nothing but money - smith, greg

[...]... near this wealthy this soon His timing had been impeccable He lived top-of-the-line, in a high-rise with a twenty-four-hour doorman in an old -money section of Midtown Manhattan perched over FDR Drive and inhabited by people whose money dated back to the robber barons of the last century Some of these people had been born into it, but some had had to scrape their way up to be allowed to live on Sutton... a short period of time There was the art collection He knew almost nothing about art, but understood its ability to create credibility He’d bought matching black Mercedes convertibles for himself and his sister He owned a $500 Rolex He visited a tanning salon once a week, no exceptions The stove in his apartment was top-of-the-line, but he never turned it on He ate out every night and placed himself... this you got and kept as much money as possible, as quickly as possible He went to college, got a degree in biology, and naturally got a job with all the implications of Darwinism—a clerk at a commodity trading house He took the Series 7 and became a registered broker, and in nine months he’d jumped to a new twenty-four-hour-a-day brokerage house with a higher salary The money poured in, and as far as... him He was up at 5:30 a.m every weekday, out the door by 6:30, at his desk by 7 He embraced his early morning enthusiasm He couldn’t wait to get to work He was going to make money, lots of money, more money than a young man of twenty-seven deserved to make This was it He had arrived He stepped into the shower and prepared to march forward He told people he lived on Sutton Place, an address synonymous... real responsibilities other than to continue making money for people who already had plenty He was up with every sunrise and ready to be at his desk at Oppenheimer by seven That was the Wall Street way This was the 1980s This was Reagan and supply-side and trickle-down This was a market trading in the thousands after trading in the hundreds for decades Money was the new frontier Every day the heroes of... day the heroes of Wall Street came up with new ways to make more and more money And there was so much money floating around, you couldn’t spend it all There weren’t enough hours in the day Maybe the old guard still took the subway to work, but the new guard knew better Why hide success? Screw the subway Hire a limo Order top-shelf, smoke Cubans, collect Italian suits Spending theatrically sent a message,... blackness There was nothing else out here but the lonely Outerbridge Crossing, the southernmost bridge in New York City that took you out of Staten Island and into the wilds of New Jersey In the headlight beams, Robert could make out a beat-up white trailer, probably the fence company’s office, stacks of concrete barriers choked with weeds, rusting rows of abandoned vehicles with leering gap-toothed grills... Gabriel Infanti disappear, this was anything but They’d thought they’d come out here and dig a hole and dump in Gabriel and the lye and then everybody goes home to their nice warm beds Who would have thought they’d still be out here after two miserable, frigid hours, with nothing to show for it but Gabriel still lying there and the sun coming up at any time? But they kept at it, and soon the hole was... Here he was, a mere twenty-seven years old and already he had acquired and then walked away from a high-six-figure partnership at Bear Stearns—the biggest brokerage house on the Street He would make a point of bringing this up and reciting the perks in detail as proof of worth “I came over to Bear Stearns as a vice president,” he’d tell people “It was right around my twenty-fifth birthday I was given... deal with that intense buy-sell nonsense of his early years, but he surely paid attention to it Dealing with derivatives was tougher You had to predict correctly all the time, and people tracked your percentages If your batting average hit a slump, you could be out the door If you were good at guessing, the client was able to sell his futures contract when the per-pound or per-ounce price was up, and . TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE CHAPTER THIRTY CHAPTER. impeccable. He lived top-of-the-line, in a high-rise with a twenty-four-hour doorman in an old -money section of Midtown Manhattan perched over FDR Drive and inhabited by people whose money dated back. back in 1869, the party ended in a bad way. But if you were there when it all took off, for a while it seemed like there was nothing but money. Greg B. Smith March 9, 2009 CHAPTER ONE December