The Wolf of Wall Street (26 page)

Oh, Christ! I quickly tuned out and began staring at the giant panda, trying to imagine what could possibly be going on inside that warped brain of his. He was actually a pretty smart guy, and he did have his uses. In fact, three years ago he had performed quite a service for me….

It was just after I’d left Denise. Nadine hadn’t officially moved in yet, so with no woman around, I decided to hire a full-time butler. But I wanted a gay butler, just like the one I’d seen on the show
Dynasty
—or was it
Dallas
? Anyway, the point was that I wanted a gay butler to call my own, and being as rich as I was, I figured I deserved it.

So Janet went on a quest to find me a gay butler, which, of course, she quickly did. His name was Patrick the Butler, and he was so gay that he had flames shooting out of his asshole. Patrick seemed like a pretty okay guy to me, in spite of being a bit tipsy once in a while, but I wasn’t home that much, so I really had no idea what he was like.

When the Duchess moved in, she quickly assumed control over the household, and she started noticing a few things—like that Patrick the Butler was a rip-roaring alcoholic who went through sexual partners at a ferocious clip, or so he’d confided in the Duchess after his fudge-packing tongue had been lubricated by Valium and alcohol and God only knew what else.

It wasn’t long after that that the shit hit the fan. Patrick the Butler made the sad mistake of assuming that the Duchess would be joining me at my parents’ house for Passover dinner, so he decided to host a gay orgy for twenty-one of his friends, who formed a human daisy chain around my living room and then played naked Twister in my bedroom. Yes, it was quite a sight the Duchess (who was twenty-three at the time) had the pleasure of walking in to: all those homosexuals pressed together—butt to nut—rutting away like barnyard animals in our tiny Manhattan love nest, on the fifty-third floor of Olympic Towers.

It was from out the window of that very floor, in fact, that Victor ended up hanging Patrick the Butler, after it came to light that Patrick and his posse had stolen $50,000 in cash from my sock drawer. In Victor’s defense, though, he hung Patrick out the window only after he’d asked him repeated times to return the stolen goods. Of course, his requests were punctuated by right crosses and left hooks, which had the effect of breaking Patrick’s nose, rupturing the capillaries in both his eyes, and cracking three or four of his ribs. You would’ve thought Patrick would come clean and return the stolen money, wouldn’t you?

Well, he didn’t. In fact, Danny and I were there to witness Victor’s act of savagery. It was Danny, more than anyone, who’d been talking tough—up until Victor threw the first punch and Patrick’s face exploded into raw hamburger meat, at which time Danny ran to the bathroom and began vomiting.

After a while it seemed that Victor was getting a bit carried away and was on the verge of dropping Patrick out the window. So I kindly asked Victor to pull him back in, a request that seemed to deeply sadden Victor but that he followed nonetheless. When Danny emerged from the bathroom, looking worried and green, I explained to him that I had called the cops and they were coming to arrest Patrick the Butler. Danny was absolutely stunned that I would have the audacity to call the police after being the architect of Patrick’s assault. But, again, I explained that when the police arrived I would tell them exactly what had happened, which was what I did. And to ensure that the two young policeman fully got my meaning, I gave each of them a thousand dollars in cash, at which point they nodded, removed their nightsticks from their NYPD utility belts, and began beating the shit out of Patrick the Butler all over again.

Just then my favorite waiter, Massa, came over to take our order. I smiled and said, “So tell me, Massa, what’s good—”

But Massa cut me right off and asked, “Why you take limo today? Where Ferrari? Don Johnson, right? You like Don Johnson?” to which the two waitresses exclaimed, “Ohhhh, he Don Johnson…he Don Johnson!”

I smiled at my Japanese admirers, who were referring to my white Ferrari Testarossa, which was the exact car that Don Johnson had driven when he played Sonny Crockett in
Miami Vice.
It was just one more example of me playing out my adolescent fantasies.
Miami Vice
had been one of my favorite shows growing up, so I had bought a white Testarossa the moment I made my first million. I was slightly embarrassed by their Don Johnson reference, so I waved the back of my hand in the air and shook my head, then I said, “So what’s on the menu to—”

But Massa cut me off once more. “You James Bond too! Have Aston Martin, like Bond. He have toys in car…oil…nails!” to which the waitresses exclaimed, “Ohhh, he James Bond! He kiss-kiss bang-bang! Kiss-kiss bang-bang!”

We all broke up over that one. Massa was referring to one of the most retarded blunders I’d ever made. It happened almost a year ago, after I’d rung the register to the tune of $20 million on a new issue. I was sitting in my office with Danny, and the Ludes were just kicking in, at which point I got a bug up my ass to start spending money. I called my exotic-car dealer and bought Danny a black Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible, for $200,000, and then I bought myself a racing-green Aston Martin Virage, for $250,000. But that hadn’t done the trick, and I still felt like I needed to spend more money. So my exotic-car dealer offered to turn my Aston Martin into a true James Bond car—complete with an oil slick, a radar jammer, a license plate that slid back to reveal a blinding strobe light that would stop pursuers, as well as a naildrop box that, with a flip of a switch, would litter the road with spikes or nails or tiny land mines, if I could find an arms dealer to sell them to me. The cost: $100,000. Anyway, I went for the full monty, which had the effect of drawing so much power from the car’s battery that the car hadn’t worked right ever since. In fact, every time I took the car out for a drive, it would conk out on me. Now it just sat in my garage, looking nice.

I said to Massa, “Thanks for the compliment, but we’re in the middle of discussing business, my friend.” Massa bowed dutifully, recited the specials, and took our lunch order. Then he bowed again and left.

I said to Victor, “Anyway, let’s get back to the issue of financing. I’m not comfortable with Kenny’s mother being the one to write you the check. I don’t care if the two of you are doing business together, unrelated or not. It’s a red flag, so don’t do it. I’ll give you the four hundred thousand in cash, but I don’t want any money flowing to you from Gladys. What about your own parents? Could you give the money to them and have them write you a check?”

“My parents aren’t like that,” replied Victor, in a rare moment of humility. “They’re simple people and they wouldn’t understand. But I can work something out with some overseas accounts that I have access to in the Orient.”

Danny and I exchanged covert looks. The fucking Chinaman was already talking about overseas accounts before he’d even opened the doors to his own brokerage firm? What a depraved maniac he was! There was a certain logical progression to committing crimes, and the sort of crimes Victor was referring to came at the end of things, after you’d made your money, not before. I said to Victor, “That raises a different set of flags, but they’re just as red. Let me think about it for a day or two, and I’ll come up with some way to get you the money. Maybe I’ll have one of my ratholes lend it to you. Not themselves but through a third party. I’ll figure it out, so don’t worry about it.”

Victor nodded. “Whatever you say, but if you need any access to my overseas accounts just let me know, okay?”

I smiled a dead smile at him, then laid the trap: “All right, I’ll let you know if I do, but I don’t really dabble with that sort of stuff. Anyway, the final thing I want to talk about is how you should manage Duke’s trading account. There are two different ways to do it: You can trade from either the long side or the short side. And both ways have their pluses and minuses. I’m not gonna go into complete detail right now, but I’ll give you the long and short of it.” I paused and smiled at my own pun, which had been entirely unintended. “Anyway, if you trade from the long side, you’ll make a lot more money than if you trade from the short side. When I say trading long, I mean you’ll be holding large blocks of stock in Duke’s trading account; you can then move the price up and make money on what you’re holding. Conversely, if you’re short and the stock goes up, then you’re gonna lose money. And during the first year all your stocks should be going up, so you need to stay heavily long if you want to make a lot of money. I mean, if you really wanna ring the register. Now, I won’t deny that it takes a little bit of balls to do that—I mean, it can be a little nerve-racking sometimes—because your brokers won’t always be able to buy all the stock you’re holding. So your cash has a tendency to get tied up in inventory.

“But as long as you have enough guts and, for that matter, enough confidence to see it through, then when the slow period is over you’ll make a bloody fortune on the way up. You follow what I’m saying, Victor? It’s not a strategy for the weak; it’s a strategy for the strong, and for those with foresight.” With that I raised my eyebrows high on my forehead and threw my palms up in the air, as if to say, “Are we on the same page here?” Then I waited to see if the Blockhead would pick up on the fact that I’d just given Victor the worst trading advice in the history of Wall Street. The truth was that trading long was a recipe for disaster. By holding stock in the firm’s trading account, you were risking everything. Cash was king on Wall Street, and if your trading account was tied up in stock you were vulnerable to attack. In a way, it was no different than any other business. Even a plumber who overstocked his inventory would find himself running low on cash. And when his bills came due—meaning rent, telephone, payroll—he couldn’t offer to pay his creditors with plumbing supplies. No, cash was king in any business, and especially in this business, where your very inventory could become worthless overnight.

The proper way to trade was from the short side, which kept you flush in cash. While it was true that you would lose money as the prices of the stocks went up, it was the equivalent of paying an insurance premium. The way I had managed the Stratton trading account, I allowed the firm to take consistent losses in the day-to-day trading, which ensured that the firm would maintain a cash-rich position and be poised to ring the register on new-issue day. In essence I lost a million dollars a month by trading short but ensured that I could make ten million a month being in the IPO business. To me, it was so obvious that I couldn’t imagine anybody trading any other way.

The question was would the Blockhead and the Chinaman pick up on it—or would Victor’s ego feed right into the very insanity of trading long? Even Danny, who was sharp as a tack, had never fully grasped this concept, or perhaps he had but was such a born risk-taker that he was willing to put the health of the firm on the line to make a few extra million a year. It was impossible to say.

Right on cue, Danny chimed in and said to me, “I’ll tell you the truth: In the beginning I was always nervous when you held major long positions, but over time…I mean…to see all the extra money being made”—he started shaking his head, as if to reinforce his very bullshit—“well…it’s incredible. But it definitely takes balls.”

Kenny, the moron: “Yeah, we’ve made a fortune trading that way. That’s definitely the way to do it, Vic.”

How ironic, I thought. After all these years Kenny still hadn’t the foggiest notion of how I’d managed to keep Stratton at the pinnacle of financial health, in spite of all its problems. I had never traded long—not even once! Except, of course, on new-issue day, when I would let the firm go heavily long for a few carefully chosen minutes, as the price of the units was flying up. But I always knew there was a massive wave of buy tickets coming in at any moment.

Victor said, “I have no problem living with risk in my life. It’s what separates the men from the boys. As long as I know the stock is going up, I’d put my last dime into it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?” With that, the panda smiled, and once more his eyes disappeared.

I nodded at the Chinaman. “That’s about the size of it, Vic. Besides, if you ever find yourself in a bad position, I’ll always be there to support you until you get back on your feet. Just look at me as your insurance policy.”

We raised our glasses for another toast.

An hour later I was walking through the boardroom with mixed emotions. So far everything was going according to plan, but what of my own future? What was to become of the Wolf of Wall Street? In the end, this whole experience—this wild ride of mine—would become a distant memory, something I would tell Chandler about. I would tell her how, once upon a time, her daddy had been a true player on Wall Street, how he’d owned one of the largest brokerage firms in history, and how all these young kids—kids who called themselves Strattonites—ran around Long Island, spending obscene amounts of money on all sorts of meaningless things.

Yes, Channy, the Strattonites looked up to your daddy, and they called him King. And for that brief time, right around when you were born, your daddy was, indeed, like a king, and he and Mommy lived just like a king and queen, treated like royalty wherever they went. And now your daddy is…who the hell is he? Well, perhaps Daddy could show you some of his press clippings, perhaps that would explain things…or…well, perhaps not. Anyway, everything they say about your daddy is lies, Channy. All lies! The press always lies; you know that, Chandler, right? Just go ask your nana, Suzanne; she’ll tell you! Oh, wait, I forgot, you haven’t seen your nana in a while; she’s in jail with Aunt Patricia, for money laundering. Oops!