Black Fridays (5 page)

“I can clear up my issues and start a week Monday. Does that work for you?”

“I was hoping to get you started next week. There are bigger considerations. I doubt this will take more than a week or two, but I need it cleared up well before the SEC deadline.”

My return ticket from New Orleans was for Wednesday, which would get me back a full two days before my next P.O. meeting.

“I might be able to swing it by Thursday.”

“I’m prepared to offer you five thousand a day, plus expenses, if you can start this Monday.”

Two weeks’ work at five thousand a day. I was willing to bend for that kind of money.

“Make it Tuesday and you’re done.” I could find a late flight back on Monday.

“Done. Come to my office. I’ll expect you at nine-thirty Tuesday morning. And thank you.”

I did the Dirty Bird touchdown dance around the living room.

There was money coming in. I was on top of the world. Persuading Angie to return seemed possible. Anything was possible.

I went across the street and stopped at the oldest wine store in America to pick up something a little special to take to dinner at my Pop’s. I ogled the Bordeaux—the seven-hundred-dollar Mouton Rothschild, the three-hundred-dollar Cos. I almost bought a ninety-dollar Barolo—it was on sale and I was sure it would be worth twice that in a year or two. Finally, I settled on a twenty-dollar California merlot. Times had changed.

STOCKMAN KEPT ME
waiting outside his office for over an hour. I didn’t sweat it. It was his dime and it felt like the first time I had sat down in days. Maybe he thought he was punishing me—I had kept him waiting a full week after my trip to Louisiana. The meeting with Angie had not gone as well as I’d hoped. I read through both the
Journal
and the
Financial Times
to reacclimatize myself to the world I was about to reenter. But my mind was elsewhere—on the rotting carcass of my marriage. I must have been scowling fiercely.

“Mr. Stafford?” Stockman’s secretary was standing over me. “Are you all right?”

I looked up at her kind face. Gwendolyn could have been forty or sixty—it was impossible to tell. She radiated calm, patience, and sympathy. And efficiency. “Thank you. I’m fine. It’s been an unusual week.”

She smiled and I felt blessed. “We all have them.” She cleared her throat. “Mr. Stockman will see you now,” she said.

“Thanks.” I stood up, shook off the memories, and prepared to go to work.

She ushered me into the great man’s presence.

“Jay! Sorry to keep you waiting. Forgive me, it won’t happen again. I had Volcker on the phone.”

Paul Volcker. The most respected lion ever to have presided over the Federal Reserve. MISTER Volcker, to you, chump, I thought.

“We go back, you know.”

I wouldn’t know. I had never spoken to Paul Volcker in my life, but I doubted he and Stockman had any history more intimate than maybe having shared an elevator one day.

Bill Stockman still dressed too well. His hair was combed, blow-dried, and brushed into a mini-pompadour that added an inch to his height. His desk sat on a three-inch riser—it helped a little, but when he stood up he still knew he was short.

The view behind him was as good as it gets in New York. The harbor and the lower bay were laid out forty floors below. The Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. The Verrazano Bridge. The rusting remains of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. To the east were Brooklyn, Queens, and the rest of Long Island, so flat that it was possible to imagine the curvature of the earth. To the west was New Jersey. Enough said.

“You’ve got a great view.”

He looked over his shoulder, as though surprised that there was anything worth looking at there. “I’m afraid I never have much time for it.”

He turned on a practiced, Broadway smile. “You’re looking good, Jason.”

I wasn’t. I was older, grayer, my jacket was a size too small for my current build, and I was red-eyed from lack of sleep for the past week.

He looked good. Unchanged. He was probably waiting for me to say so. I didn’t.

“So? Your affairs in order? Are you ready to get started?”

It was a pointed question—pointed, hooked, and barbed. I was a week late. He wanted no confidential explanations, he just wanted to remind me that I now owed him one.

I ceded the point. “Thank you for the extra time. I’m here. I’m ready to go.”

“May you live in interesting times. Isn’t that what the Chinese say? Let’s hope this next tax package puts some sense back into the markets.” The line sounded well practiced.

I didn’t think it was the Chinese who had said that. I thought it was one of those made-up proverbs, too dependent upon irony to be real. But everyone on Wall Street trotted it out whenever the markets misbehaved. I’d used it myself, but not in the last decade or so.

“Thank you for coming in on this. Forgive me if I come right to the point. This project has the potential to derail some very high-level negotiations. This cannot be allowed to happen. I need to know that there is nothing to this investigation. And I need it yesterday.”

If that was another slap for taking more than a week to get started, he was going to have to hit a lot harder before I took any notice.

“I’m here,” I said again.

There were pictures on top of the cabinets in front of the window—Stockman with his wife and children. The wife was pretty, in that wholesome, blond, middle-American way. The two daughters looked like her clones—two or three years apart. But in every picture, the camera had been focused on Stockman. Either he was the center of the grouping, or the other three were staring at him in adoration. And all the shots were upper torso only, with Stockman’s head showing just a millimeter or so higher than his wife’s. He must have been standing on a box.

“Brian Sanders,” he said, as though announcing the first slide at a PowerPoint presentation. “The Coast Guard has officially closed their investigation of the young man’s death. It was an accident. Unfortunate.”

I wasn’t there to investigate a boating accident.

“Would I have known the guy?”

“I can’t imagine. Sanders came to us from B-school. His family is from the Midwest somewhere. Kansas City?” He said it like I might not have heard of it. “Obviously, the family is still reeling. As are we. All of us. He was a good trader. Popular. Well liked. He would have had a long and prosperous career here.”

“So you knew him?” I asked.

Stockman’s eyebrows shot up. “Me? No. I’m just repeating what his cohorts have said. It seems he was an unusual young man.”

If he was both well liked and a good trader, he must have been unusual. Most young traders had to start their careers with enough arrogance to last multiple lifetimes. The market burned it out of them quickly. If they learned to roll with it, they stuck around. What they lost in arrogance, they made up for in skepticism. I don’t know that the trade-off made them any more attractive as human beings, but it did make them better at the job. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Nietzsche would have made a good trader.

“Why now? I mean with all that’s going on in the markets, all the fallout from the mortgage mess—here we are four or five years down the road and they haven’t come up with more than a handful of indictments—they’ve got insider trading running rampant, there’s all this going on, so why has the SEC chosen this month to investigate some junior trader? Have they asked about any other traders?”

“No. Their letter of intent mentions no other traders.”

He was hedging.

“But you suspect something,” I said.

“My contact there—a friend, looking out for me—mentioned that this little fishing expedition of theirs could be expanded.”

One rogue trader is rarely capable of bringing down a bank—Barings being a notable exception—but a conspiracy of traders could easily be a huge problem.

“On the phone you mentioned that compliance had already been over this. Why bring me in?”

“Our people found nothing that the SEC might care about. Sanders’ managers were shocked to hear he’s being investigated. But I need an outsider’s eyes for confirmation.”

Shocked? I doubted that. Traders whip around millions of dollars a day—sometimes billions—trying to make a minuscule profit on 60 percent of their trades. It is never a “shock” to find that someone cut some corners. Traders front-run customers—buying for their own book and running up the price before filling a customer order—though it’s illegal. They fade their bids—backing away, dropping their price when the customer wants to sell—when they know the market hasn’t moved. They often mismark their book—falsely pricing the securities they own—to smooth out the bad days. And a few brazenly trade on insider information. Sometimes it is surprising when they get caught, but never “shocking.” Mostly it’s just sad. But unless it was really egregious, these things were all handled internally. They don’t usually draw the regulators’ attention unless there is a lot more to it. I was interested to see what had the sharks homing in on this guy.

“You’ve got me. I’m hooked. Let’s get to it. What currencies did this guy trade?”

“Ahhh,” Stockman said in a long exhale. He raised one finger and shook it like he was doing the hokey pokey. “Mr. Sanders was in fixed income. Bonds. Eugene Barilla runs that department for us. You may have run into him at some point. He can fill you in on the details.”

“Hold up. I don’t know squat about bonds. I don’t want to talk my way out of a paycheck here, but I don’t know what I’ll be able to do for you.”

“It is not your product knowledge that will be of help to us. There are any number of ex–bond traders who could do that. It is your expertise in other matters that we want.”

“Because I’m a crook.” I wanted to see if he would squirm in the face of directness.

He did. “Uh, well. Many top IT security people began as teenage hackers.”

It sounded like he must have rehearsed that line, too.

“That’s a flattering comparison,” I said. It wasn’t, but I figured Stockman was much too full of himself to recognize irony.

“I have drawn up a check for the first week.” He handed me a slim envelope. “Speak with Gwendolyn about getting yourself some space to work. She can set up your interviews as well.”

I tried to appear casual about taking a twenty-five-thousand-dollar check and sliding it into my jacket pocket. It would appease my parole officer and replenish some of my rapidly disappearing funds. I planned on making sure the job lasted the full two weeks. I wanted that second check.

Stockman stood up, wiped his palm on the seam of his pants, and shook my hand. The three-inch riser under his desk helped, but he still had to look up to me.

—

GWEN PUNCHED IN
the code on the security pad and the door swung open. The familiar hum of a trading floor in full mid-morning operation rolled over us. I became instantly hyper-aware—every sense heightened, sharpened. I felt smarter, younger, and fearless. Once upon a time, I had started every working day feeling like that.

She walked me along the football-field-length floor to the row of executive offices at the far end. The smell of money hung in the air. Money to be made or lost. It was not the slightly rancid odor of consumption or the hallucinogenic aroma of a casino; it was the clean, pure, fresh scent of money for its own sake, trading hands in the blink of an eye.

The air sizzled with the undercurrent of barely controlled panic. Blood in the water.

Voices called out.

“I’ve got a 29 bid for your size.”

“We’re firm at 30. We’re working an order. He’s not going to move.”

“Listen up, people. We are a seller of dollars. At the market. Get me some bids.”

“What kind of size?”

“Surprise me.”

“Hey! Fannie Mae on the tape!”

“Fuck! What now?”

The New York Stock Exchange, the futures exchanges in Chicago, New York, and Singapore, every trading floor in every major bank in every money center in the world—they all spoke one language. They all had the same buzz. Money moving quickly. A drug that, once ingested, doesn’t ever leave your system. I was hooked for life, and at that moment I was as close to it as I was ever going to be again in this lifetime.

Gwen knocked once on the door to a glass-enclosed office and ushered me in. She spoke both our names and retreated.

Eugene Barilla had been global sales manager for Fixed Income when I was back at Case. We had crossed paths occasionally. He was direct, sometimes brusque, but very much a team player. A facilitator. I had liked him.

He didn’t like me. I found this out when he told me so.

“Jason Stafford? I don’t like you.” He stood up, looked me in the eye, and ignored my outstretched hand. “I don’t like what you did. I think you got off easy. And right now I really don’t like your getting paid for looking over my shoulder. Sanders was a good kid. I liked him. But if he was up to something ugly, I’ll find it. I don’t need you.”

He had a big, square jaw that he jutted forward for emphasis when he spoke. It made a tempting target. I breathed out slowly and spoke softly.

“Nobody died.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I did real time, Gene. I did it and got through it whole. I’m not proud of what I did, but I paid for it. Slate’s clean.”

“Do you have any idea how many people lost their jobs after that mess? The bank made major cutbacks—across the board—thanks to you. And how about the ones who lost their life savings when the stock took an eighty percent hit that week? Guys like you pretend it’s some victimless crime, but it’s not. You caused a lot of pain. Do you ever spend any time thinking about that?”

I had, but I wasn’t going to share it with him. “And I lost everything and spent two years in federal prison. I try very hard not to look back. It’s not always easy, but I try. Now, can we get down to business?”

“I told you. I don’t have shit to say to you.”

“Great. In the meantime, I’ll be sitting in some conference room, surrounded by stacks of computer printouts of trades that I don’t understand. It’s not prison, but it still sucks. But I will still be collecting five grand a day and I will milk that teat as long as I can. Or, you can give me some help and get me out of here by the end of next week. Your call.”

We glared at each other across the desk. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in his mid-fifties, more salt than pepper on top, but slim-hipped and still in good shape. I pegged him for an after-hours basketball player. He blinked first.

“Sit down.”

I took it as an invitation rather than an order.