CHAPTER FIVE

ENTER THE DATEK

______________

THE IDEA OF BECOMING A LAWYER first struck me as a five-year-old, after a violent hairy beast named Baron, my best friend Matt Slavin’s Germans shepherd, nearly ripped my face off. The threat of a lawsuit had been enough for them to have the thing banished from their family, something which delighted my father. Normally, my father couldn’t stand lawyers. As an OB/GYN physician, he had to pay absurd amounts of money for medical malpractice insurance and deal with being sued by ambulance-chasing predators who liked to channel dead babies at trial. Ah, but to me, a young kid with eighty-five stitches across my face, to see Baron exiled forever from the neighborhood because “we don’t want to get lawyers involved” had planted that first seed.

I also wanted to be a pro ball player—as a Jewish Dodgers fan, the next Sandy Koufax sounded just fine—but that dream faded in high school, where the caliber of players in Southern California was so strong, it was sobering. As an undergrad at Lafayette, I still played ball freshman year but knew it was my swan song. I found myself torn between business and law school. I’d never had a burning desire to be Clarence Darrow, and I was always good with numbers. I liked the inherent risks and tempting payoffs associated with finance, and had my first taste of it when I interned at Chemical Bank right after college, at 270 Park Avenue (today, the Bear Stearns mausoleum).

Still, law school struck me as more practical. You can always “learn” business out in the field, I told myself—most people in business don’t have business degrees, anyway—but the law was different. A degree was required. Despite my best intentions, my grades were decent, even with a semester in Australia, where I traveled the continent rather than attend class, forcing me to lobby professors just for a gentleman’s C. Even so, I crushed the LSAT. This seemed to offset my middling GPA and I soon found myself accepted at Emory, Georgetown, and USC. With no interest in diplomacy or politics, it was down to Emory and USC—and with my buddy Moe going to Emory it seemed like that would be the one. But I thought about it long and hard, and realized that Emory would be the better choice only if I wanted to practice in Atlanta—and I knew I didn’t. All I knew of Atlanta was Ted Turner and the Braves. And like every other school or college choice, the bottom line is that you don’t go for the knowledge—you can get that almost anywhere—but you go for the people. The connections. If I was going to stay in Los Angeles—and at that point in my life, that was my plan—then you had to go to law school in LA.

USC’s Gould School of Law was the oldest law school in the entire southwest. It was a great place to study; plus, I got to live in South Central LA and Brentwood, just down the block from where Nicole Simpson was murdered by someone still at large. As graduation loomed, I thought about taking the bar in California, but the pull of Manhattan became too strong. The more I heard about it—the opportunities, the lifestyle—the more I liked. It proved hypnotic. The city’s energy and women cast a genuine spell on me. Soon, I had arrived and planted my flag in New York City. I was living in a fifth floor walk-up on 28th and 3rd, a staggering 300 square feet, with a bathroom through the tiniest of kitchenettes, but still, it was mine.

The decision to accept an offer to go work for Sullivan & Cromwell in Manhattan was an easy one. I had interned there after my second year, living in pre-trendy Tribeca, where a 5,000 square foot loft cost an outrageous $1600 a month. I split the rent with my friend Sona, a fellow USC student, in order to defray the price (which, twenty years later, is, of course, about ten times higher). By my third year of law school I was putting in a meaty forty hours a week paid externship with the firm, and seemed a shoe-in for a job. A “non-offer” from your summer employer after second year of law school meant you were literally an “untouchable.” Indian lepers in Bangalore had a better chance of employment next year than you did. Granted, it was a different economy and most people got offers, but not at Sullivan & Cromwell. Few law firms are as storied; and nowhere does the term “white shoe” fit quite so snugly. At Sullivan & Cromwell, the shoes were crafted by hand, by fabled Tuscan cobblers, and the color a brilliant and blinding snow white. Founded in 1879 by Algernon Sydney Sullivan and William Thomas Cromwell, the two worked closely with Thomas Edison as he created, in 1882, what would become General Electric. But their success and connections didn’t stop there. The much older Sullivan soon retired, and it was the colorful Cromwell whose clients included J. P. Morgan (as in the bulbous-nosed banker himself, the legend) and Andrew Carnegie. Future partners would include a secretary of state (the stern Presbyterian, John Foster Dulles), a director of the CIA (John’s roguish, pipe-smoking younger brother, Allen Dulles), and a chief justice of the Supreme Court (Harlan Fisk Stone).

The musty Puritan WASP factor still lingered in the hallways, in the austere oil portraits of the famous and powerful partners. Yet by the time I got there—me, a nice Jewish boy from Southern California—the country club anti-Semitism of the firm was a thing of the past. Women and minorities could climb the greasy pole to partnership, which was what we all strived for.

Office politics had certainly changed since the stuffy days of WASP ascendancy—and when it came to after hours, we definitely let our hair down. When you work all the time, your more basic needs tend to get filled around the office, so everything was on the table. And everyone. People understood this. I believe the firm’s unofficial policy was to hire the oldest secretaries and administrative staff they could find with the hopes that it wouldn’t turn into a hothouse full of a potential sexual harassment suits (still a new thing, then). Still, there were transgressions aplenty, like the senior litigation partner who took a fancy to a summer associate thirty years his junior who was also a friend of mine. At one happy hour that ran about five hours over its intended limit, she ended up blowing him in the lower level of a well-known Third Avenue bar behind a Golden Tee game (she confided that the game’s announcer had prophetically shouted “Fore!” a half-second before he erupted in her mouth).

It was that kind of life. Always there. Always at work. Your colleagues practically your only choice when it came to socializing or antics.

Going through the motions at the firm, glued to my cellphone and my desk, my mind would occasionally drift elsewhere. Finance continued to rattle around in my head like a recurrent daydream. Stuck in Sullivan & Cromwell, this dream soon became a full-blown desire. I knew I had the temperament to run money, to be a trader, and that I could make snap decisions, often under excruciating pressure. Not everybody can do that.

By its very nature, finance was a poker game, one that would be open every day, with the stakes of my choosing. Perhaps playing poker for a living rather than editing documents wouldn’t be everyone’s choice, but I knew it would be mine in a heartbeat. Something told me I wouldn’t be a lawyer for long.

When the fateful day came, I’d been at the office since 9 a.m. Sunday, reviewing a Valujet prospectus we had drafted for Goldman Sachs—our client—making sure they were “bulletproof” after one of Valujet’s planes had fallen out of the sky. I had also just done an overnight stint at “the printers,” the most useless, technology-deprived wasteland of a department I’d ever come across. There, teams of stern-faced lawyers went over drafts, going to battle over commas and colons, and every round of changes took over an hour for the typesetters to incorporate. At 10:30 on Monday morning, I was back once again at my office, which wasn’t even mine alone. I shared the space with a Chinese national named Wu whose family supposedly had politburo connections back on the mainland. Wu had attended law school in China, which I’d always guessed involved little more than an extra semester of college. After all, how comprehensive could the legal curriculum be in a country where they can unilaterally censor all print and media, where the warning shots are chest high into protesting students, and where they can kidnap and indefinitely detain anyone they please? Habeas what?

Lurking behind my desk that morning were two extra suits (one navy blue, one medium gray), three indifferent dress shirts, a hive of discarded ties behind the door, the hypo-allergenic pillow on my bookcase that fit nicely under my desk, and the small wool LL Bean blanket (a gift from Mom) I used to cover my feet when I slept under the desk because the AC was always blasting.

Wu was just arriving as well, fresh from a weekend of drinking, eating, and gambling in Chinatown’s finest establishments. His desk was typically immaculate, not a hint of paper, here in a world that lived on nothing but paper. I had no idea how he did that. The familiar red blinking message light that haunted me was nowhere to be seen at his desk, where he sat down and took out a Chinese book and started to read.

“You don’t really do anything, do you?” I asked Wu.

I had wanted to ask this question for a long time. He turned to me and smiled.

“Onrey when dey need me,” he said slowly, smiling an even bigger smile and returning to his book. (Wu talked like a bad Chinese stereotype from a 1930s movie. Would it be better for me to lie and say that he didn’t? I assume you can handle the truth.)

Maybe once a day, Wu would disappear for thirty minutes to speak to a partner about some hypothetical matter, or on the rare occasion when a Chinese company wanted something. At this time, although China was a budding economic powerhouse, the tiger was still decidedly number two, and the majority of real “business” they were doing with overseas partners tended toward piracy. Wu was merely a small investment in the future on behalf of the Sullivan & Cromwell partnership, which hoped that one day he would return to China, do something productive, and engage our firm as his US counsel. In the meantime, I got to watch him roll in at 10 a.m. every damn day, enjoy a two-hour lunch, and jet at 4:59.

It was at that very moment, glaring at Wu and reflecting on the day I was supposed to spend with my parents that had vanished, that I decided to give something else a try. Something very different. I knew halfwits who were making much more money than I was, and working way fewer hours. The hard part would be to deviate from the all-important Path. At Sullivan & Cromwell, as with all major Manhattan law firms (no matter the color of their shoes), there was a safe yellow brick road that ended with the Pick Six on the Upper East Side, the beach house in the Hamptons, the uber-elitist private schools, membership in the right clubs, and all the trappings and accoutrements of modern financial and material success. The hard part wasn’t so much the distance—typically eight-plus years for a partnership track. The hard part was looking at those in the Winner’s Circle. Seeing a thirty-five-year-old partner who looks forty-five years old is disheartening enough. But a lot of them looked fifty-five. Thinning gray hair on the cusp of white; premature jowls; tired eyes with dark circles. And there were forty-five-year-old partners all over the firm who looked ready to start collecting Social Security. Where’s the joy in having money if you’re ready for a premature date with the Grim Reaper and you feel even worse than you look? Never mind the fact that these partners had no time in which to spend their money because they were still working all the time.

I looked at Wu and took a deep breath.

It was the late 90s, and opportunity was in the air, just outside my office window. The tech bubble was ballooning; bankers were minting money in the ongoing capital markets orgy; and there was an opening in those fields for persons who were smart and aggressive enough to write their own tickets. At the same time, of course, nobody knew that the Great and Powerful Greenspan had fallen asleep at the wheel. No one knew what loomed ahead. (The real tragedy, of course, was that no one was paying attention to a lanky, turban-sporting Saudi with a portable dialysis machine some eight thousand miles away, who was starting to broadcast infomercials promising death to the Great Satan. Instead we were focused on Y2K. The computer manufacturers were throwing napalm on the fire and pulling their hair out, yelling, “If you don’t buy a new computer RIGHT NOW! your bank account will evaporate in a microsecond!” The software mitigation experts and consultants were warning that unless they were allowed to bless and re-bless everyone’s programs, planes would fall out of the sky and Solitaire and Minesweeper wouldn’t work. Blinded by green, the “expert industry” issued one big “or else” to corporate America. It meant imminent ruin, shareholder suits, bankruptcy, and criminal negligence. Not everyone bought into it, but in our litigation-centric oligopoly, if you didn’t make the CYA moves, you’d be eaten for lunch by the lawyers.)

Greenspan was still smarting from the bad press and the lack of public love from the last time he’d exercised some modest monetary discipline back in 1994, and decided Y2K with its slick three letter acronym was as good a reason as any to jimmy the accelerator pedal to the floor of the Monetary Machine and then jump out of the rapidly accelerating car on autopilot as it headed straight for the cliff. Fortunately for everyone else, the man who destroyed the car would be waiting at the bottom of the cliff with unprecedentedly low interest rates, eager to inflate an even bigger bubble and goose the market with some extra cash once again. Just as a precaution, of course.

Faced with such an absurd world, I knew, then and there, at that moment, staring into Wu’s face, that it was time for me to hit the eject button. The very next day, I answered the call of a persistent headhunter who cold-called me every other week.

“Get me in front of the Goldman or Bear Stearns risk arbitration people or stop calling,” I told him and hung up.

It worked.

Less than a week later, I banged a successful first interview with one of the Managing Directors on the Bear Arb desk. They said they liked me from a personality and pedigree standpoint, but needed to know whether I was good, or really good, before committing to hire. Their suggestion: Go see a trial going on right now for the next two days and provide them with realtime updates and a memo on how I thought it would get adjudicated. It was a legitimate request, and a real-life test I might have demanded had our roles been reversed. (Later on at Incremental, when I was hiring traders, I pined for a beta test that would have allowed me to match a trader’s purported background and skills with the market of today. Too many of the prospective candidates were superstars on paper, and never made a dime once they got behind a keyboard for me. The Bear request was at least a glorified paper trade. You say you know M&A and you know trading? Great, what do I do in this situation? And tell me quicker and more accurately than anyone else. This was just my cup of tea.)

There was only one problem. It was nearly impossible to work a hundred-hour work week at Sullivan & Cromwell and disappear for a day, or even a half day, sans cellphone, into the caverns of 500 Pearl Street. My waking day contained a constant undercurrent of mortal fear that my cellphone would miss a call, or that I would forget to check voicemail and find some senior associate breathing fire and demanding retribution in flesh. Being without my albatross in a downtown federal court for a solid block of time was the quickest, most surefire way I could imagine to get myself fired, or to have partners asking questions that I didn’t want to answer. And even while I had made up my mind to do something else with my career, I was still, at heart, a cautious guy, and not even remotely capable of quitting or risk losing a job until I had another one, if not two, in my pocket. I thought seriously about a sick day. However, requests for sick days at S&C were typically greeted with condescension. For my employer, the sick days were an embarrassing artifact mandated by government regulation. After all, sickness was for those weak of body and mind. They were also a quick way to get weeded out from the partnership track.

Instead of claiming to have the flu, I approached a respected senior associate I was friendly with and put the scenario before him. His response was that doing something like that for Bear Stearns violated pretty much every Sullivan & Cromwell rule on conducting outside business while working for the firm and probably violated about seventeen different New York State Bar Association rules of ethics and conflicts as well.

“So that’s a ‘No’?” I asked, just to double check.

“Nope. That’s a go ahead, but if anyone finds out, you’ll be fired on the spot and possibly brought up before the Bar on disciplinary charges.”

The senior associate’s response was enough to cool me out on the live interview and let my Bear courters know that they would have to find another route to test my competency. Disappointed, they wanted me to come in the following week for another round of interviews. We would have to do with a one hour set of hypotheticals instead of the real thing.

It was all for naught, however, because that Friday, I paid a fateful visit to one of my closest friends from college, Randy Oser. It was a testament to the overlords of the Sullivan & Cromwell salt mines that I hadn’t met Randy for lunch or drinks even once since I had started working there almost two years before. Randy was at 50 Broad and I was at 125 Broad—so close, I could probably drop a Titleist into his lobby with my 8 iron. Yet still we had never met up. It wasn’t all on me, though. Randy may have had it even worse. I had asked Randy to lunch once or twice, but he’d always demurred.

“I don’t leave my desk for lunch.”

“They don’t let you leave for lunch?”

“Oh, they let me leave. I can leave whenever the hell I want. I choose not to.”

“So … you spend all day at your desk staring at a computer screen.”

“All day,” he quipped.

“I guess it’s not that bad. You go home at 5 p.m. I’m just pouring my third cup of coffee by then, because my day is only half over.”

“I’m sure the Pharaoh appreciates your sacrifice.”

“Rand, I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. This place sticks a Dirt Devil vacuum in my ear every morning and sucks out my soul. It’s pure torture.”

“Hmmm,” Randy grunted. I could tell the twenty seconds he’d allotted me had elapsed and he was already busy elsewhere. Calling Randy during market hours was like talking to an Alzheimer’s patient; they heard the sound of your voice, they just didn’t listen.

“All right, how about I come by tomorrow and bring you lunch?” I offered. “My treat.”

“Huh? Sure, whatever. 11:30. 50 Broad. Eighth floor. Ask for me.”

“Sounds good, I’ll …” and click, he had hung up.

What kind of a horrid job doesn’t let you leave for lunch, ever? Even more terrifying, what kind of a job makes an employee not want to leave for lunch? My first instinct was to flee my desk whenever possible. Sunlight and people-watching, even of the highly stressed, degraded quality found in the bowels of the downtown financial district, were a respite and the holy rite of us overworked drones everywhere. Was there really a job that people enjoyed so much that they didn’t want to go out for lunch?

“Sounds like a cult,” I said to Wu, who acknowledged me with an emphatic grunt.

The following morning—it was the first of February, 1999—I told Linda, my secretary, that I was going out to lunch with Conly Chi. Conly was a fellow associate who was also stuck on a hideous long-term project, a project finance deal.

“I’ll have my cellphone,” I said, “but try to cover for me for an hour if you can. Do you want me to bring you anything back?”

She did not.

I walked from 125 Broad Street to 50 Broad Street with no inkling that this was the beginning of the end of everything I had worked for—and the first step toward what I was born to do. A quick pit stop at a crowded, innocuous deli for a couple of sandwiches, a turkey and avocado that should have done the honorable thing and committed hara-kiri to end its dullness, and a decidedly more tasty chicken parmesan. I would give Randy first pick, and surely get stuck with the healthy one. I strolled by the Dark Tower of Goldman Sachs at 85 Broad, with its giant eye of Sauron up top, and looked through the window of the Goldman-centric Starbucks next to the lobby, where male pattern baldness–infected alpha men and perfectly coiffed, intimidatingly intense females were stopping in for their caffeine jolts before being summoned back up to the mothership.

While Goldman’s lobby at 85 Broad was marbled and immense, staffed with security burned out by years with Blackwater and giant potted palms flown in from the Amazon Delta, the lobby at 50 Broad had all the charm of the back of a Chevy Astro van. The overweight guard with an Errol Flynn mustache barely looked up from his New York Post as I entered and walked to the elevators. I pressed 8 and was soon outside of two glass doors that read Datek Securities, A NASD Co. The logo looked like it was written by some free Logo Maker software, and the glass itself—good God!—it was smeared and streaked, just begging for Windex. My already slumping spirits sank even further as a four-foot-eleven, 200-pound receptionist buzzed me in without a smile and stared at me for a few seconds before barking, “YES???”

“Uh, sorry. I’m here to see Randy Oser?”

She popped her gum in acknowledgement and whispered something into the phone.

“He’ll be right out,” she said, neither inviting nor instructing me to sit down.

After an awkward minute, Randy came bounding in.

“What’s up?” he said, giving me a handshake and wrapping me up. “Come with me.”

Randy led me through a frosted glass door and into the inner sanctum. Of absolute and utter crap.

As a lawyer, I had done work for nearly every major investment bank, and had spent a considerable amount of time near the Goldman trading floor. With its banks of monitors, high ceilings, lush expensive carpeting, understated artwork, dozens of Bloomberg terminals, Herman Miller Aeron chairs, and high tech turret phone—it was a vast football field of technology.

This, here, Datek?

It was not even on the same planet.

Datek’s trading floor was so cheap-looking it literally made me wince. It had ripped industrial blue carpets, plain wood desks that should have had liquidation stickers on them, flimsy fold-out catering tables, and self-assembled polyester overstock chairs from Staples. There was a mish-mash of randomly placed monitors from different manufacturers, chipped light blue walls in desperate need of a paint job and devoid of any art or attempt at decoration, and low ceilings with lighting connected by exposed wires. An unsettling, insect-like humming permeated the entire space. Two columns of desks created a path for foot traffic through the middle of the room, with six rows of traders on both sides of the aisle stuffed five to a row, each inhabiting perhaps thirty-six inches of living space. The trading floor at Goldman had a subdued but energetic buzz. Here, the buzz was like someone had stuffed a microphone in a wasp’s nest. Randy grabbed a dented plastic folding chair and sidled me up to his desk.

“Kind of loud in here, huh?” I asked.

“Loud?” Randy was genuinely surprised. “It’s lunchtime. You should hear it at the Open and the Close. Multiply what you hear now by a factor of three.”

I glanced around while Randy pulled the sandwiches and Diet Cokes out of the paper bag. I took in the other people around me. Mixed in were a few adults, or at least guys my age, but most of the traders were kids, right out of college or maybe with a couple of years under their belts. Jeans, T-shirts, sneakers, and baseball caps were the uniform of choice. Some guys opted for golf visors, and a select few wore homemade visors that were about the silliest looking damn things I’d ever seen: cardboard half circles duct-taped to a normal golf or volleyball visor, so that the six-inch bill was now sixteen inches or bigger, with the sides tempered down to block out any ambient light.

“Who’s that maniac?” I asked, unable to suppress the urge to gesture toward a tall, skeletally thin geek wearing green-tinted John Lennon sunglasses and a visor the size of a tanning reflector.

“That’s Brad Masters. He may not look like much, but he averages about $500K per month—his end,” Randy said driving a verbal elbow into my Adam’s apple.

“How much of that does he keep?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from cracking with envy.

“His end … meaning all of it. That’s his net, Mike. His gross was at least double that.”

Randy was doing his best to suppress a “who’s laughing now, fuckface” smile.

My mind was spinning, craving oxygen as my blood flow headed south. This Brad character was a kid who would have gotten beaten up at my high school during lunch. In fact, I had an incomprehensible urge to pummel him right then and there for wearing that absurd mega-visor. Yet he was making multiples of what I and most lawyers were being paid annually … each month! Greed is like a leech, a silent, unseen deer tick that hooks its claws into you in a flash and never willingly lets go.

Maybe Brad was an aberration, a statistical freak.

“You’re gonna catch a fly in that mouth, Mike,” Randy sniped. He was right: my mouth was actually agape, my jaw had dropped, and I was almost drooling.

“But Brad’s one of the best,” he continued. “Those aren’t typical numbers.”

I was relieved. If those numbers had been the norm, I probably would have walked back to my office, resigned on the spot, and come back over to pledge my undying loyalty to whomever or whatever I had to.

“So how’s work?” Randy asked.

“Work?” I recovered. “Oh, work is GREAT.”

I oozed sarcasm.

“But forget about me; what’ve you got here?” I asked, pointing to the dizzying array of red, green, and blue numbers blinking across his twin screens.

For the next five minutes, Randy gave me an accelerated tutorial of his trading monitor. The three Level II boxes at the bottom of the screen gave an in-depth bid-ask of a stock. The Level II quotes showed every market maker and ECN lined up on the left (the bid side) at the price they were willing to buy stock, and their mirror quote on the right (the ask side) at the price they’d be willing to sell stock. Some stocks, like Dell or Microsoft, had a nice tight spread of no more than 1/8 of a dollar, while faster or thinner stocks like Inktomi or CMGI might be separated by as much as 1/2 dollar.

“And what’s that?” I asked, as I pointed at a bolded green number on the right edge of an inversely highlighted horizontal bar down the middle of the screen.

“That’s my P&L.”

I knew enough about trading to know that P&L meant “Profit and Loss”—essentially the amount you were up or down for the day. The number on the screen read P&L 11696.

“Almost $117. Ok, not too shabby for what, two hours of work so far?”

Randy rotated my way, with the hint of a grin.

“Yeah, 117,” he said, the grin starting to grow.

“Wait, come on. $11 … thousand?”

I turned back to the screen, to double-check if my eyes were playing tricks on me.

“Nice day,” I said, my emotions pinging between disbelief and pure spite. Just prior to saying anything, I had run the numbers in my head. I doubled $117 plus some for an end of day $300 gain. Multiplied by five days equals $1500 for the week, with fifty weeks getting him to $75,000. Nice, for sure, but nothing special. Still, a better deal than my gig, based on his forty-hour work week and the ability to sport flip flops and shorts to the office.

But $11,000, however, was a whole different ballgame. Now we were talking $55,000 for the week, which, multiplied by fifty, gets him to … $2,750,000 for the year.

What the fuck am I doing working one hundred hours a week and sleeping under my desk for $100,000?

This was suddenly a huge practical joke. I felt an intense anger brewing toward Randy, for not having opened my eyes sooner. A real friend would have grabbed me Neanderthal-style by the hair and dragged me from one end of Broad Street to the other.

“Is this an average day?” I asked, almost choking. “Great day? Lousy day? Give me some perspective.”

He pulled out a busted-up blue spiral notebook with his “runs” for the previous three months. His daily averages were between $3 and $20 thousand. Monthlies were pivoting around $200,000. Holy shit. This was real. It was really real. I looked at Randy like he had just confessed to banging my fiancé, and I genuinely stammered while motioning to the rest of the room. “Ev-ev-everyone here?”

“No,” Randy scoffed.

Whew. I didn’t think so. Randy was a superb card player, a good golfer, and an engineer—sharp all around and disciplined. I didn’t know if he would be tops in here—it sounded like that Brad Masters guy already was—but I knew he would be at least a top 20 percent type guy, and likely much higher.

“Probably a quarter of these guys make no money,” Randy explained. “Then the top quarter, anywhere from $1 to $5 million. The middle 50 percent, anywhere from $100 to $500K, I’d say. That’s all ballpark,” he said, punching a few buttons and taking a bite of his chicken parmesan sandwich, as I saw his P&L change to 12014.

I sat there, gawking at the screen, but my brain was humming with possibilities.

“Who runs this place?”

“The boss is Erik Maschler. He’s, uh … he’s a special kind of animal.”

“Introduce me to him. Can you get me a job here?”

Fuck the foreplay. I didn’t want to beat around the bush. I was love-struck.

“Slow down,” Randy said. “You’ve been here five minutes and you’re ready to throw away three years of law school and a job at the best law firm in the world—just to sit here and play video games with a bunch of maniacs?”

“When you phrase it like that, Randy, I start feeling like maybe I should think about it,” I said with a smile. “But also, my gut’s saying ‘What the fuck is there to think about?’ If those numbers are real, then there’s nothing to think about. I could make partner at S&C, putting in six more years of one hundred- hour work weeks, then I could earn $1 million or more a year and still work eighty to ninety-hour weeks, and never see my wife or kids.”

“Wait? You’ve got kids? When did you even get married?”

“Not yet, but I’d like to. And I dig this girl I’m hanging with. Lisa.”

“Jay’s old girl?”

“Yes, Jay’s old girl. Can we not refer to her that way?”

“Sorry, Mike. You mean Crazy Red?”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I like her a lot. But I never get to see her because I work until eleven every night.”

“Not every night, surely?”

“You’re right,” I said. “Some nights I work until midnight. I’m lucky if it’s only 10 p.m. I’m tired of the salt mines, Randy. Of getting bossed around by people that live in mortal fear of our clients at the banks. I can’t stand being ordered around by the senior associate, who gets ordered around by the partner, who gets ordered around by some twenty-nine-year-old douchebag at an investment bank. I want to BE the twenty-nine-year-old douchebag at the investment bank. You know I’ve always loved the markets, gambling, cards. Taking risks. I traded my way through law school, and that was on a bullshit E-Trade account. I had no idea there were tools like this.”

“You would be good at it,” Randy admitted, his eyes consulting the corners of their sockets as he mentally verified this. “It’s one reason why I didn’t want to tell you about it. I don’t want to recruit you and be responsible for you throwing away a job at a marquee firm. Your life might be hard right now, but believe me, this is hard too. It burns people out. It’s the only job where you can do all your homework and preparation, and they still can reach into your pocket and take your money away from you at the end of the day. And who knows how long the opportunities here will last. Because of the market, this can all disappear in a heartbeat.”

“Exactly, which is why I should start now,” I insisted. “Worst-case scenario? I do it for a year, the market crashes, or the laws change, and then I go back to work at S&C or some other law firm. What’s the risk?”

I was playing innocent. There were risks, plural, and I knew that.

If I told my firm that I wanted to go be a visor-wearing day-trader, and then came crawling back in six or twelve months, they might give me a job again, but they’d make life hell for me and future opportunities would be few and far between.

That did not deter me. If some of these knuckleheads here in this weird room could make $250,000 a year—and the good ones were making seven figures—it was a no-brainer.

Randy sighed.

“You really want to do this? I’d have to stick my neck out for you. Erik’s a bit … unpredictable. And 95 percent of these guys here are Ivy League. I was the first non-Ivy guy they hired. But because I did well, he’s hired a few more. I think I can get him to take a chance on you, but you have to want to do it. No ‘I’m thinking about it’ or ‘We’ll see.”

“Brother, I’ll start today if he lets me. I’ll fax my resignation back to S&C from here.”

Randy laughed.

“You promise not to hold me responsible in any way whatsoever, that you are of sound mind and body and making this decision sober and with all your … faculties?” Randy checked one more time.

“Scout’s honor,” I said, holding up my hand.

“Then … you want to do this right now?” Randy asked. “We can see if he’s got time.”

My eyes went wide.

“Rock ‘n’ roll,” I said, standing up and straightening my tie.

“First of all, take that off; you look fucking ridiculous,” Randy said, pointing to my Hermes necktie. I glanced around the room. There were people with hats on backward, in shorts, or even barefoot—despite the February chill.

“Oh,” I said. “I see your point.”

“Wait here, and I’ll go see if Erik’s around,” he said. “And whatever you do, don’t fucking touch anything.”

Five minutes later, Randy reappeared.

“He’s in his office, down the aisle in the back. Says he’ll meet with you. I put in the best word I could. Now it’s all up to you.”

“Thanks Rand. I owe you.”

“You know I wouldn’t recommend any of our other friends. But you … I think you’ve got the right mentality to do this. Just don’t embarrass me.”

“No more than usual,” I said and walked across the trading floor and down the hallway. The door was open, and after double-checking the name on the plaque, I gave a light knock.

“Come in and shut the door,” a voice commanded. I did as ordered, and Erik popped up from behind his desk. He had a large, pear-shaped belly and matching chubby red cheeks that seemed out of place on a kid that couldn’t have been more than twenty-six years old. I tried to feel intimidated.

“So you’re Randy’s friend?”

“Yup. Mike Kimelman, thanks for taking the time to meet me.”

I offered a thin smile and pumped his hand.

“Sooo, you’re a loy-yah?” he said with a thick Staten Island accent.

“I am. Though hopefully, not for long.”

Then he exploded.

“Ya know, loy-yuz are … THE WORST FUCKING TRADERS I’VE EVER SEEN!” he shouted, addressing the traders down the hall as much as me. He threw up his arms with the intensity of someone trying to scare off a bear. I wondered if he was being serious, and if I should try to respond. Then I realized he was just getting warmed up.

“THEY CAN’T PULL THE FUCKIN’ TRIGGER!” he literally shouted. “THEY OVERANALYZE EVERYTHING! Ya know, if Randy hadn’t made me so much fuckin’ money, I wouldn’t have even wasted five minutes to talk to one.”

Okay, so it wasn’t quite the interview style Latham or Davis Polk came at me with. Hell, even Skadden Arps hadn’t been like this, and they were widely known as some of the meanest bastards in Big Law. As I was to learn later, Wall Street interviews are different. I’d heard of Goldman’s thirty interviews, case studies, complex mathematical and brain puzzles—all that, sure. But this was something else entirely. I thought of the Monty Python skit where a guy comes in for an argument, and says, “Hey wait, this is just abuse.”

My mind raced until it found the one place where this type of questioning had been routine. Based on the kids out there—out on the loud, crowded Datek trading floor—I thought I might have just understood something. Datek was a fraternity, and I was a potential pledge. At Phi Delt, our verbal abuse had been legendary. The hazing, the pranks, the psychological warfare. And now this guy Erik wanted to take his turn as an in-your-face drill sergeant, a sadistic pledge-master, a slob with the keys to a $250M a year cash machine.

Sensing familiar waters, I quickly moved to highlight my twin addictions of gambling and drinking.

“Randy is the best,” I said. “But you can ask him about me and confirm everything I’m going to tell you here. I may be a lawyer, but I’m the farthest thing from a technical, four-eyed nerd. I played baseball in college and Randy and I used Atlantic City as our personal ATM in college. We clobbered people on the poker tables, and I can drink like a fish and play blackjack all night. I’ve been banned from Resorts International for counting cards and I still have a host at Trump Taj that will send me a car anywhere in the northeast on thirty minutes’ notice.”

Erik’s face transformed into a curious stare that told me I had successfully changed the tenor of the conversation. He looked at me for a few more long seconds, slowly nodding his head to the internal monologue in his brain. He walked back to his chair and sat down. He reached under his desk and pulled out two huge notebooks labeled SERIES 7 and slammed them down.

“You gotta pass the Series 7. You think you can do that?” he growled. “I have to sponsor you … And if you fail, are you going to pay me back?”

That sounded an awful lot like a job offer, and the fastest one I’d ever gotten. I smiled. I didn’t answer his question immediately, simply because I couldn’t tell if he was being serious.

“I’m not asking you, guy, I’m telling you,” he snapped before I could respond. “You fail, you pay for the test.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I managed.

“Cocky bastard, aren’t you?”

“Not really. When I commit to something, I commit. There’s zero chance I will fail it.”

I’d passed the New York Bar without breaking a sweat, and nobody is about to confuse the Series 7 for the Bar. I had seen enough of my knucklehead high school friends pass the Series 7 to not be scared of it.

“Consider it done,” I continued. “What’s the timetable?”

“You schedule the test yourself,” he said. “Most people take about three months to study. After you pass, if you pass, you start a twelve-week training program here.”

“Okay, I’ll see you in two weeks,” I said.

“Two weeks?” he scoffed. “You’re nuts. The quickest anyone’s done it here was a month. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Take the time to know the material. You fail it, you’re done. There’s no second chances here.”

“It was the same at my law firm. One shot at the Bar. I’ll be fine. I appreciate the opportunity, Erik.”

I walked over to his desk to shake his hand.

“Go see Barry next door in HR, and give him all your info,” Erik barked. “He’ll get you started on the paperwork.”

After meeting Barry, the only bona fide adult in the place, I walked back out to Randy carrying my Series 7 books and drawing guarded looks from the other eighty traders in the room. Another mouth to feed. Another competitor. I strolled up to Randy with an ear-to-ear grin.

“What do you have there?” he asked, frowning.

“The Series 7 books. I’m starting in two weeks.”

“You’re not even going to think about it or talk to your firm?”

“It’s time for a change, Rand. Plus, only a fool would turn down the type of numbers you’re putting up. If I can make half or even a quarter of what you’re doing, it’ll be a home run. And that’s just on the comp side. The hours are the real prize. I like this girl I’ve been hanging with. I don’t get to see her enough. I don’t get to read, work out, or do anything. Too many people who are less motivated than me are making coin and making moves. This is the wrong time to be a drone.”

Randy looked me up and down—sensing, I think, my total determination—and shook his head.

“I know you’re right, but I still feel responsible. I don’t want you to throw away a promising career for …”

“We covered this already, bro. You’re off the hook. Now shut up and give me a hug.”

We hugged it out and Randy walked me back to the front door.

“What are you going to tell Sullivan & Cromwell?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said truthfully. “But I’m going to keep working there and wait until I pass the Seven for sure.”

“You’ll pass,” he assured me. “I’ve seen guys pass it after a three-day coke and booze bender.”

“They should probably require people to take it under those conditions; it better models the industry,” I said with a grin, and departed.

When I got back to my office, I called the SIPC scheduling agent and booked the first available date for the Seven—three weeks away. It would still be a Datek speed record, and would give me more than enough time to study. When I hung up the phone, I saw Wu watching me closely. After a passing pang of paranoia, I figured that even if he understood, he couldn’t care less.

Fuck it.

“That’s right, Wu,” I said. “It’s time to make some real money. You’re about to have your own private office, all to yourself.”

Wu looked up.

“Fock dis place,” he said with an agreeable nod, then buried his head back in his book.