Fixers (3 page)

At my Bones initiation in the spring of 1980 when my delegation formally took over from its predecessor, Mankoff was one of a selected group of alumni invited to be present to make sure all went off according to prescribed ritual and voodoo. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was talent-spotting for the CIA, where he’d been tasked to set up a section specializing in economic warfare and destabilization.

We hit it off immediately. Mainly, I guess because we’re both curious to the point of obsession. Everything interests us and
prompts us to check it out: facts, rumors, news stories. We need to know the hows and whys of life. That way, we both figure, we have a leg up when it comes to controlling the whos and whens. We read, we listen, we notice; we chew things over, we continuously ask questions of others and ourselves, we do research, we value experience.

After I graduated
from
Yale (my old man would have killed me if I’d ever said “graduated Yale”), I spent a year at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts working on a master’s in art history. I had a vague idea of making museum work my life’s calling, but I wasn’t committed. I attended a couple of the summer get-togethers Bones holds on this island it owns in Maine, and I ran into Mankoff there, and at reunion gatherings in the tomb on High Street. We found ourselves to be kindred spirits in a number of ways, and in the late spring of 1982 he recruited me to come to work at the CIA, just like in the movie
The Good Shepherd
.

The timing was propitious. The day on which I reported for duty at the agency was August 17, 1982, which was also the day a hundred-point pop in the stock market would mark the end of a decade that had subjected the country to Watergate, the Vietnam humiliation, and OPEC inflation, that saw a 17 percent prime rate and 11 percent unemployment, and signaled the beginning of the Age of Milken and all that has flowed therefrom for better or worse. A wealth manager I work with in Chicago, a trustee of that fair city’s splendid Lyric Opera, compares that glorious Thursday in August 1982 to the incredible moment in
Fidelio
when the prisoners emerge from Stygian gloom into sunlight and sing a hugely moving, uplifting chorus.

For the next ten years, Mankoff and I flourished as a team. Basically our job was to sling economic and financial monkey wrenches into vulnerable central banks; to make the cold war markets hot for collectivist economies and hostile kleptocracies. We
had a good, productive time together, and I learned all about the craft of moving large amounts of money around in ways that left no foot- or fingerprints. I also picked up a lot about human motivation and corruptibility.

During that time, I came to a significant conclusion about my native land. It’s this. The Pledge of Allegiance that I was made to memorize at grade school includes the phrase “one nation under God.” It was at Langley that I learned that, in practical terms, the deity meant isn’t the God of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed, it’s Mammon. That’s a theme I’ll be surprised if I don’t return to in the course of this account.

In 1992, our partnership, which I was beginning to think of as “legendary,” ended when Mankoff quit the Agency for STST, recruited by a former partner who was serving as a deputy secretary of defense in the Bush I administration. He offered me the chance to come along with him, but I declined. My old man was on Wall Street, and if I joined STST I’d be competing with him, at least remotely. I’d seen, from the example of certain school and college friends, what that could do to even the tightest father-son relationships, so I passed. I treasured my relationship with my father and was loath to take even the tiniest risk of screwing it up for money.

Agency life without Mankoff and his sharp instincts quickly palled, and in 1993, I put aside my finer feelings and allowed myself to be recruited by a Washington hedge fund that specialized in trading on overseas political intelligence. That’s where I learned the buzzwords and how the sexiest games were played. It’s also where, within the space of a year, I came to conclude that Wall Street work wasn’t for me. It wasn’t only that the work was boring—a deal is a deal is a deal, after all, and except for the sums and units of account, one trade pretty much resembles another—it was the people. My old man always said that if you don’t like what you’re doing, or who you’re doing it with, sooner or later you’re not
going to be very good at it. I realized that to succeed, I would have to become like these people. I would have to partake of their greed, share their unconcern for the general welfare, adopt their lack of conscience—and that I couldn’t do.

Fortunately, relief/rescue was at hand. Through a museum connection I got a job in a family office in San Francisco, running its $50-million arts philanthropies. They were deep into the entire spectrum of San Francisco culture, from the Opera House to the de Young Museum, and often partnered with other big money, which let me widen my acquaintance in that world.

I turned out to be pretty adept at mediating between the people with the money and the people who wanted it, as long as the money was going to projects I believed in, and in 2004, emboldened by the urgings of a number of people I’d worked with, I decided to go out on my own as an independent operator in the broad field of art and cultural philanthropy. Thus, Maecenas Associates. I suppose my clients think of me as a consultant, but I think of myself as a cultural investment banker; I conjure up projects—lecture series, art exhibitions, a Shakespeare opera series I’m just starting to think through—and make them happen: find the right venue, the right participants and resources, the money. For which I get paid handsome but not exorbitant fees and retainers—unlike Wall Street.

When I started the business, I had Mankoff targeted as a client and he was among the first to sign on, not only because he liked and trusted me, but also—I reckoned—because he figured that it made sense to give STST’s cultural proxy to a guy who looks like he’s just stepped out of a Louis Auchincloss novel. A lot of people are turned off by STST’s public image as a sharp-elbowed, take-no-prisoners, rip-their-face-off, eat-what-you-kill outfit; I might help ameliorate that impression. Whatever his reasoning, there’s no doubt in my mind that without Mankoff’s initial sponsorship, I wouldn’t be where I fancy I am today.

And where that is consists of roughly fifty accounts, mainly family offices running between $250 million and $3 billion in assets, with a scattering of carefully winnowed hedge-fund types (none of these is private equity, of which—knowing what I know—I don’t wholly approve, but what is it they say about beggars’ freedom of choice?) and rich individuals, a Scandinavian sovereign fund’s U.S. arts-exchange offshoot, and—finally—Mankoff/STST, my only “true” Wall Street client. My work consists of vetting and authenticating proposals and pitches and negotiating the “buyers’ side” of the projects. I work with my clients’ financial advisers to make sure the funding fits their portfolio standards and that everyone has a clear understanding of their commitment. I try to avoid client conflicts. I’m famously closemouthed; in my business, you hear things, and my policy is to let it be someone else who spills the secrets of the pillow or the family dining table. I also take on the occasional pro bono job where I feel I owe a favor, or it will be especially good for my image.

It’s not all blue skies and robin redbreast, though. The trouble with my work is that you have to be where the money is, and right now we’re going through an era where the
really
big money every museum and educational institution is chasing after belongs to a pretty sorry bunch of people: Arabs, Russians, twenty-year-old tech geniuses who were too busy coding to learn which fork to use, let alone what Socrates or Beethoven have meant to the world, or that it’s gauche to light a cigar with a 500-euro note, as I heard some Russians were doing a few years back in Saint-Tropez.

I occupy space at a sweetheart annual rent in a small office building on 63rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenues that came with an STST acquisition before Mankoff got there, and that the firm has never gotten around to using for its own purposes. The exception is a suite of grace-and-favor offices down the hall on my floor that STST makes available to a few retired partners.
I’ve nicknamed this space “San Calisto” after the sixteenth-century palazzo in Rome where the Vatican houses its elderly cardinals. About this, more anon.

Although STST is technically my client, I work almost exclusively with Mankoff. I’m grateful for this, because it protects me from the perception that I’m readily available to advance the social aspirations of the wives of certain higher-ups and their clients, such as prestigious trustee boards, superior
placement
at a particularly desirable gala, even restaurant reservations. I know, for example, that Ludmilla Rosenweis, wife of Mankoff’s #2, Rich Rosenweis, is pushing her husband hard to take a bigger role in the firm’s arts benefactions, a role she clearly believes she can slipstream into a more prominent position in Manhattan society.

My work with STST can be varied. It isn’t all program underwriting and endowments. Right now, for instance, Mankoff has sought my advice concerning the artist to be commissioned to do a huge painting for the lobby of the STST Global Headquarters building that they’ll be moving into next year. Like its predecessors, the lobby murals at places like LaGuardia Airport and Rockefeller Center, it’s supposed to reflect wealth, technology, power, energy, soaring modernity—the blessings of capitalism. STST’s own Sistine Chapel ceiling, you might say. To my mind, the ideal artist to fulfill this commission in terms of sheer visual excitement would have been Jackson Pollock, and I’d have loved to see what Basquiat would have done with that space, but they’re both dead. The competition is hot and heavy-handed, and the jury’s still out. At least three of Manhattan’s most prestigious art galleries—I’m not naming names, but if you know the art scene, you can make an educated guess—have offered me under-the-table bribes to swing the job to one of their house artists. They seemed surprised and chagrined to learn that I’m not in the “pay to play” business, as many in my line of work are.

While I would never say as much to Mankoff, I have to admit to a certain discomfort at the subsidy of nearly a half-billion dollars that Mankoff and Rich Rosenweis exacted from New York City by threatening to build STST’s new global headquarters across the Hudson in New Jersey. That is a lot of money, if you translate it into teachers’ salaries, or infrastructural improvements, or health-care assets, or poor kids’ school meals, or fixing up public housing.

I know from my Maecenas work that the rich always threaten to take their money elsewhere if they don’t get what they want. Frankly, I think it’s all a big bluff. What’s the point of having all that money if you can’t live where you want, do business where you want? Restaurants you want to eat in, where there are servitors and sycophants to bow and scrape, where there are the sort of people you think your money qualifies you to hang out with, where there’s what the immortal F. Scott calls the consoling proximity of other millionaires? But the bluff is never called. It’s other side that always folds, the side playing with taxpayers’ dollars. And why not? It isn’t their money; more importantly, when the time comes to leave public service, quote unquote, favors get returned in the form of lucrative Wall Street employment.

Let me make clear how I personally think about money. Think about it morally, if you will. It’s a tricky part of my business and frequently requires fairly agile rhetorical footwork.

Frankly, I keep my thoughts on the subject of wealth and its concomitants to myself. Perhaps that’s a bit cowardly, but I have a living to make. We live in an age that worships money and has forced it into every crack and cranny of existence. Nothing is examined, nothing is evaluated, nothing is thought about without attention being devoted to its pecuniary aspects. Professionally, I respect money; I appreciate what it can make happen; 99 percent of my work at one stage or another involves wealthy people, and I have to
take into account
their
attitudes toward
their
money, which tend on the whole to be pretty worshipful and not always attractive.

But I will never become rich, because I lack that love of money that is essential to attaining or maintaining great wealth. In the chapels of my soul, I have built no altars to Mammon. When asked by someone I trust with my confidences whether I wish I were as rich as so-and-so, I usually answer, “Not really—because then I would have to
be
so-and-so,” and leave it at that.

I can say fairly that my business is a success. Between family offices, wealth managers, sovereign funds, humongous overseas investors, and nonfinancial corporations, there’s more business out there than was ever dreamt of in my initial philosophy. Take my two Russian clients, who until Putin came in had a net worth of zero and are now worth billions. People tend to be snotty about them, but you have to put yourself in their brand-new bespoke driving shoes. How would you handle it if on Tuesday you were scrabbling for crusts in the dumpsters of Moscow and on Thursday, thanks to your friend Vladimir, you controlled all the phosphate in Russia and were booking a suite at the Ritz in Paris and leafing through books of yacht designs and Gulfstream configurations. The adjustment must be traumatic, like PTSD.

My clients don’t complain about my fees: a monthly retainer cancelable on ninety days’ notice, plus an hourly charge of $300 an hour for me, less than that for my senior associates. I employ roughly a dozen people. I give them their heads, pretty much, and pay them decently, usually with a nice bonus. School and college taught me to be a team player, with morale and leadership the captain’s responsibility.

I do well enough. This year on the basis of projects in hand and my existing client base I may bring down a half-million dollars-plus to the annual bottom line after paying myself $450K for personal living and taxes. That’s plenty for me. “Sniff at” money
on Wall Street, I know, but very good pay for work I enjoy and that gratifies me, that allows me to see marvelous things and meet interesting people. If I do say so myself, the key to my success has been skillful management of the social aspects of the business: I’ll play the extra man when I absolutely have to, and I’m not averse to the odd cruise in the Baltic or Mediterranean on a client’s yacht, but I don’t overdo it. My female associates are extremely attractive, but I keep my pen out of the company inkwell. I’ve had a couple of clients and clients’ wives make passes at me that would have to be classified as more than tentative; usually these can be dealt with without becoming deal-breakers, but when it’s been clear that’s not the case, the deal has been broken. Oh, yes, one other thing: I don’t stage or attend parties in stores.