I paused and took a moment to catch my breath. “Anyway, you all know what happened next: Seven days later they began pitching Ventura, and all hell broke loose. Blocks of tens and twenties began slinging around the boardroom like water, and money began falling out of the sky.” I shook my head slowly. “And I can't even begin to describe how quickly we grew from this point. It was as if gold had been struck, and young prospectors began showing up in Lake Success to stake their claims. At first they trickled in, then they poured in. It started from towns in Queens and Long Island and quickly spread across the country. And just like that, Stratton was born.
“Anyway, it was only a few weeks after this when I walked into my office one morning and found Jim Taormina waiting for me. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Stratton is yours,’ and he handed me a set of keys he was holding. ‘I'll sell you the place for a dollar and be your head trader. Just pleasetake my name off the license!’
“And then Mike came in, the old Wall Street war dog, who'd thought he'd seen everything. ‘You have to stop them!’ he begged. ‘We can't handle any more business right now. We're on the verge of blowing up our clearing agent.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘I've never seen anything like this, Jordan. It's absolutely incredible….’ The funny thing was that our clearing agent—meaning the company that processed our trades—couldn't handle the influx of volume and was threatening to pull the plug on us unless we slowed things down.
“And then came the Blockhead. ‘I'm underwater with commissions,’ he said, panic-stricken. ‘I can't keep track of them. Millions are pouring in, and the bank keeps calling me.’ I had put the Blockhead in charge of our finances, and he was underwater now-drowning beneath a sea of money and paperwork.
“In any event, these were all good problems, problems that were easy to handle. With Jim Taormina, I did as he asked: I bought the firm from him for a dollar and made him my head trader. With Mike, I did as he asked too: I stood before the boardroom and gave a sales meeting that turned the whole thing into a positive.
“With piss and vinegar, I said, ‘What we have here is so powerful and so effective that the rest of Wall Street can't even keep up with us!’ And, with that, my Strattonites clapped and cheered and hooted and howled. Then we spent the next two weeks just getting leads, which ultimately fueled our growth even further.
“And to help the Blockhead, I turned to my father, who was still unemployed. He was a brilliant man, a licensed CPA who'd spent the better part of his life as the CFO of various private companies. But he was in his mid-fifties now—a bit too old and way too overqualified to land a good job.
“So I recruited him—reluctantly at first, but I recruited him nonetheless. And he moved into the Blockhead's office, where the two of them had the pleasure of driving each other crazy. Mad Max quickly bared his fangs—calling the Blockhead a fucking twerp and a fucking moron and a thousand other fucking things, including, of course, a fucking blockhead. And the fact that the Blockhead was allergic to cigarette smoke was something Mad Max relished beyond belief—consuming four packs a day and exhaling thick jets of smoke right in the Blockhead's face, with the force of a Civil War cannon.
“But, that aside, you can see how I had the whole thing wired now. Between Mike and my father I had my rear flank covered, and between Danny and Kenny I had a tip of a sword that rivaled the Mossad. And I… well, let's just say that I had all the time I needed to sit back and give meetings and focus on the big picture— and to resolve the last missing piece of the puzzle, which was where to find more warrants that would provide me with cheap stock, like Ventura warrants did.”
I looked at OCD and smiled. “Care to guess who I turned to for that?”
OCD cringed. “Al Abrams,” he muttered.
“Indeed,” I said. “Mr. Al Abrams, the maddest of all Wall Streeters.” I cocked my head to the side and stared down OCD. “Correct me if I'm wrong, Greg, but I once heard a rumor that Al was writing letters to Bill Clinton about you, saying you were a rogue agent.”
OCD shook his head wearily. “He's one crazy old bird, that guy. When I arrested him, he had a hundred documents on him, some more than thirty years old!”
“Well, that sounds like Al,” I said casually. “He never liked to throw things out. He's what you call a careful criminal.”
“Not careful enough,” said the Witch. “Last time I checked, he was still behind bars.” She flashed me a devilish smile.
Yeah, I thought, but not because of you, Cruella; it was OCD who'd caught him. But I kept that thought to myself and said, “Actually, I think he's out now, probably back in Connecticut, driving his poor wife insane.” I looked at OCD. “Just out of curiosity: When you arrested him, did he have any food in his pockets? Any half-eaten Linzer tortes? He loved those.”
“Just a few crumbs,” answered OCD.
I nodded in understanding. “Yeah, he was probably saving those in case of a famine…” and I spent the next few hours explaining how Al Abrams had taught me the dark art of stock manipulation. Thrice weekly we'd meet for breakfast at the local Greek diner, where I had the pleasure of watching Al consume countless Linzer tortes, with half the torte making its way into his mouth and the other half making its way onto his cheeks and forehead; meanwhile, he would be drinking cup after cup of overcaffeinated coffee, until his hands shook.
Through it all—through all the slobbering and shaking and squeaking and squawking—he gave me the education of a lifetime. But, alas, unlike my education from Mike, this one concerned the dark side of things, the seedy underbelly of Wall Street's over-the-counter market—which was the precursor to the NASDAQ—where stocks traded by appointment, and prices were set at the self-serving whims of dark-intentioned men like Al and me.
Most troubling, I admitted, was that it wasn't long before I was teaching Ala thing or two. Within weeks, in fact, I was modernizing his rather dated stock scams—bringing my own flair and panache to them, along with the sort of brazenness that would come to characterize the Wolf of Wall Street.
By now it was a little after five, and I was finally done singing on Court Street for the day, a day that my captors considered a great success. After all, they now knew exactly how Stratton Oakmont came into existence and how—through a series of tiny coincidences and happenstances—it wound up on, of all places, Long Island.
Before I left the debriefing room, the last thing I asked the Bastard was how long he thought it would be until I actually got sentenced. Would it be three years? Four years? Perhaps even five years? The longer the better, I thought.
“Probably four or five years,” he answered. “These things have a way of dragging on sometimes.”
“That's true,” added the Witch, “and they won't be easy years. Your cooperation will be made public sometime next year, and we'll be seizing your assets accordingly.”
Now OCD chimed in, offering me a thin ray of hope: “Yeah, but you'll have a chance to start a new life. You're a young guy, and next time you'll do things right, hopefully.”
I nodded in agreement, hanging on to the words of OCD and the Bastard while ignoring those of the Witch. Unfortunately, they would all be wrong, and I would be seeing the inside of a jail cell long before that.
And I would lose everything.
CHAPTER 13
THE REVOLVING DOOR
Two Months Later
