James Grippando: Money to Burn

“Ivy!”

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN PEOPLE ALL BUT WORSHIPPED GUYS LIKE me, but not anymore. We were the ones with the seven-, eight-, nine-figure investment portfolios, the private corporate jets, the yacht that had to be a Riva and not merely a Hatteras, the penthouses and vacation homes, and all the female companionship we wanted. Before Lehman went under and the billionaires came knocking for government bailouts, the major banks, hedge funds, and brokerage firms were swimming along in a sea of sludge so heavy with bad debt and corruption that we barely noticed we were all sinking together. The media have covered the fallout from every angle. Almost. When it comes to financial crimes, secrets, violence, and even murder, my Wall Street tale proves that sometimes you can clean up toxic waste, and other times it goes up in flames.

Intense, hot, uncontrollable flames.

It started on a fairly typical weekday, and I was on my way to yet another black-tie dinner-yes, that was “fairly typical.” This one, in the Grand Ballroom of the Pierre Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, was the annual Securities Industry News awards ceremony. A colleague at Saxton Silvers was up for Collateralized Debt Obligation of the Year. The CDO-a financial tool that repackaged debts supported by collateral (like mortgages) for sale to investors-had once been the twenty-first-century darling of Wall Street. The subprime crisis in late 2006 had changed all that, eerily enough right around Halloween. I nearly skipped this year’s award ceremony, embarrassed for my firm, unable to fathom how anyone could walk on stage to accept an award for an investment instrument that had nearly destroyed the global financial system. For Saxton Silvers, however, a win was a win, and you were nothing if not a team player. So there I was, answering the call of duty.

Work had been my solace after Ivy’s disappearance-years ago. No one knew for certain what had happened to her that night in the Bahamas. Suspicion surrounded me at first-the husband was always the first suspect-but I passed a polygraph exam with flying colors. My undying hope was that Ivy would somehow return unharmed-a high-powered career woman who had jumped into marriage while on vacation, freaked out, and escaped to some far corner of the earth to sort out what the hell she’d just done. But there was never the slightest indication that she was alive. No sightings of her anywhere in the world. No cell phone calls. No record of any travel or credit card purchases in her name. Her newly opened, half-million-dollar account at Saxton Silvers-the money she had entrusted me to manage-went untouched. Eventually, the Bahamian investigators likened Ivy’s disappearance to the accidental death of Natalie Wood in the early 1980s. The only difference was that we had anchored our sailboat near “the wall,” as it is known to scuba divers-part of the continental shelf where shallow turquoise seas less than a mile from shore suddenly turned into a dark, shark-infested ocean. For two weeks search parties combed the beaches. But on day fifteen the official mourning period began. A fisherman reeled in a thirteen-foot tiger shark. The contents of its belly looked suspiciously human, and authorities determined that it was part of a woman’s shoulder and upper arm. A hair follicle taken from Ivy’s hairbrush provided a DNA match. Since shark attacks are rare, I took solace in believing that Ivy had drowned before meeting up with nature’s most efficient predator.

The alternative still gave me nightmares.

“Excuse me, Mr. Cantella. You want the Fifth Avenue entrance?”

“Cruise the block, Nick. Drop me off on Sixty-first.”

The limo and driver were a bit ostentatious, but I had passed the point in my career when I could spend a third or more of my eighteen-hour day working from the backseat of a cab. Maybe I’d lost a little of my drive. After Ivy was gone, the relentless pursuit of money had seemed a little pointless-not a good mind-set for Saxton Silvers’ youngest-ever investment advisor of the year. I was looking for real purpose, and I was about to ditch Wall Street altogether to join the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Well, not exactly.

But I had given more than just passing thought to getting out, which told me that I probably needed a change. So I called in a few favors and went to the Assessment Center, which sounded like something out of an old Woody Allen movie, but it was actually a boot camp for Saxton Silvers’ managerial prospects. You go in like a West Point plebe, and if you survive the stress, lack of sleep, and psychological games, you come out feeling like the newest member of an elite Wall Street fraternity-or like a made man in the mob. At the end of my three weeks, I was given the investment-banking equivalent of the secret handshake and Sicilian oath: I was invited to join management. But then came the kicker, straight from the lips of the assessment team leader: “And of course, we will assist in reassigning your book of business.” At Saxton Silvers, you were either a producer or a manager, not both. Investment advisors were expected to give up their clients in order to join management, which as far as I was concerned meant that management was more like the crock at the end of the rainbow-though my change of heart was not at all driven by money.

Well, not exactly.

But it had been one of those times in my life when the pot of gold was a distant second-to power. Or perhaps efficacy was a better word. Give up my clients? It seemed like a page out of the psychological playbook of Jim Jones, the doomsday cult leader who’d told his followers to hand over their wallets and follow him to Guyana, making it physically and financially impossible for them to say “See ya” when it came time to drink the Kool-Aid. So I told management to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.

Well…not exactly.

Luckily, my mentor had stepped in. A deal was struck. I was allowed to keep my best clients-I was still a producer-and the firm created a management position that I could hold until I agreed to drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, and assume a more traditional post. Keeping one hand on the production side while transitioning into management wasn’t really a breach of company policy, we rationalized, because my newly minted position had no history, no precedent.

My new charge was to position Saxton Silvers as the leader on Wall Street for investment in environmentally friendly and socially responsible companies. This, of course, was an instant source of sidesplitting laughs around the watercooler. Someone even taped the name MIKE QUIXOTE to my office door. It was a tough assignment, made even tougher by the difficulty in defining a “green” investment. One of the Harvard environmental fellows on my team calculated that each second of time spent on the Internet contributed 20 milligrams of CO 2to the environment, which is to say that if Al Gore invented the information superhighway, the inconvenient truth is that the carbon footprint of the IT industry is equal to that of the aviation industry. I let the academics argue over that one, and instead focused on turning the “windmill division” into a serious profit center for the firm.

“Here we are, sir,” said Nick.

The limo stopped. Nick jumped out to get my door, but I beat him to it. No matter how many times I told him that I could open my own door, he was too programmed to stop himself.

“Don’t go too far,” I told him. “I won’t be staying long.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was after seven o’clock, and I was already late. I knew Mallory wasn’t going to be happy with me. After nearly two years of marriage she was beyond tired of these black-tie events, especially on crazy days like this one when I had to have my tux delivered to the office and Mallory had to ride alone and meet me there.