I looked at my captors and shrugged. “And those were the famous last words from Lester Re-Morse. Brokerage firms all over Wall Street were shorting their stocks, figuring the investigation would put them out of business. So now the whole thing was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“ ‘How long will it take to get my own firm started?’ I asked him.
“ ‘It'll take you anywhere between six and ninth months.’
“‘Six to nine months! I don't have six to nine months! I'll lose everything if it takes that long.’ Then something elseoccurred to me. ‘Oh, Jesus! What about our paychecks, Lester? Monday is payday!’ to which he mumbled, ‘Yeah, well, you know… let's just say that if I were you I wouldn't hold my breath. Brokers never end up getting paid when this sort of thing happens. I would just write the whole thing off.’
“I started laughing at Lester's words, because Danny was supposed to get his first paycheck on Monday. It was close to forty grand, and it would be the ultimate crushing blow for him. I knew right then that if I wanted to keep Danny in the fold I would have to carry him until I set things up. Yet Danny was only oneof my problems. I had seven other people in my crew, and, as loyal as they were, they wouldn't wait six to nine months. ‘There's gotta be a quicker way, Lester. Six to nine months is a death sentence for me. I need to speak to Mike Valenoti; maybe he knows a way.’
“ ‘I already spoke to Mike,’ said Lester, ‘and he's with you. He said he'd come to my office today and sit down with you if you'd like. We can meet at twelve.’
“‘All right,’ I said. ‘I'll be there at twelve.’
“ ‘You know, come to think of it,’ said Lester, ‘you could start off as a branch of another brokerage firm. It's called an OSJ,which stands for Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction, and—’
“I cut him off. ‘Yeah, I know what an OSJis, and they're a total nightmare. The owner constantly tries to fuck over the branch manager. I don't want to start something that's going to blow up in six months.’
“‘What you're saying is true,’ replied Lester, ‘and normally I wouldn't recommend one to you. But I happen to know a little firm that's a diamond in the rough; they have no operations to speak of, just a tiny office on Maiden Lane, a block off Wall Street. You could open a small office on Long Island and pay them a percentage. The owner happens to be a very honest guy—an altogether lovely guy, in fact. But he lost all his money in the crash, and he's on the verge of going bankrupt.’
“ ‘What's his name?’
“ ‘Jim Taormina. And the firm is Stratton Securities.’”
“And there we go,” said OCD, with a smile.
The Bastard said, “Okay, so there we have it. We're finally at the beginning—one day and five hours of cooperation later.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “well, no one will ever accuse me of not being able to tell a good story, right?” I smiled warmly at my captors. I was at the guts of the story now, and it was a milestone of sorts. The four of us had bonded in a strange yet altogether pleasant way, and I couldn't help but marvel at Magnum's wisdom. In his absence, the walls of formality had come tumbling down, replaced by a hearty familiarity and esprit de corps. In fact, I finally felt like part of Team USA!
Alas, the Witch was quick to burst my bubble. “So this is when you embarked on your life of crime,” she said. “Everything before this was simply a warm-up.”
“So what happened next?” asked the Bastard.
I shrugged and let out a great sigh. “Well, the rest of the day was utter insanity. Before I went to Lester's, I called George Grunfeld's house, but his wife told me he wasn't home. ‘He's at the office taking care of paperwork,’she said, and by the tone of her voice I could literally hearthe paper shredder whirring in the background.
“Then I called the Blockhead and told him what was going on and that he better get down to the office to take care of our‘paperwork’ before the federalesraided the place. And then I called Danny and told him the bad news, that he wouldn't be getting paid on Monday. Of course, Danny being Danny, he took the bad news in stride.
“ ‘I got bigger problems than that,’ he snarled.
“ ‘Oh, really?’ I said. ‘Like what?’
“‘Well, I'm still married to Nancy,’ he replied. ‘Isn't that enough?’
“As usual, I resisted the urge to ask him why the fuck he'd married his first cousin in the first place. But I told him not to worry, that I would cover his mortgage and expenses and whatever else he needed until I sorted things out. To that, he thanked me graciously and told me that he was with me to the bitter end. Then I hung up the phone and headed for Lester's.”
“I'm curious,” remarked the Bastard. “What kind of documents were you looking to destroy?”
“Scripts, mostly, and maybe some buy tickets and sell tickets. But, in truth, there wasn't much I could destroy that wasn't stored in two or three other places. Nevertheless, on my way to Lester's there was a plan forming in my mind. Things were becoming very clear to me. In fact, this would mark the beginning of what I would come to think of as my Great Window of Clarity. It started on the car ride to Lester's and lasted through the beginning of 1993, when I settled my case with the SEC and sold the firm to Danny for $180 million. It was a remarkable time in my life, a four-and-a-half-year period during which there was no problem too complicated for me to work through. My brain was in overdrive, it seemed. I could be going in twenty directions at the same time yet find each destination without making a single wrong turn.” I paused for a moment, considering my words.
“I'm not trying to sound cocky here; believe me, that's the last way I feel right now. I've been humbled by my own life: by my drug addiction, by my indictment, and by my”— backstabbing— “wife leaving me on the courthouse steps. But I'm just trying to paint a picture for you, a picture of what I was like back then, so you can see why everyone followed me blindly: people like Mike Valenoti and my father, and Danny and Kenny and Jim Taormina, and, ultimately, thousands of other people who would come to work at Stratton.
“It was a time when I had all the answers, when I was able to master the brokerage business in a matter of days—both the operational side andthe trading side. Mike would come to call me the world's most able pupil, and many others would eventually call me just the same. And, alas, many of them belonged on a who's who list of securities felons.” I shook my head sadly. “Anyway, I would look back at this time with mixed emotions, and with a healthy dose of wonder.
“In some ways, I think it was the very clarity that led me to drugs and hookers and to everything else. I'd always suffered from insomnia, but suddenly I found it impossible to sleep more than a couple hours each night. I couldn't quiet down the thoughts that were roaring through my head. In the early nineties, I was managing the trading accounts of four different brokerage firms— Stratton, Monroe Parker, Biltmore, and a secret account I held at M. H. Meyerson, which I used to balance out the others—and I knew what each firm had in its account, right down to the share.” I paused for a moment, letting my words sink in.
“When the clarity finally faded, I found myself desperately trying to recapture it. I tried a dozen different businesses: I made movies, started a vitamin company, worked with Steve Madden Shoes; I even tried short-selling stocks—figuring I could make money attacking the industry I'd created.
“But, in the end, I couldn't recapture it. I never got back to the point where I felt like my brain was firing on all cylinders.” I shook my head sadly. “Sometimes I wonder if I ever will. I mean, I know I have a long road ahead of me and that I'll probably end up spending a considerable amount of time in jail, but after it's all said and done—after I've done my time and paid my debt to society,so to speak—I wonder if I'll ever accomplish anything extraordinary again. I wonder if I'll ever have another window of clarity.” I let out a genuinely heartfelt sigh.