fortune
dressed like a cowboy. Ken Lay of Enron made the front page as a visionary, his new Houston-based company that bought and sold energy touted as the company of the next century. CEOs were celebrities.
And once again, stockbrokers were kings. The old masters of the universe from the eighties were now much cooler, mostly because everybody had become an investor. Not just old money capital but new money capital: the guy who owned the bagel store. The owner of the nail salon. The retired postal supervisor. The Kmart stock clerk. Cable TV was devoting entire channels just to stock market gyration, and people were watching. In barbershops, on the rows of TVs at the mall retail stores, at the airports. Forget baseball. Forget politics. Forget what’s happening in Afghanistan.
Money was the new Crusade.
It all seemed so easy. It was practically guaranteed that if you paid attention, you could make 1,000 percent profit overnight. The returns were astonishing. You just had to act quickly. Your neighbor the hairstylist just made in one week $10,000 betting on Amazon. How could you ignore that? And in order to make real money you had to risk real money. Why not take a chance on a margin account? Sure, they could call it at any time, but what was the risk when the market was so bullish? If your neighbor the hairstylist could do it, so could you.
But for the troops out there slogging in the trenches along Broad Street and Wall Street and Exchange Place, the actual making of money, the job itself—it could be so profoundly tedious. Especially during meetings. This was what Robert Grant had to look forward to: a roomful of guys bored out of their skulls trying to stay awake through the latest pitch, the newest shtick, the most up-to-date patter. Each new strategy was supposed to produce more customers willing to buy product, which was supposed to mean more commissions. But mostly the newest pitch was just a warmed up version of the previous pitch. It was all pretty much the same. Keep the customers moving. Keep them believing that they must act fast. Momentum was the key. Never get too specific with numbers. Most of the material Grant had been given about the companies he pushed was pretty vague anyway. There wasn’t a whole lot of detail about assets. It was hard to tell from the prospectuses whether any of the companies had any real track records to speak of. But from the perspective of the broker working the customer, it really didn’t matter. Just keep the monologue going. Overwhelm them with the urge to make money fast. Robert Grant didn’t need a meeting to tell him that. All he needed to do was get on the phone with a potential client and throw that slider over the plate.
The big push at Monitor the past few weeks was a company called Reclaim, which allegedly recycled roofing shingles. Environmental spin was always effective. Somehow it was easier to sell the idea of profiting while saving the planet. There were dozens of companies like this one out there. Monitor was pushing Reclaim under the symbol ROOF. Grant’s job was to cold-call, often to seniors, usually in the Midwest. He was handed a list of names. He didn’t ask where they got it. He didn’t really think that these people could be his own grandparents. He just made the calls and performed the pitch.
By the time he arrived on the scene, Monitor had already paid off the market makers to drive up the price, guaranteeing them against a loss. The Monitor insiders were buying Reclaim at 25 cents a share, buying them up through offshore shells, knowing they could sell after forty days. The market makers drove the price up to $2.50, then Grant and the other brokers at Monitor went to work in the retail market. The brokers were paid by cash or check to pump it up further. This was going on in New York and overseas. There were rumors that suitcases filled with cash were coming and going from Germany. When they got it to $6, everybody on the inside was going to dump as fast as they could.
So far as he knew, Robert Grant was holding up his end, snagging customers across the nation. The only warning sign he’d experienced was the repeated admonition not to let his customers unload their Reclaim. Not yet. If they insisted, Robert had to find somebody to sell it to. It was as simple as that.
Robert Grant and another broker, a sometime friend named Eric, arrived at Monitor around 7:45 a.m., right on time. Both were told to report to the conference room immediately. They hustled in even before they had their coffee.
The minute he opened the door to the room, Grant realized this was not the usual pitch meeting. Mostly he realized this because once he stepped into the conference room, he was immediately whacked in the face with an office chair.
Robert Grant went down on the carpet and curled up in a fetal position. The guy with the chair was named Bobby Gallo.
Robert Grant knew Bobby Gallo only as some creep from Brooklyn who seemed to hang around the office. The guy didn’t actually work, as far as anyone could see. He was from a different world than Robert Grant. He hadn’t bothered with the abstract knowledge of the MBA. He hadn’t spent any time in school at all. His knowledge came from the streets of Brooklyn. While Robert Grant was learning about the Laffer curve, Bobby Gallo was learning how to coldcock a guy so he couldn’t get up. Robert Grant used a calculator; Bobby Gallo used fists. The rumor was Bobby Gallo had actually passed his Series 7 exam, but Robert Grant couldn’t believe such a thing was possible. He could believe that Bobby Gallo was now hitting him about the face and back with an office chair.
As he flailed away, Gallo kept screaming something about taking money from a man’s family. Then he’d swing again with the chair. He was also kicking Robert Grant in the sides, in the back, in the legs, wherever he could. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Grant could see that a couple of other guys built more or less like Gallo were also kicking at Eric, who was also on the carpet, writhing and howling in pain.
Robert Grant managed to slide himself under the conference table and come up on the other side. Maybe it would have been better if he had learned archery or swordsman ship or hand-to-hand combat like a real knight, but here he was, slinking his way out of the conference room and into the women’s bathroom.
He slammed the door behind him. There he lay, bleeding, his chest heaving, his face bruised, his sides and back racked with searing pain.
It had all happened so fast.
He remembered screaming, “What the hell are you doing?” over and over, but couldn’t remember what Gallo and the other guys were yammering on and on about as they went to work on Robert and Eric. Something about trying to take customers away from Monitor to jump to another firm. He had no idea what they were talking about.
This kind of behavior was not something he’d expected to find on Wall Street. He didn’t remember the use of office chairs being discussed in business school. He didn’t know guys like Gallo were part of this world. He’d been told Wall Street was all college guys, lots of preppies, plenty of fraternity brothers. But this? This was a version of
Animal House
he hadn’t thought existed.
Lying on the floor of the women’s bathroom, Robert Grant figured a guy like Bobby Gallo hadn’t thought up the idea of busting up his morning himself, so he decided to make a plan. He’d get the hell out of Monitor, go directly to Beekman Hospital and make sure they took some good photos of his injuries. Then he’d make three phone calls.
First he called his boss.
Then he called the cops.
Then he called a good lawyer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Warrington sat in his cubicle at Monitor, watching the ticker for signs of Spaceplex. The market makers had already gone to work and now they were out in the retail market, driving the numbers higher. All the brokers at Monitor’s three offices were on the case, and there was a serious competition to see who could sell the most in one day. Jimmy Labate walked up to Warrington’s cubicle and slapped a set of car keys on his desk.
“Sell fifty thousand shares in the next fifteen minutes, and this is yours,” he said, pointing at the keys. Warrington could see the Mercedes logo on the key chain.
“What color is it?” he asked.
“Green,” Labate answered, and then he stood there, waiting.
Warrington didn’t really like Jimmy Labate. He usually avoided him. They were from different worlds. Warrington was a guy who’d pay somebody to fix his clogged up sink. Jimmy would just fix it. Warrington had a prep school education and almost four years of college, and a Series 7 broker’s license. He was a man of reason. Jimmy probably didn’t make it out of high school, and when he approached things, he relied exclusively on the threat of physical harm to get what he needed. Frankly Warrington considered Labate to be a moron. He was also just a little afraid of the guy. Jimmy and his like were clearly at Monitor for one reason—to enforce the no-sale policy. He’d heard rumors regarding how this was accomplished. There was the story about the broker who’d tried to jump to another firm who was beaten bloody with an office chair. There was the broker who was punched in the nose so hard they thought he was dead, and when he woke up, Jimmy threw him out on the street.
Then there was the little misunderstanding. Warrington had been told by several sources that Jimmy carried a weapon. He’d never actually seen it, but Jimmy often wore his knee-length leather jacket into the office, so who knew? A few weeks back, Warrington had looked up from his computer to see Jimmy standing just inches away, barking at him to open up his trading history. Now! Warrington had looked up at Jimmy and then down at his waistband, which was a few inches away. He could clearly make out the grip of a pistol tucked inside. He opened up his computer and showed that he hadn’t made any trades in the last hour. Clearly Jimmy had thought he had violated the no-sale policy. Jimmy smiled and patted Warrington on the back. Warrington smiled, but only with his mouth. He hoped his eyes weren’t revealing his mixed sense of fear and relief.
Mostly Jimmy was always in a lousy mood. He seemed to dislike just about everyone at Monitor except Cary Cimino. He certainly didn’t like Jeffrey Pokross, who openly manipulated Jimmy whenever possible. And he was seriously paranoid. He would often be seen whispering to his pals in the hallway and stopping the conversation when Warrington walked by. He probably disliked Warrington, but at that moment, with those car keys sitting in front of him, Warrington decided that Jimmy’s challenge was just business, nothing personal, and he went to work.
He began calling customers until he found one who was around. It was his friend at the Bank of Monaco. He made his usual pitch. He made it clear this would be a fast turnaround, but that his friend had to act quickly. He didn’t guarantee the stock against a loss, but he did offer the guy substantial discount shares for his own personal use that amounted to a bribe. Naturally the guy—who was overseeing institutional money, which somehow was less personal than an individual’s money—accepted.
Warrington filled out the buy ticket as Jimmy Labate watched. He hit the send button, and in minutes, the Bank of Monaco had purchased not 50,000, not 75,000, but 100,000 shares of Spaceplex, the next Disney World that was really just an amusement park on Long Island.
Jimmy Labate smiled and walked away, leaving the keys right where they were.
At lunch, Warrington walked downstairs and over to a spot in a parking garage down the street. In the corner sat a sea green Mercedes 580SL, brand-new. Warrington sat in the car and turned the ignition. It made a nice quiet sound that implied power and affluence, and it all belonged to Warrington.
 
 
The name of the company was Discovery Studios Inc. The idea went like this: create a chain of storefronts in malls across America to recruit potential models. It was to be a kind of
Star Search
for the next “it” girl, with aspirants paying fees to get their photos taken and sent off to a big name agency. The storefronts would also market Discovery Studios cosmetics and other beauty products, and would offer the Discovery Studios advice of “beauty consultants.” Finalists would win contracts with big-league agencies in New York City.

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