The Buy Side (23 page)

For some reason, he says, this deal was orchestrated directly from his bank’s trading desk, a transaction that hardly ever takes place. I ask who was on the desk. When he tells me, I can feel the veins popping out of my neck. I know the trader. He’d interviewed at Galleon when I was there. He wanted the job badly but didn’t get it. But I know he hasn’t given up on the idea. I also know he’s been kissing my old nemesis’s ass.

I haven’t had any real interaction with Gary Rosenbach since he tried to sabotage my start with Argus. But it isn’t like he’s completely
disappeared from my mind. He hovers in the background like a vulture on a distant telephone line. I know I’m still in his thoughts, too. Through scuttlebutt, I’ve heard he was saying disparaging things about me, calling me America’s Guest and a Wall Street diva. I also believe, with absolute certainty, that if ever he has the chance to fuck me over, he will.

I get Rosenbach’s friend on the J. P. Morgan trading desk on the phone. He acts as if he has no idea why I’m angry. He tells me it was his firm’s decision. They placed the stock where they saw fit. “Relax, Turney,” he says. “Take a deep breath.”

I repeat his words back to him: “Relax?” I say. “Take a deep breath?” It feels like my face is on fire. I’m holding the phone so tight, my knuckles are white. Put your boss on the phone, I say, using every ounce of my energy to keep my voice level. The thought that he’s deriving pleasure from my discomfort makes the task almost impossible. “Nobody’s around,” he says.

“We’ll see about that,” I say.

I call our research salesman and get the number of J. P. Morgan’s head of equities. His last name is vaguely familiar. He used to be a top producer, but now he sits in his office every day being a manager, one of Wall Street’s many inexplicable misuses of talent. They like to take top producers and make them managers. When I learned about the transitive property in eighth grade, I don’t think this is what they were talking about. One doesn’t equal the other. He says he has no idea what I’m talking about. I explain the whole story without raising my voice. When I finish, in a calm and collected way, I tell him if he doesn’t correct the situation I’m pulling the wire.

Now, when you tell your coverage you’re pulling their wire, it’s a big deal. The “wire” is the phone connection over which all their business takes place. It’s a threat taken seriously. You pull someone’s wire
and you’re killing them off. The manager at J. P. Morgan apologizes profusely but says there’s nothing he can do about the MDRX deal. The two million shares of stock they had for sale are already in the hands of other clients. The stock is now up three dollars from where they priced it this morning. “I’ll make it up to you, Turney,” he says. “I promise.”

“That’s not good enough,” I say. And before I hang up the phone, I add: “This is unacceptable. And just so you know, other hedge funds told me their allocations.”

There are few reasons why you don’t share information about your allocations. First, like bonuses, you run the risk of pissing off other traders. If I got, say, 100,000 shares and you were given only 25,000, you might be offended or resentful. You might even go to the seller and ask what the hell is going on, which could affect my future deals. But it’s also a code by which we traders live. It seems almost ludicrous that in the cold-blooded, cutthroat world of Wall Street such gentlemanly agreements exist, but they do. They have to exist to keep the business from descending into total anarchy. People who break these codes are labeled “bad guys.” And for someone like me, having so much invested in people liking me, nothing could be worse than being ranked among them.

Whenever you lower your standards, however, justification follows. I crossed this line for a business reason, I tell myself. The manager at J. P. Morgan now has little choice but to investigate the deal. And when he sees the list of allocations, it’ll become obvious to him that Argus got screwed, and he’ll want to know why. This is no longer about business for me. This is about my getting even with the people who I believe have conspired against me: Rosenbach and his friend on the trading desk.

The next day I’m back at my desk when I get hit on my instant
messenger. It’s a friend of mine who’s still at Galleon. He asks if I can call his cell phone. “Dude, what the fuck are you doing to us?” he says. He then tells me Gary called every single Galleon trader into the conference room and accused each of disclosing their allocation on MDRX to Turney Duff. “Everybody here is pissed at you,” my friend says. “They think you said something.” I’d given little thought to any collateral damage my actions might have. I don’t know what to say. “Did you?” my friend asks.

That night I go to bed and the only thing can I think about is what my old coworkers must think about me. I can’t sleep. I get up to smoke a cigarette on my roof deck. It’s past midnight. I sit down on one of my deck chairs and light up. I understand why the guys at Galleon are angry. They’re worried about their reputations on the Street. But mostly they’re pissed because Gary is making their lives miserable. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried bluffing J. P. Morgan. It was a knee-jerk decision; I did it out of anger. The only thing it accomplished was to get people upset with me. I know exactly how those guys at Galleon feel. I watch the smoke from my cigarette dance and disappear in the black night air. All of the gratitude I have for everything Galleon taught me and the opportunity it gave me disappears. I’m thankful I don’t work there anymore. Gary continues to believe he can have his way with me. But when I think about it, there’s no reason he should believe any differently. It’s the culture he swims in and has swum in since I’ve known him.

At some point at Galleon, I just became numb. They could yell at me as loud as they wanted and it wouldn’t affect me. But when I seemed unfazed by the volume, it only made them turn up the rhetoric. And it wasn’t only me. Belittling was a way of life there. Always politically incorrect, Raj and Gary one day walked into the office with a dwarf, whom they introduced as an analyst hired to cover “small-cap” stocks.
Other stunts weren’t nearly as innocuous. Once, after I’d left Galleon, Taser International came up to the offices for an investor’s road show. Raj offered five thousand dollars to the most attractive woman in the office if she agreed to get zapped. A fellow employee pointed the Taser as the woman braced herself. Her legs buckled and she collapsed to the floor when she was hit by the darts. The story goes that she may have had an accident in her pants. The odor of burnt flesh and defecation lasted longer than the laughter. Fuck those guys.

I’m not sure how much Argus lost out on the MDRX deal, or how much Gary Rosenbach and Galleon made. Maybe the amount was a few hundred thousand dollars. Yes, it’s a lot of money, but for a billion-dollar fund it really doesn’t move the needle. But that’s not the point. The point is, I have to change. Here I am, hitting full stride in my career, and I’m caught up in this bullshit. I don’t even care about the money. Yes, I’m still upset that my friends at Galleon think I used them, that I put their jobs in jeopardy. But I’m not going to let people like Gary push me around, and I’m not going to feel guilty about pushing back. And if someone else gets hurt in the process, well, that’s the cost of war. You do more damage being tentative than making a wrong choice. From now on, I’m all in. If I’m going to be a successful trader, I can’t do it by just trading stocks. I have to be willing to club baby seals, park in handicap spaces, and demolish an orphanage to build a strip club. On Wall Street, the timid get trampled. I’m tired of the hoof marks.

A BLACK
Cadillac Escalade is waiting as I walk out of my building on a Saturday afternoon in late October. Carlos, the driver, has a cooler full of Corona in the back. We drive up past Canal Street and head over to the East Side. Randy, casually dressed, is standing on the corner of Fortieth and Third Avenue. He jumps in and I trade him a chilled beer for a bag of cocaine. I peel open the bag, wet my pinky, and stuff it right into the heart of the coke. My finger comes out looking like a sugarcoated biscotti. I jam it up my nose and snuff it. The Escalade turns onto the East River Drive. Traffic is thick, but moving. I continue shoving coke up my nose, but I count the ride in beers. Two Coronas later, we can see Yankee Stadium.

The usher takes us to the first row above the dugout. The stadium is full, but our row is empty. We make it just in time for David Wells’s first pitch. We get two draft beers and two hotdogs, but the dogs are
out of some sense of tradition. As coked-up as we are, there’s no chance of us actually eating them. I stick mine under the seat and look up at the crowd. Hundreds of rows of smiling faces climb to the sky; World Series bunting hangs from the upper decks.

We’re so close to the field that we can hear the pop of the catcher’s mitt, see the glistening sweat on Wells’s forehead. The score is 1–0 and the Yankee fans are a little restless. They always expect to win the World Series. I grew up a Cleveland Indians fan but also rooted for the Red Sox when we moved to Maine. I remember going to a game in July with my mom and dad when I was about seven or eight. Boston was a two-hour drive and we took the family station wagon, the Green Machine. It was a big deal. I remember being startled by all the cars and people but amazed at Fenway. The green field looked almost neon. I think Luis Tiant was pitching. We sat on the field level, behind third base, but way back. My father paid something like six bucks each for the tickets, whereas Randy, no doubt, paid a couple grand or more for our seats—and he bought eight tickets for just the two of us.

“You gonna get paid this year, right?” Randy asks as he wipes away his beer foam mustache. I give him a
What do you think?
look, a coked-up version of Tony Soprano. “If I don’t make at least seven hundred and fifty k, I’m leaving,” he says. Along with the market, the trading volume is way up. If people are trading, then the sell side is making money. “I should know by December,” he says. Randy flags down the beer guy and orders two more. “Once the check clears I’ll decide.” No need to let anyone know you’re looking for a new job until that check clears. In January everybody’s a free agent.

Wells is struggling. There are runners on base. The pitcher looks like someone you’d meet at Red Rock West. Maybe I did.

“Dude … so funny,” Randy says. “Last week we had a sales meeting.” He grabs the two beers. “They used your account as an example on the slide presentation,” he says, laughing.

“Come on,” I say, wondering if he’s putting me on.

“Yup. They said this is the correct way to grow an account and they showed your commission growth for 2001, 2002, and the first three quarters of this year,” he says.

“Did they show slides of eight balls and bottle service?” The Marlins hit into a double play. Inning over.

“Let’s use two of the tickets,” Randy says. We get up and make our way to the bathroom, find two stalls in the back. I jam my apartment key into the bag and rip three quick bumps. Yankee Stadium is one Zip. I hate doing blow here. So many people in and out, no privacy. When we’re done in the stalls, we head for the exit. The ticket taker warns us that there is no reentry.

“We know, we know,” I say. Six extra tickets for three smoking-breaks. Once outside, we fire up two cigarettes. We finish them and light another. After we smoke our second we hand the same ticket taker two new fresh tickets. He should be an undertaker. His smile indicates nothing.

By the time we’re back to the seats, I already want another bump and cigarette. I look up at the scoreboard. It’s the top of the second—no, it’s the third. The game is still 1–0, and Florida has a couple of guys on. “So, you think you can get me a new job?” Randy asks.

“Dude, in fifteen minutes,” I say. I pull out my phone like I’m going to make a call. He asks me where I think he should go and I tell him Lehman or Merrill. “They do big business and there’s not a lot of office drama,” I say.

“You sure you can get me in there?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “If I hooked Pete up, you should be a layup.”

It was this summer that I met Pete. I awoke with a hangover in the beach house I shared with a few other Wall Street guys. In the pocket of the shorts I wore the night before was a bar napkin on which was written a phone number under the name “Pete—White Squall.”

Over bagels and Gatorade on the porch, my housemates tell me that Pete is the bartender at John Scott’s, a local beach bar. Slowly, the previous evening’s festivities came into focus. I was calling Pete “Bailey” after the character from the TV show
Party of Five
. Pete was insane. At one point he put twenty cigarettes in his mouth and lit them. He didn’t charge us for a thing. I loved him.

“But why do I have his number?” I asked.

“You promised you’d help him get a job,” came the reply.

Pete told me he works in the back office of a firm called Knight Securities. That Monday morning I called Knight’s trading desk. “This is Turney Duff from Argus Partners,” I said. “We have a couple billion in assets and we want to open an account.” There was the appropriate moment of silence on the phone. Imagine a lotto agent calling your house and telling you that he wants to sell you the winning ticket. What I’d just dangled meant hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions for them.