“…and Victor will always stay loyal,” continued the Blockhead, “and you stand to make more money off Duke Securities than off Biltmore and Monroe Parker combined.”

I shrugged my shoulders, then said, “Perhaps, Kenny, but that’s not my primary concern here. Don’t get me wrong—I’m planning on making a lot of money. I mean, after all, why shouldn’t all of us make a lot? But what’s most important to me here, what I’m really trying to accomplish, is to secure your and Victor’s futures. If I can do that and make a few extra million a year at the same time, then I’ll consider the whole thing a huge success.” I paused for a few moments to let my bullshit sink in and tried getting a quick read on how they were taking my sudden change of heart.

So far so good, I thought. “Anyway, we have our SEC trial coming up in less than six months, and who knows how it’ll end up? As good as things look, there may come a point when it might make sense to settle the case. And if that day comes, I want to make sure everybody has their exit visas stamped and ready. Believe it or not, I’ve actually wanted to get Duke up and running for a while now, but the issue of my Judicate stock has been hanging over my head. I still can’t sell it for two more weeks, so everything we do has to be kept secret for now. I can’t overestimate the importance of that. Understood?”

Victor nodded his panda head in understanding, and said, “I won’t breathe a word to anybody. And as far as my Judicate stock goes, I don’t even care about it. We all stand to make so much money on Duke that if I never get to sell a share I don’t even give a shit.”

At this point, Kenny chimed in: “You see, JB—I told you! Victor’s head is in the right spot; he’s completely with the program.” Once more, he reached over and patted the Chinaman’s enormous back.

Victor then said, “I also want you to know that I swear complete loyalty to you. Just tell me what stocks you want me to buy and I’ll buy the shit out of them. You’ll never see a share back until you ask for it.”

I smiled and said, “That’s why I’m agreeing to this, Victor, because I trust you and I know you’ll do the right thing. And, of course, because I think you’re a sharp guy and you’ll make a big success of it.” And words are cheap, I thought. In fact, all this goodwill on Victor’s part was complete crap, and I was willing to bet my very life on it. The Chinaman was incapable of being loyal to anybody or anything, especially himself, who he would inadvertently fuck over to feed his own warped ego.

According to plan, Danny showed up fifteen minutes after we sat down, which I had calculated as the appropriate amount of time for Kenny to relish his moment of glory without Danny being there to rain on his parade. After all, he deeply resented Danny for having taken over his slot as my number one. Skipping over Kenny was something I’d felt bad about, but it was something I’d had to do. Still, it was a shame he had to take the fall with Victor, especially since I was certain that Kenny believed every word he said to me—about Victor staying loyal, and all the rest of that jargon. But Kenny’s weakness was that he still looked at Victor through the eyes of a teenager. He still worshipped him as a successful coke dealer, while he was merely a successful pot dealer, which was one step down on the drug-dealing food chain.

Anyway, I had already had my sit-down with Danny when I got back to Stratton after my meeting with Ike—explaining my plan to him in intimate detail, holding back very little. When I was finished, his response had been the expected one.

“In my mind,” he’d said, “you’ll always own Stratton, and sixty cents of every dollar will always be yours. And that’s whether you take an office down the street or you decide to sail your yacht around the world.”

Now, an hour later, he had arrived at Tenjin, and he immediately poured himself a large cup of sake. Then he refilled all three of our cups and held up his own, as if to make a toast. Danny said, “To friendship and loyalty, and to getting scrummed by Blue Chips tonight.”

“Here, here!” I exclaimed, and the four of us clinked our white porcelain cups together. Then we downed the warm fiery brew.

I said to Kenny and Victor, “Listen, I haven’t really spoken to Danny about what’s going on with Duke”—a lie—“so let me give him the quick rundown and bring him up to speed, okay?”

Victor and Kenny nodded, and I quickly plunged into the details. When I got to the subject of where Duke should be located, I turned to Victor and said, “I’ll give you a couple of options: The first is to go to New Jersey, just over the George Washington Bridge, and open the firm there. Your best bet would be Fort Lee, or maybe Hackensack. Either way, you’ll have no trouble recruiting there. You’ll be able to pull kids from all over North Jersey and then some reverse commuters, kids living in Manhattan who are sick of working there. The second option would be to go into Manhattan itself; but that’s a double-edged sword. On one side, there’re a million kids there, so you won’t have any trouble recruiting, but on the other side you’re gonna find it hard to build loyalty there.

“One of the keys to Stratton is that we’re the only game in town. I mean, just look at this restaurant, for example.” I motioned with my head to all the tables. “All you see here are Strattonites. So what you have, Victor, is a self-contained society”—I resisted the urge to use the word cult,which was more appropriate—“where they don’t get to hear the alternative point of view. If you open an office in Manhattan, your guys are gonna be having lunch with stockbrokers from a thousand different firms. It might not seem too important right now, but, trust me, in the future it will be important, especially if you start getting bad press or if your stocks start crashing. Then you’ll be very happy that you’re in a place where nobody’s whispering negative things in your brokers’ ears. Anyway, that being said, I’ll still let it be your call.”

Victor nodded his panda head slowly, deliberately, as if he were weighing the pros and cons. I found this to be almost laughable, insofar as the chances of Victor agreeing to go to New Jersey were slim and nil, and as the saying went, slim had already left town. Victor’s giant ego would never allow him to pick New Jersey. After all, the state didn’t resonate with wealth and success and, most importantly, a place for players. No, Victor would want to open his firm right in the heart of Wall Street, whether it made sense or not. And that was fine with me. It would make it that much easier to destroy him when the time came.

I had given the same speech to the owners of Biltmore and Monroe Parker, all of whom had originally wanted to open their firms in Manhattan. That was why Monroe Parker was tucked away in upstate New York and why Florida-based Biltmore had chosen to keep its office off Boca Raton’s Maggot Mile, which was a name the press had given to the section of South Florida where all the brokerage firms were located.

In the end, it all came down to brainwashing, which had two distinct aspects to it. The first aspect was to keep saying the same thing over and over to a captive audience. The second aspect was to make sure you were the only one saying anything. There could be no competing viewpoints. Of course, it made things much easier if what you were saying was exactly what your subjects wanted to hear, which at Stratton Oakmont had been the case. Twice a day, every day, I had stood before the boardroom and told them that if they listened to me and did exactly as I said, they would have more money than they had ever dreamed possible and there would be gorgeous young girls throwing themselves at their very feet. And that was exactly what had happened.

After a good ten seconds of silence, Victor replied, “I see your point, but I think I can do really well in Manhattan. There’re so many kids there that I can’t imagine not filling the place up in two seconds flat.”