10Power Play

Barbara Moakler was sitting in her political science class at Mount Holyoke College when the word “elite” came up. She had never heard it before. She asked, mispronouncing it: “What’s an eee-light?” It turned out to be a useful word to have as she, a working-class “townie” dressed in “corduroy slacks” and “a green-and-white striped button-down shirt,” washed dishes in the dining hall to help cover her tuition.

In her senior year, the Mobil Corporation offered Barbara a place in their training program—the first ever undergraduate hire—which included the promise to cover tuition for an MBA at New York University’s business school. Barbara was put on the fast track at Mobil, but as she socialized on weekends at the city’s various college clubs, she realized the action was shifting to Wall Street, and to investment banking especially. Ronald Reagan was not yet president, but he’d just been elected, and late 1980, Barbara lined up interviews not knowing—no one really knew—that this was the very moment that Wall Street would truly take off.

Interviewing at Salomon Brothers, Drexel Burnham, Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb (following a 1977 merger), all the big ones, Barbara did not fit the usual profile for their first-year program. Investment banks had for a while now hired recent MBA graduates as “associates,” and evaluated each year’s new “class” in terms of how they performed in comparison with one another—the best could then begin to climb the ladder. Typically, the first-year associates at these top Wall Street firms almost all came from the same five or six business schools. Barbara had an MBA—well, almost, she was two courses shy of one after four years of taking night classes—but from New York University, which, if she were being honest, was “a journeyman’s school.” It was where the ambitious secretaries and trading assistants went to work their way up.

At Lehman, a small group of partners sat around a table to interview her, but it felt more like an interrogation

“Who are you? Who’s your father?”

She answered that her father was a mailman who’d died when she was seven.

They kept firing questions at her, trying to place her within a schema that they understood. But she had one thing going for her even as her background was lacking: four years at the Mobil Corporation, which effectively made her an energy expert.

For her final vetting, she was brought in to see William Morris, head of the investment banking division, who said to this twenty-six-year-old woman: “How much money do you think is a lot of money? … We’re a little concerned. You’re a young woman. We train people, they get married, they get pregnant, they leave.”

He continued to needle her. (Only later did she learn that what he was doing was subjecting her to a so-called stress interview to see if she’d hold up.)

“How much money do you think is a lot of money? Because we have to work with people who understand the economics,” he continued.

She looked at the framed photographs behind him and asked, “Mr. Morris, is that your home?”

He nodded.

“Well, I’d say whatever you’re making would probably work for me,” she replied.

He laughed.

She had passed.

Barbara was hired as a first-year associate in energy, natural resources, working on underwriting—debt underwriting, equity underwriting, mergers and acquisitions—for companies in gas, oil, and energy that needed to raise capital. It was November 1980, and blazers were de rigeur, blouses with ruffles down the front were the epitome of sophistication, and skirts now landed just below the knee. Just like in the film 9 to 5 that came out that year, the women who sported actress Lily Tomlin’s layered hair, her fire-alarm lipstick and belted silk blouses, could sense something in the air. Change was afoot.

Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton on the set of the movie 9 to 5, 1980.

Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb at the time had around 700 employees, most of them men, advising CEOs and CFOs on how to strategize and position themselves in the market. Barbara’s first assignment was handed to her by managing partner and former CIA operative Henry Breck. He needed spreadsheets of comparable data and analysis for a coal company, Holland Carbon Fuels, about how much these companies traded for.

Acquiring such data today would take little time, but with no digitized databases or search engines, research was done the old-fashioned way; the kind of research one learned in college, where you had to hunt down information. All financial institutions had their own library, where records and data were stored, typed out on “Jacquard typewriters.” But Henry Breck needed it the next day. He told Barbara there was a guy at another firm who already had the spreadsheets that Lehman needed, who had done the research, but there was no way to get hold of them.

If there was “an advantage to being female,” Barbara sensed it was now: she called up the man, introduced herself, confessed she was a first-year associate who had literarily started her job the previous day, and also the one and only woman in the energy division at Lehman. She could do the spreadsheets, she told him, but she needed the data: would he know where to find it?

These were still the days when the Street was genuinely concentrated around the Wall Street area and to invite someone over meant only a three- or four-block walk at most. He offered that she come by. When she arrived, the man, much older than Barbara, handed her his spreadsheets. “Look, Barbara, this is market data,” he said, playing it down. “You could pull it together, it’ll take you a while, here’s what you need … And tell him where you got them.”

The next day Barbara Moakler arrived at work and handed over the spreadsheets. “Where did you get these?!” Breck asked in astonishment.

“I called him up … we had some coffee … and he gave them to me.”

“Kid, you’re going to make it! You figured out how to get the work done without actually doing the work!”

Unfortunately, getting the work done without putting in the hours proved to be illusory. During her first year as an associate, the workload was eighty to a hundred hours a week, which required working every single day, all-nighters the norm. She had to prove that she belonged. There were two other women who started with her, and with political correctness a long way off, “they would call you names,” and nothing was considered out of bounds. The energy sector was “beyond macho,” more so than investment banking generally, and everyone was of the same mind: Barbara Moakler couldn’t hack it.

At the end of her first year, a well-known Lehman partner who hadn’t thought she should be there in the first place because she hadn’t entered the class through the usual channels of a prestigious B-school, started showing up with a little notebook to jot down observations. He was in charge of ranking the seven associates from Barbara’s class of 1980. One by one they were brought in to hear where they stood. When it was Barbara’s turn, she entered a room filled with cigar smoke, rings of pungent gray-blue emanating from the Lehman partner. Sitting beside him was Barbara’s boss, who was clearly uncomfortable, leaning back in his chair, staring fixedly at the ceiling as he puffed on his own cigar. The partner opened the notebook and proceeded to break down her performance. He then announced her ranking: she had come seventh out of the seven associates.

“I don’t understand,” Barbara said. “You just told me that my work is considered to be technically quite good.”

“Yes, but we just don’t think you’re very comfortable here.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve noticed when you come in in the morning, you seem to be coming in with Bob, and then you’re having lunch with Steve.” What did that mean? These were her classmates, her buddies. “You’re quiet,” he went on. “You don’t say very much, you’re always taking notes … you don’t seem to have a presence, you’re more subdued. You do all the work, your work is excellent, everyone thinks your work is excellent. You’re very good at numbers.”

She felt like pointing out that she was also good at making coffee—which she was often asked to do, and which she did, because she wasn’t going to fight every battle.

She looked at her boss, who was still leaning back, staring blankly, and asked, “Do you agree with this?!”

He murmured something unintelligible, taking another inhale of cigar smoke, still mesmerized by the ceiling.

Exasperated, Barbara asked: “So is there anything positive other than that I do great numbers and I’m quiet?”

He looked down at his notes. “People think you dress well. You’re not wearing those bowties and masculine kind of clothes.”

When she got home that night, she called her stepfather for advice. He told her to be herself, to go back in the next day and tell her boss that he should have stood by her.

So that’s what she did. She asked her boss point-blank if he agreed with the assessment of her. “Do you really think I’m seventh out of seven?”

He parroted the company line: “I don’t think you’re comfortable here.”

“I don’t think you’re comfortable with me being here,” she replied. “Do you think this is fair? Do you think I’m being treated fairly?”

He finally shook his head. “I don’t.”

But they weren’t wrong that she knew how to dress. When she received her first bonus, she went out and bought herself a mink coat in a white-amber shade. It was a showstopper even if “so ridiculously tacky.” But she loved it. She arrived at the office with the coat draped over her shoulders, and immediately the questions started up from the men: “Where did you get it?”

“My boyfriend gave it to me,” she said without skipping a beat. “He’s a partner at Goldman Sachs.”

Goldman Sachs was Lehman’s archrival, and there was no boyfriend, and certainly not a Goldman Sachs boyfriend. But Barbara had them hooked now.

They wanted to know his name.

But she wasn’t telling. No, she explained patiently, he did not want to put Barbara in an awkward position and because of that, it had to remain hush-hush.

“Oh, and by the way, we’re going to Paris this weekend,” she announced. “So I’m going to need Friday off. We’re leaving Thursday.”

There, she had said it, and now there was nothing to do but spend her sudden windfall of a long weekend lying on her couch in her studio apartment eating Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, the latest New York craze, and catching up on her favorite television show, The Paper Chase. (Never mind that John Houseman’s starring character was modeled on Harvard law professor A. James Casner, who put aside only one day a year when he was willing to call on female students. He called it “Ladies’ Day.”)

But it wasn’t just about gifting herself a long weekend, courtesy of her male colleagues’ gullibility; it was about strategy. Everyone expected Barbara—young, good-looking, gregarious (despite the partner’s claim that she was quiet and timid)—to leave Lehman sooner than later, to fall for the inevitable offer of a plush marriage, to abandon her nascent career for a wealthy man she would meet on Wall Street. And if that’s what they thought, why not get the wheels turning in their heads? Why not have the men around her think twice about how they treated her? Because if there was a chance, even the slimmest of chances, that she might marry this mystery partner at Goldman Sachs, the man who was already gifting her mink coats and taking her to Paris for the weekend, there was also a chance that one day in the foreseeable future, one of these Lehman men would be sitting across from her Goldman Sachs husband, at a dinner party, or in a conference room, or playing doubles on the court, hoping to close a deal, and Barbara’s husband might turn to him and say, Explain to me why I would give you this deal after the way you treated my wife?

She had just given herself not only a mink coat but a superpower.

Barbara understood it was a chess game; and that she had to think several moves ahead. It would have been easier to have left, to have stormed out after being placed seventh out of seven, but where would that have gotten her other than further away from money, and the power that came with it?

Moreover, invisible boyfriends were sometimes necessary on Wall Street for other reasons too. Carolyn “Cali” Cole, a Vassar College graduate, folk singer, and Janis Joplin groupie, had run out of money by 1966 and landed a job at Standard & Poor, the ratings firm for bonds and companies, before moving over to Paine Webber. Despite her hippie past, Cali eventually donned a quintessential WASP look with circle pins, expensive jewelry, and preppy clothes. But she was also gay, and had watched enough people be fired for their sexuality that she was not about to risk the same. It was much easier to say, when she was asked, that she didn’t have a boyfriend at the time (“which is true”!). Others opted to have “boyfriends” who were conveniently out of town, traveling for work.

______

AROUND THE TIME THAT BARBARA BOUGHT HERSELF THE WHITE-amber mink coat, Marianne Spraggins had decided that she, too, needed to be on Wall Street. The daughter of a prominent lawyer and activist in New York, Marianne had grown up in a historic Harlem brownstone once owned by the wealthy, well-connected racketeer Madame St. Clair. Marianne had been adventurous in her twenties, marrying a jazz musician and moving to Los Angeles, working as an airline stewardess and then on the NBC television shows Speaking Freely and Positively Black. After her adored father died in 1971, she decided to honor him by becoming a third-generation Spraggins lawyer.

Marianne now had a law degree from New York Law School, an additional LLM degree in international law from Harvard Law, and was an associate professor at New York Law School—she did not need Wall Street. Yet she could not forget a seminar she’d taken on international business transactions, taught by Nicholas Deak, “a very suave … mysterious” Transylvanian-born American Hungarian who would arrive for class in a different vintage car each time, his chauffeur behind the wheel. When she learned that Deak owned a Swiss bank, as well as the New York financial group Deak-Perera, she practically swooned. (Deak had in fact worked as an operative for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, during World War II, and just five years after Marianne’s seminar, his firm would be accused of laundering money for Latin American drug traffickers. Soon after, Deak was shot dead alongside his receptionist by a homeless woman in a suspected assassination.)

Marianne, already attuned to the finer things in life because her father had believed giving her luxury as a child would ensure she’d work hard to keep it within reach as an adult, immediately understood that Deak represented a level of power she had not yet experienced. Growing up, she had “understood political power from this Harlem vantage point of getting people in jobs and knowing city hall and getting people in judgeships. But I always knew there was something more. And when I took that course, and we went down into those bowels of Wall Street, I didn’t know what they did, but there was a different energy, and just a, kind of like a veil being lifted for me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was really important and it was kind of a magnet.” She realized that this “was the real seat of power.”

The money was certainly an allure for Marianne, “but that wasn’t the driving force.” Instead, it was the dawning recognition that Wall Street represented power and “knowing that this is a table that we did not sit at. And that we had to.” And so she set her sights on Wall Street, to be one of the first Black women to sit at the table with a full place setting in front of her. But it was one thing to decide to go to Wall Street and quite another to figure out how to get there, or even figure out what Wall Street was. She had heard of Merrill Lynch and the term “bull market,” but that was the sum of it. Marianne took to calling herself an Alice in Wonderland because she was about to fall down a rabbit hole and had no idea what she’d find at the other end.

Looking for a way in, Marianne was introduced to Russell L. Goings Jr., the founder of one of the first Black brokerage firms, First Harlem Securities Corporation, on 125th Street. Goings had started out as a shoeshine boy at a brokerage house. A former professional football player with an intellectual bent, he warned her that Wall Street was rough, “brutal for Black people,” and told her the story of when he and a friend were invited to someone’s mansion in Connecticut, where fancy food they’d never seen was being served on trays, including what must have seemed very sophisticated then, the mini Babybel red-wax-covered rounds of bite-sized cheese. His friend reached for one, not knowing what it was, and popped it in his mouth, including the indigestible fire-engine-red wax.

But Russell L. Goings did not put Marianne off. “I called up every single black person on the Street at firms and said, ‘Hi, I’m Marianne Spraggins, let’s get together.’ ” Few of them were willing to meet with her, and she should have understood right then that the game of survival on Wall Street was so cutthroat that the ideas of kinship to which she was accustomed might be meaningless there. But she did manage to rustle up some meetings, and slowly started to figure out who was who, what each firm did, who their clientele was, what part of the financial world they represented, and what you were expected to do once you entered their world.

The journalist and civil rights activist Evelyn Cunningham introduced her to a friend at JP Morgan with whom she was serving on a board. As they had dinner, making small talk, Marianne asked: “Oh, how long have you been there at JP Morgan?”

He looked at her and replied with all seriousness: “Seven years of four generations.”

She was starting to get a sense of what she might be up against.

She was still searching for a way in when she happened to arrive at a friend’s housewarming party and saw her friend’s boyfriend standing there, looking, to Marianne’s eyes, “very bankerly,” in a pinstriped suit and a shirt with a white collar.

He noticed Marianne too: “You know, I know you.”

“You do?”

“You get off the train at Franklin Street. I see you in the morning.”

The stop after Franklin was Wall Street—and, indeed, it turned out he worked for Salomon Brothers.

She got right to the point; she wanted to get onto Wall Street. Could he help?

The next day he called her: “Can you get me your résumé?”

He managed to get her an interview but warned her not to get her hopes up: Salomon Brothers were putting together a “class” of incoming analysts (the analysts program worked much like the associates program, except it was targeted at recent college graduates instead of B-school graduates). That was the good news. The bad news was that they’d already picked four Black people for it—two men and two women—and this was itself revolutionary. It was hard to imagine they’d bring in a fifth Black analyst. To complicate things, Marianne was not a recent college graduate but a law professor.

On Monday, she arrived at her interview on the forty-second floor of Salomon Brothers, all rich wood paneling and Persian rugs. (Years later she would call it the “false front.”) The imposing reception area was filled with paintings and art objects, and the interview room with white men. While she’d sat waiting to be called in, she’d observed the other interviewees and was unimpressed. “Average,” she thought to herself. “They were average.” When it was her turn, she went in, determined to act herself because she needed to be sure she’d fit in.

It worked. She got a callback for a second interview, this one held in a large meeting room that overlooked the trading floor. Marianne decided to take the lead. She walked in first, chose where to sit, and followed the same advice that she gave her students at NYLS: “If you believe you are excellent … the world will be persuaded to accept your view of yourself.” But part of her confidence stemmed from her ignorance: it was all still a game to her—she still “had no idea what they did” on Wall Street. When she was asked what she wanted, she didn’t say money or power, she said: “I don’t see anyone here who looks like me and I want to be here for that reason.” On Friday, they told her she had a spot in the training program. She had found a seat at the table.

Each analyst class started off with basic training: one week they learned about treasuries, another week about securities. Half the time Marianne had no idea what they were talking about, but she had faith in what she’d learned at law school; if push came to shove, she could always lock herself in a room, read everything she needed to on a given subject, and figure it out. Department heads arrived to give lectures about their specific financial sectors with a binder tucked under their arms with each analyst’s profile, including background and photograph. As far as Marianne could see, these weren’t so much training sessions as they were “beauty contests,” a chance for department heads to come and have a look-see and decide who they wanted to snatch up for themselves.

Who did they want? The pressure to conform was intense. One of the other two Black women had arrived sporting an Afro and a hippie vest. Within a week she had entirely changed her appearance, her clothes, and her persona. Women especially, Marianne noticed, felt the pressure to blend in, to show up wearing a pinstriped lady-suit and a “little yellow tie thing.” But Marianne was having none of that. She told the woman there was no point in trying to blend in; that for Black women, blending in wasn’t even a possibility, and so why pretend? A Black woman needed her clothing to say: “So this is who I am, and this is who I’m going to be here.” For Marianne, that meant a blazing red suit and high heels.

As the weeks passed, department heads stopped by to recruit their top picks. The white men were the first to be hired into a department. Most of them had arrived knowing someone and had all along planned to join their friend’s department at “Solly.” Among the five Black trainees, one of the women was immediately shipped off to a branch office. No way was Marianne going to be removed from New York, where the action was. One of the two Black men had barely spoken to the other four African Americans in the class; he had a plan just like his white counterparts, and he, too, was placed quickly. Now there were three Black trainees left, and time was ticking. The remaining man, who had a military demeanor and might have gone to West Point, suddenly vanished and Marianne heard he’d been found dead in Central Park.

Now there were two. Two Black women—Marianne Spraggins and a super-smart math major, who was not from New York. No one invited either of them to join a department at Solly. With nothing to do, they languished. They watched and rewatched the training tapes. During a twelve-day subway strike in April 1980, the two of them had to take cabs to and from work, all paid for by Salomon Brothers, only to do nothing once they arrived at the office. They attended social events where they were asked what they did at the much-revered firm. The power of their imaginations was tested; they had to pretend they were doing something, they couldn’t say, We sit and stare at the wall all day.

The holding pattern was awkward, excruciating, deeply humiliating. It was like a nightmare version of being the last to be picked for a team in middle school. They had nothing to do. No one spoke to them. They were like pariahs. An Irish security guard would stop by Marianne’s desk and ask how she was doing. Not well. She felt “like Hester Prynne with her scarlet letter.” Worse, it was almost time for the next class of trainees to arrive, to assume their place in the lecture rooms. The other Black woman in the meantime had started to date a white man at the firm, not a partner but someone high up in the pecking order. It was “a fatal error,” in Marianne’s assessment. Sure enough, she disappeared all of a sudden, presumably removed by either the Salomon partners or an angry spouse, and Marianne heard the men calling out to one another, laughing: “Guess who’s gone?!”

Now it was just Marianne.

One thing she knew for certain; she had to keep her game face on no matter what she felt inside. Much of the time she was doing what she could just to hold back the tears: to show any vulnerability, any pain, was out of the question. How did she go from being a law professor to this? She never told her family what was going on; she didn’t want them to make it worse by asking her if she was OK, like the Irish security guard did daily whether out of genuine concern or some perverse delight.

One day she was walking down a long hallway when she heard a wolf whistle. Not thinking it was for her, she kept walking. When she realized that the wolf-whistler was coming up behind her, she did not flinch. She was a New Yorker—a young, very good-looking one, a woman who had heard her fair share of whistles. It was a guy from her analyst “class.”

“Marianne, I can’t believe you didn’t turn around!”

Without breaking her stride, without even turning her head, side-eye only, she said: “No. And I won’t until your name gets to be John Gutfreund.” Take that back to Gutfreund, she thought to herself, let the Salomon Brothers CEO know that she was still there.

But there was another time when it was much harder to keep her composure, when the humiliation cut her to the core. Because she had nothing to do, and everyone knew it, sometimes she was sent out onto the trading floor—a place populated, to her mind, by “uncouth, ill-bred, uneducated people making boohoo money”—to get a quote. The traders would make the women (and anyone else they wanted to torment) stand there for fifteen, twenty minutes before they even acknowledged them. She was on the floor being yelled at by one of the traders after having already done her time waiting for his attention when suddenly she heard: “Oh, Professor Spraggins!”

Marianne turned around. Standing there was one of her former law students, who turned out to be the sister-in-law of one of the senior partners. Marianne excused herself after a bit and went to the bathroom, where she broke down in tears. She had been reduced to nothing by these people, and now her former student had been a witness to her humiliation.

What made it worse was that she was having to answer to a man who was “a total racist” with “steel-blue eyes, like a beetle.” One day he sent her to interview at one of the departments, and when she got there, she saw that here were the people of color. They were working in either money markets or municipal bonds. It didn’t take having an MBA to work it out. Money markets were the sector in which you made the least money. As for municipals, Black mayors were starting to be elected all around the country, and it was in every firm’s interest now to have minorities sitting at the table representing them in meetings with these newly elected Black officials in charge of investing large sums of public money.

Marianne made a quick calculation: these Black employees were going to be pitted against other Black people hired at the other firms for the same reason, all of them chasing after Black business. This is where he thought she belonged. She did the interview, saying everything she was supposed to say about how she wanted to make bundles of money. The man then looked up, pointed to the secretary’s desk, and said that she’d have to sit “there,” with the secretary, because there was no desk space “here.” She thanked him politely and left, her anger building.

By the time she reached her supervisor, she was yelling, screaming, crying. “Let me tell you one thing,” she said, planting herself in front of his desk. “You can subject me to anything you subject everybody else around here to. That, and no more. Because you don’t understand who I am. I am Roy Spraggins’s daughter. That means nothing to you, but it means everything to me, and it means everything to everybody who ever put anything into trying to make something out of me in this life. I will do that and no more, and do you understand?”

He stood up, apoplectic, turning various shades of purple.

“And everybody tells me I’m not supposed to cry,” she continued. “Well, I don’t care. This is what I do. I see those people out there [on the trading floor], and they cuss and swear and go to strip clubs, and I cry. And if you don’t like it, it’s tough.”

He pointed to a desk outside his office as if he were putting her in detention, shouting that if she hadn’t liked it “up there” then she was just going to have to sit down here in that chair.

She sat down. She did what he ordered. She tried to compose herself. And as she sat out the rest of the day on that chair outside his office, she made up her mind that either she’d be a huge success or else she’d be “carried out feet first.” There were no other options left at this point.

The next day, she gathered up her things and moved herself to the cafeteria.

Salomon Brothers had private dining rooms, where partners invited clients and guests, but the company cafeteria was where everyone usually went to grab some food, even the partners, especially in the mornings. Marianne parked herself at a table right near the cash register so that everyone who came in would have to see her. She sat there from the time she came in until it was time to go home, reading the financial papers, busying herself. She made it her office because “one day, somebody is going to have to say, ‘Who is that Black woman? Why is she sitting there every day reading the papers,’ right?”

Deciding it was better to be glaringly visible than conveniently invisible, to put herself on view, to make a spectacle of herself no matter how awkward it was for her or anyone else, brought its own kind of liberation. Glass walls were everywhere—an investment banking specialty, as if promising transparency—and there was literally no place to hide, so why not be seen instead? Sometimes she would get up from her cafeteria table and ride the escalator that went down to the trading floor. CEO John Gutfreund notoriously sat right on the trading floor, instead of in his office in the back, perched “like the captain of a ship.” Marianne, dressed vividly in her bright-colored suits and high heels, shoulders back, would ride up and down that elevator. She wanted him to see her. He had famously said that to make it on the Salomon Brothers trading floor, you had to get up each morning and be “ready to bite the ass off a bear.” This was Marianne’s way of saying she was ready to bite.

Sitting at her cafeteria table, if anyone so much as made eye contact with her, she found out who they were, went to their office, and introduced herself: “My name is Marianne Spraggins, and I was in the last class.” A new “class” of analysts had since started up, and she did not hesitate putting that out there: “I was in the class and I didn’t get placed. Do you have any work you need done?” Some, taking pity on her, or feeling so awkward that they just wanted to make her disappear, gave her work. She was handed small tasks here and there, and after she was asked to write a paper on European floating rates, she eventually got an interview in the newly emerging field of mortgage finance. A man named Lewis S. Ranieri handed her a prospectus on a Friday and said they’d talk on Monday.

Lew Ranieri was not yet a familiar name outside of Salomon Brothers, although he would become well known after the publication of Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’s autobiographical account of life at Salomon Brothers in the late 1980s. Ranieri had started in the mailroom at Salomon Brothers while a college student in Queens, alighted on the trading floor as a college dropout, and then blew past everyone when he created an entirely new market in mortgage-backed bonds. He would be known for coining the term “securitization,” and be among the first to practice “financial alchemy,” in his case packaging together home loans and selling them to institutional investors. He was also known as loudmouthed, “uncouth,” and prone to orchestrating inappropriate practical jokes.

When Marianne arrived for her interview in the early 1980s, however, the mortgage trading department on the forty-first floor was not yet filled with what Michael Lewis would call “the firm’s Biggest Swinging Dicks.” Ranieri’s department would eventually be the golden goose laying the firm’s most monumental golden eggs, outpacing all other departments at Solly; it was where every analyst trainee would want to be assigned, desperate to play alongside the “baddest dudes,” the mortgage traders who made a sport of throwing corded phones at one another.

But for now, there was no sign of this future. That Ranieri handed Marianne a prospectus explaining what his department did, what it was they were selling, suggested that no one yet understood mortgage bonds. Mortgages as a possible source of Wall Street trading was, in hindsight, obvious. Yet mortgages had not been recognized as a potential source of seemingly endless revenue until Salomon Brothers started Wall Street’s first mortgage securities department in 1978. At the center of it all was the small-town savings-and-loan bank, known as a thrift, which doled out most of America’s mortgages, and benefitted from government protections and tax breaks. Outstanding mortgage loans were at $55 billion in 1950, rising to $700 billion in 1976, and becoming a whopping $1.2 trillion by January 1980. Debt, selling and buying it, meant money, serious money.

Marianne, even after she’d read the prospectus cover to cover and her friends had quizzed her until she could recite it in her sleep, still wasn’t sure what these mortgage-backed securities were, but on Monday morning she took a deep breath and knocked on Ranieri’s office door. She was ready, or as ready as she could be, to answer any questions he could possibly throw at her, but after a short while he simply said that she sounded like everyone else at the firm so she might as well have the job.

It had taken Marianne over a year, but she finally had a position at Salomon Brothers.

Marianne set about making cold calls, trying to sell this product—the mortgage-backed security—that was still then an unknown. She started by calling insurance companies, but she was clearly stepping on toes: after she hung up with the Thrift Insurance Corporation, a Salomon partner called and started yelling at her never to call Thrift Insurance again. When she tried calling Prudential Insurance, she received another incensed call telling her to stay away. So now what? Marianne decided to use her common sense—“women have it”—and thought: this is a long-term asset, and what does that mean in terms of who wants to buy it? Pension funds was the obvious answer. She switched gears, and started calling pension funds, and this time no one at Solly was calling to chew her out: “So I knew I was on to something.” Public, government pension funds proved to be the most receptive, and as soon as she did her first deal, she was on to the next state to do another. Soon she was selling not one but a whole series of mortgage bonds to various state and city pensions.

Marianne had lucked out. It could not have been predicted that Ranieri’s department would become the top earner at Salomon Brothers. When the department finally took off, it was because of a single tax decision. In October 1979, the Federal Reserve, under Paul Volcker, appointed by President Carter in a desperate attempt to stanch inflation, had significantly raised interest rates. The S&Ls, the thrifts, were hit hard. Until then, the joke had been that they operated under a system of 3–6–2: pay depositors 3 percent, lend their money out as mortgages at 6 percent, and hit the golf course at 2 p.m. But with Volcker now trying to tighten up money to lower inflation, the reliable formula imploded. Volcker cooled the economy, as intended, but he also brought the housing market to a screeching halt, and the S&Ls to the brink of collapse. Congress, unwilling to give up on the mom-and-pop banks of middle America, agreed to help them out.

Starting in October 1981, these small thrifts were given the right to sell off their mortgages to pay off their depositors. To make it yet more advantageous for them, they were also able to turn their loss on these mortgages into refunds on taxes they’d paid in previous years. With such a profitable tax break dangled in front of them, S&Ls were suddenly extremely eager to unload their mortgages, and Salomon Brothers was the only brokerage house with a fully established mortgage trading department. Overnight Ranieri found himself, even if briefly, with a Wall Street monopoly.

At first, he bought mortgages from one S&L and sold them to another at a markup. But to make them more tradeable for institutional investors, he came up with what became called the mortgage-backed security, the MBS. These securities were pooled, turned into baskets filled with anonymous mortgages that the buyer and trader only saw as paper, and that the mortgage-owner only saw as a monthly mortgage reminder from their local, friendly S&L, the kind of community-based bank at the center of the Christmas movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life. In 1982, Ranieri’s department made $150 million for Salomon Brothers.

In 1984, about three years after joining the department, Marianne was called on to testify before Congress about the mortgage-backed securities market in relation to a proposed bill to increase the ability of pension funds, both public and private, to participate in this new market. Marianne, representing Salomon Brothers, explained, “We are pioneers in developing mortgage securities and, indeed, I think we could go so far as to say that we have been missionaries, in that field. We have learned a lot of lessons.” She was asked why other firms were so slow in getting in on the MBS, and she countered, “I would love to say that that was true, that other firms haven’t tried, but they have.… We were willing to come into this market at an early stage in time,” and as a result are “now trading about $15 billion in mortgage securities a month.” That same year, Marianne would herself do four Connecticut transactions that totaled $500 million.

Even as Marianne was now thriving, she recognized that on Wall Street, as a Black woman, the worst of it was actually being a woman—even as Black women hires were cruelly referred to as “twofers” because a firm could tick off two minority hires in one go. But being a woman in a male culture seemed to her to be the greatest disadvantage. She wasn’t surrounded just by men but by men with military and professional sports backgrounds. They were all trained to respond to commands: move left, move right; say X, and I’ll say Y. There was a discipline and hierarchy built into the Wall Street system that appealed to these men. One time, when a partner yelled at Marianne for something, he literally finished with: “And that’s a direct order!”

But Marianne “always did whatever I wanted to do, period, always. Part of the fun was circumventing all this, and then looking at them like I had no idea what they were talking about: what are you so upset about?” Said with an innocent voice, of course. Women wanted context; men wanted rules. Bosses, male bosses, when asked “why,” why did this need to be done in this way, were at first flabbergasted and then infuriated.

Marianne also came to understand that inside these organizations there were three levels of people: the people at the top, who, for the most part, were not a threat; the people at her own level, in the middle; and the people at the bottom, who were invisible, ignored, and if you offered them even the slightest bit of respect, they would help you. She had a lot of friends at the bottom, and she had recognition from the top. Her problems all stemmed from the middle, where she was blocked at every turn even as she would eventually find her way around the obstructions they set up. She had also grasped the importance of “external constituencies,” meaning mayors, state treasurers, and the elected officials she worked with in making the deals. In part, she saw them as her protection, as a second set of eyes: “There are people who know I am here, and they are watching, so you can mess with me just so much.”

Marianne was extravagant and reveled in being so. When she closed on her first big deal, she invited her friends, most of them from outside the finance world, to the Palace on East Fifty-Ninth Street, “known as the city’s most expensive restaurant.” She jubilantly announced to the waiters at the start of the dinner to put the glasses on the bill “because we’re going to break them!” Marianne had not only found a seat at the table but had guaranteed herself a full place setting.