He nodded. "Okay-I"d like to tell everybody about how Steve Madden Shoes got started and then talk about our bright future!"
The last two words resulted in some eye-rolling and a little bit of head-shaking, but, thankfully, the boardroom remained quiet.
Steve lumbered on: "I started my company with one thousand dollars and a single shoe. It was called the Marilyn"-Christ almighty!-"which was sort of like a Western clog. It was a great shoe-not my best shoe, but still a great shoe. Anyway, I was able to get five hundred pairs made on credit, and I started going around and selling them out of the trunk of my car to any store that would buy them. How could I describe this shoe to you? Let me see...it had a chunky bottom and an open toe, but the top of it was...well, I guess it doesn"t really matter. The point I was trying to make was that it was a really funky shoe, which is the trademark of Steve Madden Shoes: We"re funky.
"Anyway, the shoe that really launched the company was called the Mary Lou, and this shoe ... ... well, well, this this was no ordinary shoe!" was no ordinary shoe!" Oh, Jesus! What a f.u.c.king fruitcake! Oh, Jesus! What a f.u.c.king fruitcake! "It was way ahead of its time-way ahead!" Steve waved his hand in the air, as if to say, "Forget about it!" And he kept right on going. "Anyway, let me describe it to you, because this is important. Now, it was a black patent-leather variation of the traditional Mary Jane, with a relatively thin ankle strap. But the key was that it had a b.u.mp toe. Some of you girls here must know exactly what I"m talking about, right? I mean-it was really a hot shoe!" He paused, obviously hoping for some positive feedback from the sales a.s.sistants, but none came-only more head-shaking. Then there was an eerie, poisonous silence, the sort of silence you find in a small town in the middle of Kansas the moment before a tornado hits. "It was way ahead of its time-way ahead!" Steve waved his hand in the air, as if to say, "Forget about it!" And he kept right on going. "Anyway, let me describe it to you, because this is important. Now, it was a black patent-leather variation of the traditional Mary Jane, with a relatively thin ankle strap. But the key was that it had a b.u.mp toe. Some of you girls here must know exactly what I"m talking about, right? I mean-it was really a hot shoe!" He paused, obviously hoping for some positive feedback from the sales a.s.sistants, but none came-only more head-shaking. Then there was an eerie, poisonous silence, the sort of silence you find in a small town in the middle of Kansas the moment before a tornado hits.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a paper airplane sail across the boardroom in no particular direction. At least they weren"t throwing things directly at him! That would come next. I said to Danny, "The natives are getting restless. Should I go up there?"
"If you don"t, I will. This is f.u.c.king nauseating!"
"All right, I"m going." I made a beeline for Steve.
He was still talking about the Mary f.u.c.king Lou when I reached him. Just before I grabbed the microphone he was talking about how she she was the perfect prom shoe, priced reasonably and built to last. was the perfect prom shoe, priced reasonably and built to last.
I grabbed the mike out of his hand before he knew what hit him, and it was then that I realized he"d gotten so absorbed in the glory of his own shoe designs that he had actually stopped sweating. In fact, he seemed completely at ease now and was entirely unaware that he was about to get lynched.
He whispered to me, "What are you doing? They love me! You can go back now. I got it covered!"
I narrowed my eyes. "Get the f.u.c.k out of here, Steve! They"re about to start throwing tomatoes at you. Are you that blind? I mean, they don"t give a s.h.i.t about the Mary f.u.c.king Lou! They just want to sell your stock and make money. Now, go over to Danny and relax for a while, before they come up here and rip off your baseball cap and scalp the last seven hairs off your head!"
Finally, Steve capitulated, and he walked off center stage. I raised my right hand, asking for quiet, and the room fell silent. With the microphone just beneath my lips, I said in a mocking tone, "All right, everyone, let"s give a big round of applause to Steve Madden and his very special shoe. After all, just hearing about little Mary has inspired me to pick up the phone and start calling all my clients. So I want every last one of you-sales a.s.sistants included-to put your hands together for Steve Madden and his s.e.xy little shoe: the Mary Lou!" I wedged the microphone under my arm and started clapping.
And just like that-thunderous applause! Every last Strattonite was clapping and stomping and hooting and howling and cheering uncontrollably. I raised the microphone in the air again-asking for quiet-but this time they didn"t listen. They were too busy seizing the moment.
Finally, the room quieted down. "All right," I said, "now that that"s out of your system, I want you to know that there"s a reason why Steve is so completely off the wall. In other words, there"s a method to his madness. See, the simple fact is that the guy"s a creative genius, and by definition Steve has to be somewhat insane. It"s necessary for his image."
I nodded my head with conviction, wondering if what I"d just said made even the slightest bit of sense. "But listen to me, everyone, and listen good. This ability Steve has-this gift of his-goes far beyond being able to spot a couple of hot shoe trends. Steve"s real power-what separates him from every other shoe designer in America-is that he actually creates creates trends. trends.
"Do you know how rare that is? To find someone who can actually set a fashion trend and enforce it? People like Steve come along once every decade! And when they do, they become household names, like a Coco Chanel or an Yves St. Laurent, or a Versace, or Armani, or Donna Karan...or a short list of others."
I took a few steps into the boardroom and lowered my voice like a preacher driving home a point. "And having someone like Steve at the helm is exactly what it takes to launch a company like this into the stratosphere. And you can mark my words on it! This is the company we"ve all been waiting for since the beginning. It"s the one that"ll put Stratton on a whole new plateau. It"s the one that we"ve been..."
I was on a roll now, and as I continued speaking, my mind started to double track. I began totaling up the profits I was about to make. The awesome number $20 million $20 million came bubbling up into my brain. It was a good estimate, I figured, and the calculations were pretty simple. Of the two million units being offered, one million of them were going into the accounts of my ratholes. I would buy those units back from my ratholes at five or six dollars per and then hold them in the firm"s proprietary trading account. Then I would use the power of the boardroom, the ma.s.sive buying this very meeting would create, to drive the units up to twenty dollars, which would lock in a paper profit of $14 or $15 million. Although, actually, I wouldn"t even have to drive the units up to twenty dollars myself; the rest of Wall Street would do the dirty work for me. As long as the other brokerage firms and trading firms knew I was willing to buy the units back at the top of the market, they would drive the price up as high as I wanted! I just had to leak the word out to a few key players and the rest would be history. (And this I"d already done.) The word on the street was that Stratton was a buyer up to twenty dollars a unit, so the wheels were already set in motion! came bubbling up into my brain. It was a good estimate, I figured, and the calculations were pretty simple. Of the two million units being offered, one million of them were going into the accounts of my ratholes. I would buy those units back from my ratholes at five or six dollars per and then hold them in the firm"s proprietary trading account. Then I would use the power of the boardroom, the ma.s.sive buying this very meeting would create, to drive the units up to twenty dollars, which would lock in a paper profit of $14 or $15 million. Although, actually, I wouldn"t even have to drive the units up to twenty dollars myself; the rest of Wall Street would do the dirty work for me. As long as the other brokerage firms and trading firms knew I was willing to buy the units back at the top of the market, they would drive the price up as high as I wanted! I just had to leak the word out to a few key players and the rest would be history. (And this I"d already done.) The word on the street was that Stratton was a buyer up to twenty dollars a unit, so the wheels were already set in motion! Unbelievable! Unbelievable! To make all that money and not commit a crime! Well, the ratholes weren"t exactly on the up-and-up, but still, it was impossible to prove. Ahhhh, talk about your unbridled capitalism! To make all that money and not commit a crime! Well, the ratholes weren"t exactly on the up-and-up, but still, it was impossible to prove. Ahhhh, talk about your unbridled capitalism!
"...like a rocket ship and keep on going. Who knows how high this stock could go? The twenties? The thirties? I mean, if I"m even half right, those numbers are ridiculously low! They"re nothing compared to what this company is capable of. In the blink of an eye the stock could be in the fifties or even the sixties! And I"m not talking about some far-off time in the future. I"m talking about right now, as we speak.
"Listen to me, everyone. Steve Madden Shoes is the hottest company in the entire women"s shoe industry. Orders are going through the roof right now! Every department store in America-chains like Macy"s and Bloomingdale"s, Nordstrom and Dillard"s-they can"t keep our shoes in stock. The shoes are so hot they"re literally flying off the shelves!
"You know, I hope you"re all aware that as stockbrokers you have an obligation to your clients, a fiduciary responsibility fiduciary responsibility so to speak, to get on the phone with them the second I"m finished and do whatever it takes-even if it means ripping their f.u.c.king eyeb.a.l.l.s out-to get them to buy as much stock in Steve Madden Shoes as they can possibly afford. I sincerely hope you"re aware of this, because if you"re not, then you and I are going to have some serious issues together after all this is said and done. so to speak, to get on the phone with them the second I"m finished and do whatever it takes-even if it means ripping their f.u.c.king eyeb.a.l.l.s out-to get them to buy as much stock in Steve Madden Shoes as they can possibly afford. I sincerely hope you"re aware of this, because if you"re not, then you and I are going to have some serious issues together after all this is said and done.
"You have an obligation here! An obligation to your clients! An obligation to this firm! And an obligation to yourself, G.o.d d.a.m.n it! You better ram this stock right down your clients" throats and make them choke on it until they say, "Buy me twenty thousand shares," because every dollar your clients invest is gonna come back to them in spades.
"I mean, I could go on and on about the bright future of Steve Madden Shoes. I could talk about all the fundamentals-about all the new store openings and how we manufacture our shoes in a more cost-effective way than the compet.i.tion, about how our shoes are so hot that we don"t even have to advertise and how the ma.s.s merchants are willing to pay us royalties to have access to our designs-but at the end of the day none of it matters. The bottom line is that all your clients wanna know is that the stock"s going up; that"s it."
I slowed my pace a bit and said, "Listen, guys, as much as I"d like to, I can"t get on the phone and sell the stock to your clients. Only you you can pick up the phone and take action. And at the end of the day, that"s what it"s all about: taking action. Without action, the best intentions in the world are nothing more than that: intentions." can pick up the phone and take action. And at the end of the day, that"s what it"s all about: taking action. Without action, the best intentions in the world are nothing more than that: intentions."
I took a deep breath and plowed on. "Now, I want everybody to look down." I extended my arm and gestured to a desk just in front of me. "Look down at that little black box right in front of you. You see it? It"s a wonderful little invention called the telephone. Here, I"ll spell it for you: T-E-L-E-P-H-O-N-E. Now, guess what, everybody? This telephone won"t dial itself! Yeah, that"s right. Until you take some f.u.c.king action, it"s nothing more than a worthless hunk of plastic. It"s like a loaded M16 without a trained Marine to pull the trigger. See, it"s the action of a highly trained Marine-a trained killer-that turns an M16 into a deadly weapon. And in the case of the telephone it"s the action of you-a highly trained Strattonite, a highly trained killer who won"t take no for an answer, who won"t hang up the phone until his client either buys or dies, someone who"s fully aware that there"s a sale being made on every single phone call and that it"s only a question of who"s selling who. Were you the one who did the selling? Were you proficient enough and motivated enough and gutsy enough to take control of the conversation and close the sale? Or was it your client who did the selling-explaining how he couldn"t make the investment right now because the timing was wrong or he needed to talk it over with his wife or his business partner or Santa Claus or the f.u.c.king tooth fairy."
I rolled my eyes and shook my head in disgust. "So don"t you ever f.u.c.king forget that that phone sitting on your desk is a deadly weapon. And in the hands of a motivated Strattonite it"s a license to print money. And it"s the great equalizer great equalizer!" I paused, letting those last two words reverberate around the boardroom, and then I kept right on going. "All you gotta do is pick up the phone and say the words I"ve taught you, and it can make you as powerful as the most powerful CEO in the country. And I don"t care whether you graduated from Harvard or you grew up on the mean streets of h.e.l.l"s Kitchen: With that little black phone you can achieve anything.
"That phone equals money. And I don"t care how many problems you have right now, because every single one of them can be helped with money. Yeah, that"s right; money is the greatest single problem-solver known to man, and anyone who tries to tell you different is completely full of s.h.i.t. In fact, I"m willing to bet that anyone who says that never had a dime to their f.u.c.king name!" I held my hand up in the scout"s honor mode, and said with p.i.s.s and vinegar, "It"s always those same people who are the first to spew out their worthless advice-it"s always the paupers, who sling around that ridiculous line of bulls.h.i.t about how money is the root of all evil and about how money corrupts. Well-I-mean-really! What a bunch of happy horses.h.i.t that is! Having money is wonderful! And having money is a must! What a bunch of happy horses.h.i.t that is! Having money is wonderful! And having money is a must!
"Listen to me, everyone: There"s no n.o.bility in poverty. I"ve been rich and I"ve been poor, and I choose rich every time. At least as a rich man, when I have to face my problems, I can show up in the back of a stretch limousine, wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and a twenty-thousand-dollar gold watch! And, believe me, arriving in style makes your problems a h.e.l.luva lot easier to deal with."
I shrugged my shoulders for effect. "Anyway, if anyone here thinks I"m crazy or you don"t feel exactly like I do, then get the f.u.c.k out of this room right now! then get the f.u.c.k out of this room right now! That"s right-get the f.u.c.k out of my boardroom and go get a job at McDonald"s flipping burgers, because that"s where you belong! And if McDonald"s isn"t hiring, there"s always Burger King! That"s right-get the f.u.c.k out of my boardroom and go get a job at McDonald"s flipping burgers, because that"s where you belong! And if McDonald"s isn"t hiring, there"s always Burger King!
"But before you actually depart this room full of winners, I want you to take a good look at the person sitting next to you, because one day in the not-so-distant future, you"ll be sitting at a red light in your beat-up old Pinto, and the person sitting next to you is gonna pull up in his brand-new Porsche, with his gorgeous young wife sitting next to him. And who"ll be sitting next to you? Some ugly beast, no doubt, with three days of razor stubble-wearing a sleeveless muumuu or a housedress-and you"ll probably be on your way home from the Price Club with a hatchback full of discount groceries!"
Just then I locked eyes with a young Strattonite who looked literally panic-stricken. Hammering my point home, I said, "What? You think I"m lying to you? Well, guess what? It only gets worse. See, if you want to grow old with dignity-if you want to grow old and maintain your self-respect-then you better get rich now. The days of working for a large Fortune Five Hundred company and retiring with a pension are ancient f.u.c.king history! And if you think Social Security is gonna be your safety net, then think again. At the current rate of inflation it"ll be just enough to pay for your diapers after they stick you in some rancid nursing home, where a three-hundred-pound Jamaican woman with a beard and mustache will feed you soup through a straw and then b.i.t.c.h-slap you when she"s in a bad mood.
"So listen to me, and listen good: Is your current problem that you"re behind on your credit-card bills? Good-then pick up the f.u.c.king phone and start dialing.
"Or is your landlord threatening to dispossess you? Is that what your problem is? Good-then pick up the f.u.c.king phone and start dialing.
"Or is it your girlfriend? Does she want to leave you because she thinks you"re a loser? Good-then pick up the f.u.c.king phone and start dialing!
"I want you to deal with all your problems by becoming rich! I want you to attack your problems head-on! I want you to go out and start spending money right now. I want you to leverage yourself. I want you to back yourself into a corner. Give yourself no choice but to succeed. Let the consequences of failure become so dire and so unthinkable that you"ll have no choice but to do whatever it takes to succeed.
"And that"s why I say: Act as if! Act as if you"re a wealthy man, rich already, and then you"ll surely become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence and then people will surely have confidence in you. Act as if you have unmatched experience and then people will follow your advice. And act as if you are already a tremendous success, and as sure as I stand here today-you will will become successful! become successful!
"Now, this deal opens in less than an hour. So get on the f.u.c.king phone right this second and go A to Z through those client books and take no prisoners. Be ferocious! Be pit bulls! Be telephone terrorists! You do exactly as I say and, believe me, you"ll be thanking me a thousand times over a few hours from now, when every one of your clients is making money."
With that, I walked off center stage to the sound of a thousand cheering Strattonites, who were already in the process of picking up their phones and following my very advice: ripping their clients" eyeb.a.l.l.s out.
CHAPTER 9
PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY
At one p.m., the geniuses down at the National a.s.sociation of Securities Dealers, the NASD, released Steve Madden Shoes for trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the four-letter trading symbol SHOO: p.r.o.nounced shoe. How cute and appropriate that was! shoe. How cute and appropriate that was!
And as part of their long-standing practice of having their heads up their a.s.ses, they reserved the distinguished honor of setting the price for the opening tick for me, the Wolf of Wall Street. It was just another in a long line of ill-conceived trading policies that were so absurd that they all but a.s.sured that every new issue coming out on the NASDAQ would be manipulated in one way or another, regardless of whether or not Stratton Oakmont was involved in it.
Just why the NASD had created a playing field that so clearly f.u.c.ked over the customer was something I"d thought about often, and I"d come to the conclusion that it was because the NASD was a self-regulatory agency, "owned" by the very brokerage firms themselves. (In fact, Stratton Oakmont was a member too.) In essence, the NASD"s true goal was to only appear to be on the side of the customer and to not actually be on the side of the customer. And, in truth, they didn"t even try too hard to do that. The effort was strictly cosmetic, just enough to avoid raising the ire of the SEC, who they were compelled to answer to.
So instead of allowing the natural balance between buyers and sellers to dictate where a stock should open, they reserved that incredibly valuable right for the lead underwriter, which in this particular case was me. I could choose whatever price I deemed appropriate, as arbitrary and capricious as it might be. In consequence, I decided to be very arbitrary and even more capricious, and I opened the units at $5.50 per, which afforded me the glorious opportunity of repurchasing my one million rathole units just there. And while I won"t deny that my ratholes would have liked to hold on to the units for a weeeee weeeee bit longer, they had no choice in the matter. After all, the buyback had been prearranged (a definite regulatory no-no), and they had just made a profit of $1.50 per unit for doing nothing and risking nothing-having bought and sold the units without even paying for the trade. And if they wanted to be included in the next deal, they had better follow the expected protocol, which was to shut the f.u.c.k up and say, "Thank you, Jordan!" and then lie through their teeth if they were ever questioned by a federal or state securities regulator as to why they sold their units so cheaply. bit longer, they had no choice in the matter. After all, the buyback had been prearranged (a definite regulatory no-no), and they had just made a profit of $1.50 per unit for doing nothing and risking nothing-having bought and sold the units without even paying for the trade. And if they wanted to be included in the next deal, they had better follow the expected protocol, which was to shut the f.u.c.k up and say, "Thank you, Jordan!" and then lie through their teeth if they were ever questioned by a federal or state securities regulator as to why they sold their units so cheaply.
Either way, you really couldn"t question my logic in the matter. By 1:03 p.m.-just three minutes after I"d bought back my rathole units at $5.50 per-the rest of Wall Street had already driven the units up to $18. That meant I had locked in a profit of $12.5 million-$12.5 million! In three minutes! I"d made another million or so in investment-banking fees and stood to make another three or four million a few days from now-when I bought back the bridge-loan units, which were also in the hands of my ratholes. Ahhhh-ratholes! What a concept! And Steve himself was my biggest rathole of all. He was holding 1.2 million shares for me, the very shares NASDAQ had forced me to divest. At the current unit price of $18 (each unit consisting of one share of common stock and two warrants), the actual share price was $8. That meant that the shares Steve was holding for me were now worth just under $10 million! I"d made another million or so in investment-banking fees and stood to make another three or four million a few days from now-when I bought back the bridge-loan units, which were also in the hands of my ratholes. Ahhhh-ratholes! What a concept! And Steve himself was my biggest rathole of all. He was holding 1.2 million shares for me, the very shares NASDAQ had forced me to divest. At the current unit price of $18 (each unit consisting of one share of common stock and two warrants), the actual share price was $8. That meant that the shares Steve was holding for me were now worth just under $10 million! The Wolf strikes again! The Wolf strikes again!
It was now up to my loyal Strattonites to sell all this inflated stock to their clients. All this inflated stock-not just the one million units they had given to their own clients as part of the initial public offering but also my one million rathole units that were now being held in the firm"s trading account, along with 300,000 bridge-loan units I would be buying back in a few days...and then some additional stock I had to buy back from all the brokerage firms that had pushed the units up to $18 (doing the dirty work for me). They would be slowly selling their units back to Stratton Oakmont and locking in their own profit. All told, by the end of the day, I would need my Strattonites to raise approximately $30 million. That would more than cover everything, as well as give the firm"s trading account a nice little cushion against any pain-in-the-a.s.s short-sellers, who might try to sell stock they didn"t even own (with the hopes of driving the price down so they could buy it back cheaper in the future). Thirty million was no problem for my merry band of brokers, especially after this morning"s meeting, which had them pitching their hearts and souls out like never before.
At this particular moment I was standing inside the firm"s trading room-looking over the shoulder of my head trader, Steve Sanders. I had one eye on a bank of computer monitors directly in front of Steve, while my other eye looked out a plate-gla.s.s window that faced the boardroom. The pace was absolutely frenetic. Brokers were screaming into their telephones like wild banshees. Every few seconds a young sales a.s.sistant with a lot of blond hair and a plunging neckline would come running up to the plate-gla.s.s window, press her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against it, and slip a stack of buy tickets through a narrow slot at the bottom. Then one of four order clerks would grab the tickets and input them into the computer network-causing them to pop up on the proprietary trading terminal in front of Steve, at which point he would execute them in accordance with the current market.
As I watched the orange-diode numbers flash across Steve"s terminal, I felt a twisted sense of pride over how those two morons from the SEC had been sitting in my conference room, searching the historical record for some sort of smoking gun, while I fired off a live bazooka under their noses. But I guess they"d been too busy freezing to death, as we listened to every word they said.
By now, more than fifty different brokerage firms were partic.i.p.ating in the buying frenzy. What they all had in common, though, was that each one fully intended on selling every last share back to Stratton Oakmont at the end of the day, at the very top of the market. And with other brokerage firms doing the buying, it would now be impossible for the SEC to make the case that I had been the one who"d manipulated the units to $18. It was elegantly simple. How could I be at fault if I hadn"t been the one who"d driven the price of the stock up? In fact, I had actually been a seller the whole way. And I had sold the other brokerage firms just enough to wet their beaks, so they would continue to manipulate my new issues in the future-but not too much that it would become a major burden to me when I had to buy the stock back at the end of the trading day. It was a careful balance to strike, but the simple fact was that having other brokerage firms bidding up the price of Steve Madden Shoes created plausible deniability with the SEC. And, in a month from now, when they were subpoenaing my trading records, trying to reconstruct what had happened in those first few moments of trading, all they would see was that brokerage firms across America had bid up the price of Steve Madden Shoes, and that would be that.
Before I left the trading room, my final instructions to Steve were that under no circ.u.mstances was he to let the stock drop below $18. After all, I wasn"t about to shaft the rest of Wall Street after they"d been kind enough to manipulate my stock for me.
CHAPTER 10
THE DEPRAVED CHINAMAN
By four p.m. it was one for the record books.
The trading day was over, and the news that Steve Madden Shoes had been the most actively traded stock in America and, for that matter, the world had come skidding across the Dow Jones wire service for one and all to see. The world! Such audacity! Such sheer audacity! The world! Such audacity! Such sheer audacity!
Oh, yes, Stratton Oakmont had the power, all right. In fact, Stratton Oakmont was was the power, and I, as Stratton"s leader, was wired into that very power and sat atop its pinnacle. I felt it surge through my very innards and resonate with my heart and soul and liver and loins. With more than eight million shares changing hands, the units had closed just below $19, up five hundred percent on the day, making it the largest percentage gainer on the NASDAQ, the NYSE, the AMEX, as well as any other stock exchange in the world. Yes, the world-from the OBX exchange way up north in the frozen wasteland of Oslo, Norway, all the way down south to the ASX exchange in the kangaroo paradise of Sydney, Australia. the power, and I, as Stratton"s leader, was wired into that very power and sat atop its pinnacle. I felt it surge through my very innards and resonate with my heart and soul and liver and loins. With more than eight million shares changing hands, the units had closed just below $19, up five hundred percent on the day, making it the largest percentage gainer on the NASDAQ, the NYSE, the AMEX, as well as any other stock exchange in the world. Yes, the world-from the OBX exchange way up north in the frozen wasteland of Oslo, Norway, all the way down south to the ASX exchange in the kangaroo paradise of Sydney, Australia.
Right now I was standing in the boardroom, casually leaning against my office"s plate-gla.s.s window, with my arms folded beneath my chest. It was the pose of the mighty warrior after the fray. The mighty roar of the boardroom was still going strong, but the tone was different now. It was less urgent, more subdued.
It was almost celebration time. I stuck my right hand in my pants pocket and did a quick check to make sure my six Ludes hadn"t fallen out or simply vanished into thin air. Quaaludes had a way of vanishing sometimes, although it usually had more to do with your "friends" s.n.a.t.c.hing them from you-or you getting so stoned that you took them yourself and simply didn"t remember. That was the fourth phase of a Quaalude high and, perhaps, the most dangerous: the amnesia phase. The first phase was the tingle phase, next came the slur phase, then the drool phase, and then, of course, the amnesia phase.
Anyway, the drug-G.o.d had been kind to me, and the Quaaludes hadn"t vanished. I took a moment to roll them around in my fingertips, which gave me an irrational sense of joy. Then I began the process of calculating the appropriate time to take them, which was somewhere around 4:30 p.m., I figured, twenty-five minutes from now. That would give me fifteen minutes to hold the afternoon meeting, as well as enough time to supervise this afternoon"s act of depravity, which was a female head-shaving.
One of the young sales a.s.sistants, who was strapped for cash, had agreed to put on a Brazilian bikini and sit down on a wooden stool at the front of the boardroom and let us shave her head down to the skull. She had a great mane of shimmering blond hair and a wonderful set of b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which had recently been augmented to a D cup. Her reward would be $10,000 in cash, which she would use to pay for her breast job, which she"d just financed at twelve percent. So it was a win-win situation for everyone: In six months she"d have her hair back, and she"d own her D cups debt free.
I couldn"t help but wonder if I should"ve allowed Danny to bring a midget into the office. After all, what was so wrong with it? It sounded a bit off at first, but now that I"d had a little time to digest it, it didn"t seem so bad.
In essence, what it really boiled down to was that the right to pick up a midget and toss him around was just another currency due any mighty warrior, a spoil of war, so to speak. How else was a man to measure his success if not by playing out every one of his adolescent fantasies, regardless of how bizarre it might be? There was definitely something to be said for that. If precocious success brought about questionable forms of behavior, then the prudent young man should enter each unseemly act into the debit column on his own moral balance sheet and then offset it at some future point with an act of kindness or generosity (a moral credit, so to speak), when he became older and wiser and more sedate.
Yet, on the other hand, we might just be depraved maniacs-a self-contained society that had spiraled completely out of control. We Strattonites thrived on acts of depravity. We counted on them, in fact; I mean, we needed them to survive!
It was for this very reason that, after becoming completely desensitized to basic acts of depravity, the powers that be (namely, me) felt compelled to form an unofficial team of Strattonites-with Danny Porush as its proud leader-to fill the void. The team acted like a twisted version of the Knights Templar-whose never-ending quest to find the Holy Grail was the stuff of legend. But unlike the Knights Templar, the Stratton knights spent their time scouring the four corners of the earth for increasingly depraved acts, so the rest of the Strattonites could continue to get off. It wasn"t like we were heroin junkies or anything as tawdry as that; we were unadulterated adrenaline junkies, who needed higher and higher cliffs to dive off and shallower and shallower pools to land in.
The process had officially gotten under way in October 1989, when twenty-one-year-old Peter Galletta, one of the initial eight Strattonites, christened the building"s gla.s.s elevator with a quick b.l.o.w. .j.o.b and an even quicker rear entry into the luscious loins of a seventeen-year-old sales a.s.sistant. She was Stratton"s first sales a.s.sistant, and, for better or worse, she was blond, beautiful, and wildly promiscuous.
At first I was shocked and had even considered firing Peter, for dipping his pen into the company inkwell. But within a week the young girl had proven to be a real team player-blowing all eight Strattonites, most of them in the gla.s.s elevator, and me under my desk. And she had a strange way of doing it, which became legendary among Strattonites. We called it the twist and jerk-where she"d use both hands at once, while she transformed her tongue into a whirling dervish. Anyway, about a month later, after a tiny bit of urging, Danny convinced me that it would be good if we both did her at the same time, which we did, on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon while our wives were out shopping for Christmas dresses. Ironically, three years later, after bedding G.o.d only knew how many Strattonites, she finally married one. He was one of the original eight Strattonites and had seen her ply her trade countless times. But he didn"t care. Perhaps it was the twist and jerk that had got him! Whatever the case, he"d been only sixteen when he first came to work for me. He dropped out of high school to become a Strattonite-to live the Life. But after a short marriage, he became depressed and committed suicide. It would be Stratton"s first but not last suicide.
That aside, within the four walls of the boardroom, behavior of the normal sort was considered to be in bad taste, as if you were some sort of killjoy or something, looking to spoil the fun for everyone else. In a way, though, wasn"t the concept of depravity relative? The Romans hadn"t considered themselves to be depraved maniacs, had they? In fact, I"d be willing to bet that it all seemed normal to them as they watched their less-favored slaves being fed to the lions and their more-favored slaves fed them grapes.
Just then I saw the Blockhead walking toward me with his mouth open, his eyebrows high on his forehead, and his chin tilted slightly up. It was the eager expression of a man who"d been waiting half his life to ask a single question. Given the fact that it was the Blockhead, I had no doubt the question was either grossly stupid or grossly worthless. Whichever it was, I acknowledged him with a tilt of my own chin, and then I took a moment to regard him. In spite of having the squarest head on Long Island, he was actually good-looking. He had the soft round features of a little boy and was blessed with a reasonably good physique. He was of medium height and medium weight, which was surprising, considering from whose loins he"d emerged.
The Blockhead"s mother, Gladys Greene, was a big woman.
Everywhere.
Starting from the very top of her crown, where a beehive of pineapple blond hair rose up a good six inches above her broad Jewish skull, and all the way down to the thick callused b.a.l.l.s of her size-twelve feet, Gladys Greene was big. She had a neck like a California redwood and the shoulders of an NFL linebacker. And her gut...well, it was big, all right, but it didn"t have an ounce of fat on it. It was the sort of gut you would normally find on a Russian power-lifter. And her hands were the size of meat hooks.
The last time a person really got under Gladys"s skin was while she was going through the checkout line at Grand Union. One of those typical Long Island Jewish women, with a big nose and the nasty habit of sticking it where it didn"t belong, made the sorry mistake of informing Gladys that she had exceeded the maximum number of items to pa.s.s through the express lane and still maintain the moral high ground. Gladys"s response was to turn on the woman and hit her full on with a right cross. With the woman still unconscious, Gladys calmly paid for her groceries and made a swift exit, her pulse never exceeding seventy-two.
So there was no leap of logic required to figure out why the Blockhead was only a smidgen saner than Danny. Yet, in the Blockhead"s defense, he had had a lot on his plate growing up. His father, who died of cancer when Kenny was only twelve years old, had owned a cigarette distributorship, and, unbeknownst to Gladys, it had been grossly mismanaged-owing hundreds of thousands in back taxes. And just like that, Gladys found herself in a desperate situation: a single mother on the brink of financial ruin.
What was Gladys to do? Fold up her tent? Apply for welfare, perhaps? Oh, no, not a chance! Using her strong maternal instincts, she recruited Kenny into the seedy underbelly of the cigarette-smuggling business-teaching him the little-known art of repackaging cartons of Marlboros and Lucky Strikes and then smuggling them from New York into New Jersey with counterfeit tax stamps, where they could pick up the difference in the spread. As luck would have it, the plan worked like a charm, and the family stayed afloat.
But that was only the beginning. When Kenny turned fifteen, his mother realized that he and his friends had started smoking a different type of cigarette, namely, joints. Had Gladys gotten p.i.s.sed? Not in the least! Without a moment"s hesitation, she backed the budding Blockhead as a pot dealer-providing him with finance, encouragement, a safe haven to ply his trade, and, of course, protection, which was her specialty.
Oh, yes, Kenny"s friends were well aware of what Gladys Greene was capable of. They had heard the stories. But it never came down to violence. I mean, what sixteen-year-old kid wants a two-hundred-fifteen-pound Jewish mama showing up at their parents" doorstep to collect a drug debt-especially when she"s sure to be wearing a purple polyester pantsuit, size-twelve purple pumps, and a pair of pink acrylic gla.s.ses with lenses the size of hubcaps?
But Gladys was only getting warmed up. After all, you could love pot or hate pot, but you had to respect it as the most reliable gateway drug in the marketplace, especially when it came to teenagers. In light of that, it wasn"t long before Kenny and Gladys realized there were other economic voids to be filled in Long Island"s teenage drug market. Oh, yes, that Bolivian marching powder, cocaine, offered too high a profit margin for ardent capitalists like Gladys and the Blockhead to resist. This time, though, they brought in a third partner, the Blockhead"s childhood friend Victor w.a.n.g.
Victor was an interesting sort, insofar as him being the biggest Chinaman to ever walk the planet. He had a head the size of a giant panda"s, slits for eyes, and a chest as broad as the Great Wall itself. In fact, the guy was a dead ringer for Oddjob, the hitman from the James Bond movie Goldfinger, Goldfinger, who could knock your block off with a steel-rimmed bowler cap at two hundred paces. who could knock your block off with a steel-rimmed bowler cap at two hundred paces.
Victor was Chinese by birth and Jewish by injection, having been raised amid the most savage young Jews anywhere on Long Island: the towns of Jericho and Syosset. It was from out of the very marrow of these two upper-middle-cla.s.s Jewish ghettos that the bulk of my first hundred Strattonites had come, most of them former drug clients of Kenny"s and Victor"s.
And like the rest of Long Island"s educationally challenged dream-seekers, Victor had also fallen into my employ, albeit not at Stratton Oakmont. Instead, he was the CEO of the public company Judicate, which was one of my satellite ventures. Judicate"s offices were downstairs on the bas.e.m.e.nt level, a mere stone"s throw away from the happy hit squad of NASDAQ hookers. Its business was Alternative Dispute Resolution, or ADR, which was a fancy phrase for using retired judges to arbitrate civil disputes between insurance companies and plaintiffs" attorneys.
The company was barely breaking even now-proving to be yet another cla.s.sic example of a business looking terrific on paper but not translating into the real world. Wall Street was chock-full of these kinds of concept companies. Sadly enough, a man in my line of work-namely, small-cap venture capital-seemed to be finding all of them.
Nevertheless, Judicate"s slow demise had become a real sore point with Victor, despite the fact that it wasn"t really his fault. The business was fundamentally flawed and no one could"ve made a success of it, or at least not much of one. But Victor was a Chinaman, and like most of his brethren, if he had a choice between losing face or cutting off his own b.a.l.l.s and eating them, he would gladly take out a scissor and start snipping at his scrotal sac. But that wasn"t an option here. Victor had, indeed, lost face, and he was a problem that needed to be dealt with. And with the Blockhead constantly pleading Victor"s case, it had become a perpetual thorn in my side.
It was for this very reason that I wasn"t the least bit surprised when the first words out of the Blockhead"s mouth were, "Can we sit down with Victor later today and try to work things out?"
Feigning ignorance, I replied, "Work what what out, Kenny?" out, Kenny?"
"Come on," he urged. "We need to talk with Victor about opening up his own firm. He wants your blessing and he"s driving me crazy about it!"
"He wants my blessing or my money? Which one?"
"He wants both," said the Blockhead. As an afterthought, he added, "He needs needs both." both."
"Uh-huh," I replied, in the tone of the unimpressed. "And if I don"t give it to him?"
The Blockhead let out a great blockheaded sigh. "What do you have against Victor? He"s already pledged his loyalty to you a thousand times over. And he"ll do it again-right now-in front of all three of us. I"m telling you-next to you, Victor"s the sharpest guy I know. We"ll make a fortune off him. I swear! He"s already found a broker dealer he could buy for next to nothing. It"s called Duke Securities. I think you should give him the money. All he needs is half a million-that"s it."
I shook my head in disgust. "Save your pleas for when you really need them, Kenny. Anyway, now is not the time to be discussing the future of Duke Securities. I think this is slightly more important, don"t you?" I motioned to the front of the boardroom, where a bunch of sales a.s.sistants were setting up a mock barbershop.
Kenny c.o.c.ked his head to the side and looked over at the barbershop with a confused look on his face, but he said nothing.