I don’t believe we’ve ever met. I’m Mr. Right.
—“Four Tested Opening Lines,”
advertisement, Playboy, 1969
The summer was over and Troob and I felt pretty crappy. We hadn’t exercised that much, we’d worked long hours, and we were tired. A summer that we had thought was going to be filled with social engagements, weekends in the Hamptons, and dating turned out to be a summer filled with work. However, we were paid well—about $12,000 for ten weeks of work, the first two weeks of which we did nothing. They told us that if we came back full-time we would be handsomely rewarded. We were told at the end of the summer that if we joined full-time we’d receive an advance of $18,000 and receive a signing bonus of another $5,000 that would cover our moving expenses at the end of the school year.
We went back to our second year of business school, me to Wharton and Troob to Harvard. Within two months the recruiting push for full-time employment came. The DLJ bird catchers came hunting for Troob first. He was a pigeon, and I could hear him squawking all the way down at Wharton:
Over the summer I had made some good friends like Rolfe, but I was standing on my moral high ground and saying to myself that I wouldn’t get lured in by the mystique of investment banking and would only take a job that I really liked. Well, my moral high ground was about as sturdy as a drunk cowboy’s shooting hand. I was weak. I called Rolfe and asked him what he was going to do and he told me that he was going to hold out. So I said I would hold out also. Then in October some senior DLJ bankers came up to Boston to take me out to dinner.
Ed Star and Les Newton came to town. I’d worked with both of these guys during the summer. They were up in Boston to seal the deal, to close the transaction, to lock me in. I was a project to them, just another deal that they needed to close. I was a steer and these were two cattle ranchers rounding me up. They wanted to brand my ass with a hot iron. Looking back, I had no chance.
Star was the head of the Merchant Bank, the most orgasmic place to work on Wall Street. In the Merchant Bank even the junior bankers were allowed to participate in the deals. Just hanging out with Star got me excited. He smelled like money. They didn’t have to corral me and lead me to slaughter, I was ready and willing to walk into the DLJ slaughterhouse all by myself. I was as lubed as the women at Peepland, and ready to sign up.
I wanted to be like Star. He was married to a woman who looked like she was a dancer or a model. People said that he had bought a house in the Hamptons for around $5 million and an apartment in NYC for the same amount. He said that he played golf all the time, and did deals, in between holes, that made him rich. He seemed to be having fun. He had the life, or so I thought. What I didn’t realize was that I would be entering the bank at a level so many rungs below where Star resided that our lives would have about as much resemblance as Cindy Crawford has to the bearded lady at Coney Island. There were dues to pay, pain to experience, and a long journey from associate to managing director. He may have been my role model, but I was fooling myself to think that it came easy.
Les Newton was the golden child. He was young, successful, and rapidly moving up the hierarchy. He had it all. He had investments in deals, lots of disposable income, and what seemed to be a dream job. He looked rested and relaxed. He’d figured out one of the investment banker’s greatest secrets—how to stay up all night working and still look fresh the next day. He was made of rubber, and he was what all MBAs hoped they could be. He had also probably kissed more ass than a toilet seat sees in a year.
I also wanted to be like Les. Les was a good guy. Les played his cards right, played the game well, and he was rewarded for it.
They took me to a strip bar and we spent tons of dough, and then we went to a steak place, ate great steaks, and drank expensive bottles of red wine. We finished the evening off with glasses of port, cheesecake, cigars, and a discussion. They really poured it on and I was loose as a goose and eating it all up. This was what I had imagined banking was all about. Steaks, wine, cigars, naked women, and rich guys. Like the Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party, except with guys who were loaded down with dough.
“Pete, we want you to join DLJ. You’re our favorite candidate. We really want you, we really need you. Say yes now and I’ll make sure you get your signing bonus money in a couple of weeks. I think you’re the type of person who would excel at DLJ and could move up the ladder quickly. When you get to DLJ we want you to work for us. You’re our guy.”
At Harvard the recruiters weren’t allowed to give “exploding” offers. An exploding offer was an offer that automatically got rescinded at a certain date if it hadn’t been accepted. The business schools had outlawed the exploding offers because they wanted all the students to be able to fully assess all their options. This gave the savvy students the ability to shop their offers around. The really smart students would interview with all the banks, all of whom came onto campus early in the recruiting season, and build a book of banking offers. They would then use those offers as backup while they tried to get the much more difficult leveraged buyout shop and hedge fund offers.
The investment banking recruiting machine was not naive to this strategy, though. So the investment banks would not give official offers at all but would wait until the candidate gave them the assurance that he would say yes if offered a job. This was the pinnacle of the mating dance. The proverbial cat-and-mouse game. On the one hand, the banks wanted to give exploding offers so that the business school students wouldn’t use the offers to find better jobs. On the other hand, the school wouldn’t permit exploding offers. Well, the business schools were no match for the investment banking recruiting machines.
Les said, “We’re not giving you an offer, but if we did offer you a job—remember we are saying if—would you accept it within three weeks? If you can’t accept it by the end of October, then we can’t offer you a job.”
“So,” Star chimed in, “we’d like you to climb aboard. So will you? We’re not giving you an offer, but if we did you would have to get back to us by the end of October, because if we didn’t have an indication that you would accept the offer, which we’re not officially making, then we’d have to look for other people and extend them offers instead. So, if you can give us a strong indication that you want to work for DLJ and that you would accept an offer if one was given to you, then we could probably extend you an offer.”
I’m still not sure what a “strong indication” should have been. Should I have jumped up on the table and screamed, “Yes, I want to work at DLJ!” Maybe if I had run outside and peed the letters “DLJ” in the snow, this would have given them a strong indication. The game was ridiculous and I played right into it.
“You have the right stuff,” Star went on. “You’re our kind of guy. You’re the man. You’ll work in Merchant Banking, and do deals, and get levered and make money. We’ll protect you.”
That saying—“We’ll protect you”—is akin to a nineteen-year-old horny high schooler sitting in the backseat of his dad’s car with his eighteen-year-old date and saying, “Trust me.” Somebody’s about to get screwed.
I was so high by this point. These guys had pumped me so full of hot air that I was almost floating away. My head must have been the size of a pumpkin. Right then and there I accepted. I had promised to talk to Rolfe before I accepted, but I couldn’t wait. I sold my soul.
Well, maybe I really didn’t accept anything because they had never officially offered me anything. I went back to my apartment and called Rolfe to tell him what I’d done, but on my answering machine there was Rolfe.
“Hey, Troob, the guys brought me out and I think that this banking thing will be a good move so I went ahead and accepted their offer.”
I spoke to Rolfe and we assured each other that we had made the right decision. Explanations like “This is a great stepping-stone and the hours won’t really be that bad because we’ll be more senior” pervaded our conversation. We had a favorite explanation: “We’ll only work for the good people. They’ll protect us.”
Within a week, I’d received all of the checks that I was now entitled to and had also received a bottle of Dom Perignon with a note attached: “Welcome to the DLJ family.” I thought that this showed class.
A couple of weeks later they flew me to New York to say hello to other bankers and just revel in the bliss of being part of the DLJ team. They sent me plane tickets and had a car pick me up at the airport. I stayed at the Four Seasons and was told to order as much room service as I wanted. The DLJ Hoover machine was sucking me in like a piece of dust on a carpet. I liked the plane flights, the cars, the nice hotels, the feeling of being rich, the lifestyle. I was a junior banker and no one could stop me. God help me.
However, from November through June I didn’t hear from Ed Star, Les Newton, or any of my so-called comrades-in-arms again. At this point, I called Rolfe and found out that he’d had the same experience. This was our first indication that we were just cogs in the Big Machine. Star and Newton had come to Boston and had done what they were contracted by the firm to do. Make me accept a job that they never really offered to me. They had closed the transaction and moved on. Other bankers closed on the Rolfe transaction. We were two excited and eager suckers.
The first contact we had with DLJ after officially accepting our non-official offers came in June when an administrative assistant called to tell us that we had to take a drug test before starting work. Well, this scuttled a whole load of fun plans we’d had for the summer, but we were willing to do whatever it took to be able to be part of the elite DLJ club.
With the start of our new careers edging ever closer, we were beginning to feel good about our choice. We had a conversation in July and talked about doing IPOs and doing deals in the Merchant Bank. We talked about the big money and the time we’d have to spend it. We discussed our grand plans of taking the New York social scene by storm. The parties, the big life. We talked about being hotshot investment bankers at the hottest firm on Wall Street. We were stroking each other and it felt good. We thought we were entering nirvana, and that we would soar like eagles over the heads of the common folk.
Actually, we weren’t eagles. We were pigeons, following a trail of bread crumbs.