Wall Street Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2007 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Map by Sohrab Habibion

  ePub ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07054-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-23-1

  ISBN-10: 1-933354-23-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006938154

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AWARD-WINNING AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  Dublin Noir, edited by Ken Bruen

  London Noir, edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  FORTHCOMING:

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir 3, edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by Eric Olsen & Chris Hocking

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  For Alice

  Acknowledgments

  All books are collaborative efforts, but none more so than anthologies, and so I owe many thanks to many people: first and foremost, to all of the contributors, for their talents, time, good humor, and professionalism; to Johnny Temple, for seeing the possibilities; and to Reed Coleman, for a good eye and sound advice.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: DOWNTOWN

  STEPHEN RHODES 40 Broad Street

  At the Top of His Game

  TWIST PHELAN 1 North End Avenue

  A Trader’s Lot

  TIM BRODERICK 40 Wall Street

  A Terrorizing Demonstration

  JIM FUSILLI 23 Wall Street

  A Terrorizing Demonstration

  DAVID NOONAN 85 Exchange Place

  Town Car

  PART II: UPTOWN

  RICHARD ALEAS Times Square

  The Quant

  LAWRENCE LIGHT 257 W. 36th Street

  Make Me Rich

  JAMES HIME 200 Park Avenue

  Rough Justice

  PETER BLAUNER 1313 Avenue of the Americas

  The Consultant

  PART III: MAIN STREET

  MARK HASKELL SMITH Los Angeles, California

  The Day Trader in the Trunk of Cleto’s Car

  PETER SPIEGELMAN Lethe, South Dakota

  Five Days at the Sunset

  MEGAN ABBOTI 110 W. 139th Street

  Today We Hit

  JASON STARR Hoboken, New Jersey

  The Basher

  PART IV: GLOBAL MARKETS

  JOHN BURDETT Bangkok, Thailand

  The Enlightenment of Magnus McKay

  HENRY BLODGET Shanghai, China

  Bonus Season

  LAUREN SANDERS Tel Aviv, Israel

  Everything I’m Not

  REED FARREL COLEMAN Tegucigalpa, Honduras

  Due Diligence

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  TRADITION

  Wall Street is long on tradition. The opening bell, the floor traders’ vivid jackets, black Town Cars at curbside, long nights spent hunched over spreadsheets, helicopters to the Hamptons, lap-dance tabs that run to five figures—these shared rituals and experiences bind generations of money folk one to the other, and so preserve and propagate the culture. But there’s one link in that chain more tarnished than the rest, and less fondly regarded: crime.

  Financial crime has a history much longer than Wall Street’s—by several thousand years at least. Conflicted interests, insider trading, and outright fraud are as old as the first marketplaces—as old as the first swap of flint chips for bearskins, no doubt—and they’ve been part and parcel of Wall Street since the days of the old Dutch barricade. Just as Wall Street has raised finance to high art (or at least, to expensive spectacle), so has it done crime bigger and flashier than its Old World antecedents. Sure, there was the South Sea scam, and that business with the Vatican Bank, but Wall Street has given us Robert Vesco, Ivan Boesky, and the Hunt brothers, not to mention playing midwife to Enron, Adelphia, and Qwest. And unlike some traditions (floor traders are an endangered species at the NYSE, and the bean counters are ever more skeptical about receipts that come dotted with glitter), crime on Wall Street actually has a future.

  Caveats about past performance and future results notwithstanding, I feel pretty safe in this prediction. The news gives me comfort. Every day seems to bring more stories of front-running, insider trading, and cooked books, and some business blogs (the more ironic ones, to be sure) even offer travel tips for white-collar bail-jumpers. Crime endures on Wall Street through cycles of boom and bust, and waves of regulation, deregulation, and re-regulation—a constant in an otherwise changing world.

  This persistence and bright future of crime stands in marked contrast to the public image the Street projects these days. Viewed from a distance, on the cable business channels, say, it seems like such a clean, well-lighted place. The sort of place where investment decisions are guided by careful formulae and subtle strategies, by dispassionate consideration of all the facts and figures; the sort of place where cool reason prevails. The information is out there for all to see; you just need to interpret it correctly. It’s as pure a meritocracy as one could ask for, so get some software, open a margin account, and knock yourself out. It’s a comforting notion—but it doesn’t hold up on close inspection. Close up, you see distortions in how the information flows (remember that suspicious trading activity before the merger announcements?). You see the sheen of sweat, and you can almost smell the fear and greed.

  News reports of Wall Street crime don’t often focus on the gritty parts. Not surprisingly, they’re usually more concerned with the nuts and bolts of a scam—the who did what when, the mechanics of the money laundering. The human details get lost in the numbers and technique. But it is in those details—in the textures of fear, greed, envy, and paranoia, in the class, race, and sexual frictions—that Wall Street is revealed as a very noirish place indeed, a place that is far more Jim Thompson than Warren Buffett.

  Beyond the buying and selling, the dealing room is a theater of outsized, often dysfunctional personalities, banging heads (and other body parts) in sometimes ugly, sometimes entertaining, and usually noisy and fascinating ways. And always there’s money at sta
ke—big money. Of course, as the cliché goes, that’s just for keeping score. To many of the players, money is a proxy for more desperate stakes: the sense of self is on the line. Who has the biggest, brassiest pair? Whose is longest? It’s a zero-sum game, and if he’s the Man (or she is), then you are not. Step onto any trading floor, anywhere in the world, and watch the action for a while—you’ll get what I mean.

  The writers in this collection get it, and that’s no surprise—many of them are industry insiders or refugees, and all are keen observers of the Wall Street scene. Their stories are dark (sometimes darkly funny) tales of hungry egos, cutthroat competition, cultural dislocation, sweaty suspicion, not-so-innocent bystanders, and desperate deals with a variety of devils. And while these tales offer not a shred of advice about what to do with that 401k, their cautionary aspects are unavoidable.

  Hard to miss also is that many of these stories are not set on those short, crowded blocks between Trinity Church and the East River. This too should not surprise. In the past couple of decades, Wall Street has decamped from its historic home in lower Manhattan and—riding a wave of globalization and deregulation—conquered vast new territories around the world. There are stones from the old Dutch wall in Midtown Manhattan; Greenwich, Connecticut; London; Moscow; Mumbai; and in the shining sci-fi skyline of Shanghai, too. Today, Wall Street is everywhere—the undisputed capital city of money—and these writers explore its neighborhoods old and new, from its downtown roots to its glossy uptown digs, from Main Street, U.S.A. to the wider world beyond. It’s a shadowy landscape, to be sure, but they are savvy guides.

  Peter Spiegelman

  Ridgefield, Connecticut

  December 2006

  PART I

  DOWNTOW

  AT THE TOP OF HIS GAME

  BY STEPHEN RHODES

  40 Broad Street

  On the day they conspire to put a bullet in my head, I experience an epiphany.

  My epiphany is this: a fourteen-year career on Wall Street wears away at your soul, as assuredly as a stream against limestone. It pushes you to a place where you don’t fully recognize who you are, or how you got here. Everyone around you becomes a stranger, including—no, especially your own wife. Working sixteen-hour days in those glistening glass towers in Manhattan, engaging in mortal combat with some of the planet’s brightest and most power-obsessed bastards who have trained their full concentration on destroying you and stealing the business you’ve built up over the years—well, it hardens you. Wall Street eats its young, and today the beast has a particular appetite for a certain thirty-six-year-old maverick with seventy-eight people reporting to him (which would be me).

  So today they plan to execute me. How do I know this? Well, last night at 9:30 p.m., an urgent BlackBerry message instructed me to report to Howard Ranieri’s office at 7:30 a.m. sharp for a mandatory meeting. That particular e-mail was no surprise; a head’s-up had come from a friend in HR that my employment would be terminated during this impromptu meeting.

  My response: Bring it on, jerkweed. Bring it on.

  Ranieri is now more than forty minutes late for his own meeting. Typical move for this passive-aggressive, hair-challenged, beer-gutted, no-talent clown. I should mention that Ranieri is my co-head in the Equity Structured Products group.

  Outside Ranieri’s office, the phones on the trading floor twitter relentlessly. This morning, Goldman Sachs has issued a dire report on certain Latin American economies. As a result, the overseas financial markets are getting walloped.

  The twentysomething stress addicts that populate the trading floor gaze into their Bloomberg screens seeking divine guidance. I hear the voices of my people reporting losses in the overseas markets like breathless wartime correspondents witnessing heavy casualties from the front lines. The Footsie is getting whacked, hammered, slammed, smashed, crushed, drilled, smoked, spanked, roasted, sewered, bashed. Beaten like a redheaded stepchild, clubbed like a baby seal. Boom boom, out go the lights.

  Ranieri’s tardiness is driving me to distraction. It’s Friday, for chrissakes. I’ve got a dinner party at the Honeywells’ tonight. And I’ve got a wife who may have been cheating with a kickboxing instructor for God knows how long. Do I really need to have Ranieri playing with my head in the moments before he gleefully fires me?

  Abruptly, Howie breezes through the door of his office. “Sparky, glad to see you’re here,” he burbles as if he’s five minutes late for a tennis game. “I’m really truly sorry about this, but—”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Come again?”

  I pronounce each syllable slowly. “I said, ‘No, you’re not.’ Meaning, no, you are not sorry. You are the polar opposite of sorry. You kept me waiting on purpose.”

  “Touché, Sparky.” Ranieri’s laugh is a brutish grunt. “Maybe you’re kind of right about that.”

  “Not a problem. I passed the time by reading all your e-mails.”

  Ranieri inspects me to see whether I’m serious, but my poker face is inscrutable. Backatcha, jerkweed.

  “Anyhoo,” Ranieri says with narrowed eyes, “let’s move on to the reason we’re here. You know Brian, I presume.”

  I turn around and see Brian Horgan, a VP from HR, skulking in the doorway, craving invisibility. Brian is a good guy in my book; he was the one who gave me the head’s-up about this meeting. I take note of the thick Redweld tucked under his arm—my personnel file, no doubt.

  “Um, good morning, Mark.” The poor bastard winces as he says this. It’s obvious this is anything but.

  Of course I know Brian,” I say breezily. “We’ve worked together for what … six years?”

  “Yeah, six years,” he confirms.

  “Six long years recruiting the best structured products group on the Street, from the ground up.”

  Ranieri steers the conversation away from my accomplishments. “Well then, I hope we can make this as pleasant as possible for everyone concerned. Given your contribution to the firm, we’ve moved heaven and earth to be generous.” Translation: You need to sign this piece of paper promising not to sue us, or you walk away with nothing for fourteen years of service

  I wheel around to my friend from HR. “Your work is done here, Brian.”

  “It is?” There is a look of palpable relief on Brian Horgan’s face.

  “Go back to your office, check your e-mail for further instructions.”

  Ranieri erupts. “Just what the hell are you trying to pull—”

  “It’s not my doing. Sanderson has taken an interest in this—”

  “Bullshit. He’s in Hong Kong.”

  “Exactly. And Sanderson says stand down. Nothing is to happen until he returns to London on Monday.”

  Ranieri scrutinizes me. “Does Becker know about this?”

  “Why would that matter?”

  Ranieri scowls venomously, then wheels his Herman Miller Aeron chair over to his flat-panel computer screen. His lips move as he reads the fresh e-mail from Sanderson. Then he slams his open palm on the surface of his desk. “Sonuvabitch!”

  I turn to Horgan. “Like I was saying. Until this gets sorted out, you’re free to go.”

  Ranieri grumbles with a dismissive wave. “Whatever.” With a surreptitious wink, Brian Horgan reassembles the file and departs.

  My co-head makes a big show of closing the door and sealing us off from the rest of the trading floor. “Swift move, asshole. You knew I was leaving for Barcelona with my family tonight, didn’t you?”

  “Guess you’ll just have to postpone your victory dance.”

  “Maybe …” Ranieri regards me with a feral leer, “but you can postpone the inevitable only so long, Sparky.”

  I lean back and give him a smile that’s … well, yes, call it self-satisfied. “Let’s recap, shall we? Four months ago, you pull some strings in London with Ian Becker—your Harvard roommate—to conjure up some do-nothing job that suggests to senior management that you’re not utterly useless. Lucky me: Since I happen to drive t
he lion’s share of revenue in the U.S., Becker drop-kicks you into my sandbox as a cohead. Says you’ve got a lot to learn and you’re ‘here to help.’ Instead, what happens? You steal my ideas, my team, my business, my revenues. You systematically bad-mouth me to Becker and the rest of senior management as ‘redundant’ and ‘not a team player.’ You and Becker wait for my mentor to be incommunicado somewhere so you can pull this lame-ass coup d’état.” I shake my head in disgust. “You’re not even worth keeping around to order lunch for my people.”

  Ranieri leans back calmly. “On the one hand, screw you for messing up my vacation. At the same time, I commend you for pulling off that last-minute clemency from the powers that-be. Very creative.” A slow smile spreads across his face. “But guess what? Turns out your guy is getting a bullet to the head himself from senior management. So looks like we have a do-over first thing Monday morning.”

  “We done here?”

  “For now.”

  “Good.” I bolt upright and regard my mortal enemy with utter contempt. “You’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to the desk and make some money. I’ll leave you to whatever it is you do all day.”

  Bite me, jerkweed. And I’m out of there.

  Moments later, I experience an emotional cocktail of mild embarrassment and genuine euphoria when the entire derivatives trading floor erupts in a standing ovation. On the Street, information is the ultimate commodity, and the news that I survived Ranieri’s savage assassination attempt causes spasms of joy among the all-star team I’ve assembled.

  “Okay, okay, all right!” I shout over the sustained applause, whistles, and catcalls. “A for effort, but this show of loyalty won’t necessarily have a favorable impact on year-end bonuses.”

  The cheering tapers off into an admixture of laughter and mock boos. I hear a muffled thud behind me as an apoplectic Ranieri kicks his office door shut. I love these people. Love them

  “All right, people, show’s over. Let’s pump it up and make some money for the Brothers.”

  As if a switch is turned on, the trading floor becomes electrified, crackling with high-voltage activity. The discordant brays of traders fill my ears: