Fixers (38 page)

“Well,” she gasped after she got enough breath back to talk, “that’s not the way we normally go about our lives here at Leeward Harbor, capital of old-fashioned circumspection.”

“How do you know?” I gasped back. “What about your mother and father, back in the day? I’ll bet they’ve got a few tales to tell.”

“In their day, my buck, such tales weren’t told!”

Point well taken, I thought. And another point for the Longboat Way.

Incidentally, I’ve tapped out this entry on a terrific new gadget, a present from B, one of those rare gifts where both the object itself and the feeling behind it are life-enhancing: an iPad. It has been on the market for maybe four months and has sold millions. Some people have all the brains.

End of week one of the Rosenweis Regime at STST. It’s been two months since I last visited their offices, although my retainer payments have been direct-deposited right on schedule.

Lucia’s still hanging on and plans to stay until the end of the year. Her role will be much reduced during this interim period. She tells me that Rosenweis kept his inner-circle shock troops in the office over the Labor Day weekend to rejigger the internal power grid, and when STST returned to work a week ago Tuesday and looked at the new organization charts, it was clear that the Mankoff regime is over.

San Calisto’s worried; they fear their days are numbered—specifically that they will be evicted if or when the building is converted to make way for a London- or Monaco-style private bank for high-net-worth clients. I’ll have to get out, too—so I’ve called a couple of brokers and set up appointments to look at office space. But nothing will replace those old boys across the way. No matter what alternative arrangements are made for them, an era is surely ending.

Which brings me to something else that’s going to be shut down: this diary.

With Mankoff out of the picture, my career as a Wall Street secret agent is over. Mankoff is sick. Orteig is said to have made the First Lady’s shit list and can no longer enter the Oval Office without knocking. Ian Spass is reported by the
Journal
to have signed on at a reported $5 million a year as senior Washington counsel to a gigantic Mexican telecom. So now it’s time for yours truly to make my final bows and tiptoe from the stage.

At the end of the day, has anything really changed? Wall Street may not be back to all its exact same old tricks, but confidence is
certainly running high among the traders and bankers that they can get away with whatever needs to be gotten away with to turn a fast buck. Winters has left the administration, and Holloway has announced that he’ll be leaving soon, too, and no one on the Street has gone to jail.

The general economy remains stagnant. Can I say that the trillion or so that was diverted from Main Street would have made a difference? One would think so.

My Wall Street glory moment is finished, and with it, the point of this diary. I’m going to load it onto a couple of flash drives and tuck them away in my safety deposit box. I sometimes think of what could happen if I went public with it now, but I’m certainly not going to do that while Mankoff is alive. Or while I’m alive, for that matter.

Grace Mankoff reports that her husband is deteriorating. Almost as if separation from STST has cut into his will to live. She says that the tics in his speech patterns seem to be accelerating, the “lost” pauses seem more frequent. And yet the disease does have its peculiar compensations: Grace tells me is that his harpsichord playing has never been better; all of a sudden, “the fleetness and fluency Leon’s been chasing for years is his,” is the way she put it.

How odd life is.

The Democrats and OG got killed in last week’s midterm elections—as expected. The wonk set is declaring the Affordable Care Act a singular accomplishment, but it doesn’t feel like it. I often wonder what the early days of the New Deal felt like. Bigger and better, I would guess.

The nation’s politics are broken. The GOP has become a raving hive of lunatics, NRA-style gun fundamentalists, and wealth-worshippers. The rise of the Dreck brothers, who are willing to spend whatever it takes to turn the country hard right, is symbolic of the way things are going. The San Calisto crowd says the Drecks remind them of the German industrialists who backed Hitler; they better be careful of getting what they wish for.

And how do I feel about it all, given my own role in the events? As usual, I waver. The moral qualms haven’t gone away, and I know I was too eager to dive in—too excited about a breathtaking mission. Still, I don’t know that the alternative—any alternative—would have been much better.

And so, Gentle Reader, with this entry I bid you goodbye. It’s been a long and winding road, hasn’t it? Three and a half years: all the way from Three Guys, to a world without Mankoff.

A brave new world?

Where do I come out when my mirror and I engage in a little personal evaluation? I suppose I could say we are what we are, life is what it is, we end up where we end up—and leave it at that. But my mind doesn’t work that way. I look at the past three-odd years and see three standout achievements. I cut a deal with Orteig that probably saved Wall Street from the gallows, in a manner of speaking. I blackmailed Washington into making STST whole on its busted GIG swaps. I developed a relationship with Ian Spass that led him to tell me about Polton turning state’s evidence on Protractor, on the basis of which STST was able to reduce its out-of-pocket on settling with Washington by $350 million.

How’s that going to look to St. Peter when he turns to my page at the day of reckoning? There was a Grantland Rice poem the Warrior liked to recite when he’d had a couple: “
When the one great scorer comes to write against your name, he marks not that you won or lost, but how you played the game
.”

But what if the game itself stinks? Can the whole point simply be to make the rich richer? That seems to have happened, too—and do I want that on my conscience? The fact is, I really never thought through these outcomes when Mankoff asked me to be his man. If I were a true son of Wall Street, I wouldn’t have given a shit then, and I still wouldn’t today.

But I do.

February 17, 2007, to December 18, 2010. Three years, ten months, and a day, if I’ve counted correctly. A geologic era. A lot
of water over the dam, a ton of money in play, and the further corruption of a political philosophy that was once upon a time the greatest melding of idealism and moral power on God’s earth. Things have happened that maybe shouldn’t have; things haven’t happened that maybe should have. The earth regularly shifts beneath our feet. We’ll let history be the judge.

That I should be thinking such thoughts now reflects a change in attitude that I attribute to my growing involvement with B’s family, her parents especially, and what they represent: namely, the kind of American, “city on a hill” values I was brought up and educated to believe in. The more this country went on in the way it has since Reagan, the harder it has been to believe in that stuff. But in Marjorie’s company, I do. Thayer’s, too, although less so—he’s a banker, after all.

I’ve made two copies of the diary, and I’ve erased the text from my computer. On Monday, these will go into my safety deposit box, and there they’ll slumber until someone finds them after I’m dead.

So there we are. I thank you for being a great audience. One last word, if I may. I started this diary with a quote from Gibbon, so it seems only fitting that I finish with one. At the end of his
Autobiography
, the great historian describes the moment when he completed
The Decline and Fall
:

“Short and precarious.” Let’s hope not. Precarious is for Wall Street thrillers, and this isn’t one. The thrill is gone, as the song says.

So there you have it, Gentle Reader. Over and out. Good night and good luck. See you in some other life.

Well, Gentle Reader, surprised to hear from me again? What has prompted me to pick up my figurative pen, you ask?

When I began the diary, I perceived it as a chronicle that would be useful to historians, a record of a slice of time, place, and activity that would have some value to scholars and readers of a later day. My thinking on that has changed. Changed completely. Bear with me.

Four years ago, I stepped away from the fray, ceased to be a participant, and became a mere onlooker with no skin in the game. For one thing, Leon Mankoff passed away two years ago, in September 2012. His death wasn’t unexpected, but it was a huge blow, nonetheless.

Still, the last four years have been mostly positive. B and I go from strength to strength. Her family has become mine, as it were. Values and convictions I had carried away from my upbringing and education have been restored. I had been taught one kind of America, you might say, but somewhere along the way lost sight of it, just as the country lost sight of what it’s supposed to be.

Now, with Mankoff no longer around and me completely detached from STST (when my consulting contract came up for renewal last year, I was advised that the firm “was now going in a different direction” in my area of competence, and that was that), I started to look at the state of the nation’s affairs with a cold, hard eye. It’s fair to say that I was—am—disgusted with what I saw. Increasingly so, day by day. Disgusted with the ignorance, the greed, the mediocrity, the total lack of proportion and rationality in every area essential to the moral and material well-being of the nation. And disgusted with myself for having played the role I did in the country’s unconditional surrender to Mammon and his cohorts.

I’m not going to sermonize on the state of America in 2014 or about Wall Street, or about the stench of corruption and selling out that every pore of Washington exudes. There are just too many ills and evils to list, and any halfway sentient American knows what they are. The diagnosis isn’t good, the prognosis is dire, and as we run up to the election two years from now, it will only get worse. Already the candidates who’ve announced for the GOP nomination would suit a circus clown car, and on the other side, of course, she’s back. What I spent $75 million of Mankoff’s money to prevent—Hillary Clinton in the White House—at this point looks like a done deal for 2016.

The only remedy for all that ails us, at least as I see it, is for this country to experience the kind of catharsis—a massive coast-to-coast convulsion—that will force open its eyes, eyes blinded for almost a generation by now by avarice and stupidity, and shove in its face an unignorable, true picture of what we have let ourselves become. The more I ponder the matter, the more I’ve concluded that there are only two ways out of the present swamp. One would be mobilize
good
Big Money against
bad
Big Money. I don’t see that happening.

The other would be public outrage of a scale, intensity, and universality few Americans now alive will have seen firsthand. French-Revolution-quality outrage, pitchforks-and-tumbrels-quality outrage. I may be flattering myself, but I think my diary, properly and effectively presented to the electorate, could trigger such a reaction, and I intend to give it a shot.

What we need is a cathartic trigger I believe my diary could be the means by which to force such a catharsis. The twenty-first-century equivalent of Camille Desmoulins hopping up on a restaurant table in Paris and haranguing the crowd into a fury that led to the storming of the Bastille and all that followed. The kind of catharsis that the Civil War represented, that brought the end of slavery and for a time a genuine effort toward civil rights; that led
to the New Deal; that brought to a nation awash in hopelessness the power that comes from thinking as a community in the way that World War II did. Hell, it was just such a catharsis, north to south, east to west, that created the United States.

If I make my diary public, I think, quite frankly, that it will have several times the seismic effect of Watergate. Just look at the differences in scale. It’ll get people to ask, if this is the way the country can be jerked around by the money power, what else may have gone down that we don’t know about?

The voters are mad or disillusioned. Racists hate OG, Tea Partiers hate him, his own party’s disappointed at his feckless presidency—particularly his failure to take on Wall Street—and of course Wall Street hates him (even if they pretend they don’t) out of fear that he may still have a regulatory wild card up his sleeve. Both sides of the “class warfare” aisle seem angry at him: either too much talk about inequality, or not enough. His tax policies favor the other guy, whoever the other guy is. People who can’t find Iran on a map are furious with his negotiations with what Bush called the “axis of evil.” Many of the noisiest voices in the room hate the Trans-Pacific trade agreement because there’s nothing in it for them, which they just know means there must be something in there for someone they hate—and of course there is, most likely. To right-wingers, OG’s a Socialist, to others he’s a puppet for crypto-fascist corporatism. A lot of the threads are interwoven, which only turns up the heat.