Mike Offit - Nothing Personal - A Novel of Wall Street

“Gee, I don’t know, Mr. Hament.” The unctuous, condescending tones of the Polish émigré never failed to annoy Warren. “I’ll check the log, but I would be surprised if any of the staff would have come into the apartment without telling me.” The building had a copy of Warren’s keys for emergency access.

Warren smiled unconsciously. The super never actually did anything himself. He’d have one of the doormen or a handyman do it. He just wanted the tip himself. Warren knew that every other staff member in the building hated Gabriel. Nonetheless, Warren didn’t have time to worry about it, so he fished a twenty out of his pocket. Another $20 tip, he thought, just the cost of living in New York, like the parking tickets, the taxes, and every other maddening expense made necessary by the endless inability of the city government to clean up its own corruption and convince the poor that any work was better than welfare or crime. “God,” he said out loud to himself, coming up short, “I’m starting to think like a fucking Republican.”

Warren poured and drank the rest of his coffee while reading a heartening summary of the Rangers’ hockey game the night before. The team was improving, but Warren knew better than to hope for a Stanley Cup anytime soon. Still, it could happen. He put down the paper, his neck stiff and painful. He got up and poked around in a drawer, finding some aspirin, and downing them with juice. He stopped for a moment. Coffee. Aspirin. Orange juice. Jesus, he might as well pour some battery acid down there, too. So, he searched around some more and came up with a pack of Rolaids. He popped a few in his mouth, and the rest in his pocket. He crept into the bedroom and gently kissed Sam on the forehead. She opened her eyes, the indirect light making the green irises almost translucent.

“Gee, you look nice,” she said, sitting up. “You know, you’re better looking than you think.”

“God, a compliment at this hour? What did I do to deserve that ?”

“Hey, I know I might have told you that looks don’t matter to a woman, but I’m starting to realize that you’re the cutest guy I’ve ever gone out with.”

“Gone out with?” Warren spread his hands wide. “I think we’re a little past that.”

“Hmmmm. Yeah, maybe. Well, we’ll have to talk about that later.” Sam stretched back out and pulled the covers up to her chin. “I need at least three more hours here.”

After the taxi ride to the office, and a few minutes getting organized, Warren began the ritual of another day. He was amazed how quickly everything had become a mundane repetition, even though it involved moving billions of dollars around in increasingly arcane ways, and at how having at best a modest talent made young professionals into arrogant, free-spending millionaires. The work was deadening and largely filled with limited and shallow people. Increasingly, the engineers and quant jocks were the stars of the Street, and their peculiar patois could kill the conversation at any cocktail party.

Warren couldn’t keep himself from pondering Liechtenstein, and the events that had led to the treasure so carefully buried there. Frankly, he wasn’t even certain how illegal Anson’s activities had been. The money technically was only brokerage fees and trading profits earned by a middleman on some fantastically lucrative transactions. Unless the bankers had been completely fraudulent in writing down the loans, there was no crime there. Combes’s taking a big cut of the profits was obviously against the firm’s rules but… Warren stopped himself. This was all a stupid rationalization. He knew that Combes and his cohorts had stolen the money from the banks, just as surely as if they had done it with a gun. If money had been passed back to Beker, that was probably a felony. If the shareholders and regulators were too sloppy or stupid to notice it, that didn’t change anything. The right thing for Warren to do would be to march right off and tell the FBI or the CIA, or somebody. Hell, he thought, if I told the guys at Weldon, they’d probably just try to figure out a way to take the money themselves. Besides, Warren hadn’t engaged in any of the criminal activity. He’d just stumbled upon the pirates’ buried treasure. He wasn’t sure what that made him.

He’d seen lots of instances where management had approved trades with insurance companies or banks to help them avoid accounting problems. They were illegal, but they were profitable for Weldon and hard to define. Malcolm had always had some plausible-sounding explanation. Once, Kerry had asked about paying one of her banks two points more for a package of adjustable-rate mortgages than they were worth, in order to sell them a different bond at a four-point markup. To sell them and buy the CMOs made a lot of sense, but if they sold the mortgages for their true market value, they would take a loss, which would result in lower earnings for the year, and that would result in lower pay for the men who ran the bank. So, if Weldon paid a price that would allow them to break even or show a profit, then made up the difference by also selling the bank the CMOs at an inflated price, Weldon would make lots of money, the bank would look falsely profitable, and if a regulator figured out what was done and actually did something about it, they would all wind up out of the business or in jail. Malcolm okayed the trade.

“Well,” he had said to Kerry, “you know those are some pretty weird ARMs they’re selling. They could be worth a couple points more. Who knows? I’ve seen it happen before.” While many unusual securities, particularly in mortgages, were hard to price accurately, that trade had been an obvious and egregious violation. Nothing ever came of it, except for Weldon’s $2 million profit, because the regulators were generally people with little or no knowledge of what they were regulating and rarely checked transactions anyway. Profits from that trade helped fatten Malcolm’s year-end bonus, in addition to allowing Kerry to earn a big commission. The firm’s compliance department rarely raised a stink if a supervisor signed off on a trade—after all, those same supervisors set the compliance department’s bonuses. This system ensured that problems or bad deeds would generally be ignored or covered up. There was no reward for a compliance officer to uncover misdeeds. In fact, Warren had heard more than once that the officers got pushed aside or even fired.

Warren’s mind returned to the larger question. If the money wasn’t really “missing”—since no one seemed to notice or care about the markdowns at the banks—that meant no one would be looking for it. There had been absolutely no sign of any investigations or inquiries, and most of Anson’s records and files had been distributed to the groups working on each transaction or archived. Warren and Sam had broken down the computer into tiny pieces, roasted them in his fireplace, then scattered them in trash cans all over the city. There was no sign that anyone thought Anson’s death was anything more than a tragic example of the growing crime rate. It just didn’t make any sense. There was no such thing as the perfect crime. If Anson Combes had died, Warren reasoned, it was because someone wanted that money. Otherwise, some dumb burglar had killed one of the wealthiest men in New York and left with only a few bucks and some jewelry.

Thinking about the whole situation made Warren anxious, and he buried himself in his work. The corporate trading desk had been at the morning sales meeting, hawking a big new deal for an airplane leasing company, so he hunkered down and started studying the financial summaries to see if he wanted to sell it to his clients. He’d gone about halfway through the pack of Rolaids in his pocket already, the chalky, mint flavor somehow soothing to the spirit as well as the belly.