Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  “Not 999-to-1?”

  “No,” he said with a loose grin that made her eyes unfocus, her feet arch. He was very close to her on the bed and she could smell tobacco and ginger, and she could feel his weight shifting her, sinking her toward him.

  “It’s all so simple,” he added, almost a whisper, as if to himself. “And yet someone needed to think of it. And now they have.”

  “I’d never play those odds,” she said, her breath slightly fast.

  “You wouldn’t,” he smiled. “Not you. Nor me, my girl.”

  He flicked one of the coins with the tip of his finger. It flipped over on her belly, sending a wave of soft heat all the way up to her nostrils. He flicked another, and then one more.

  “But lots of fine, warm, striving folks would,” he said. “For a promise.”

  He set his hand down on her torso, each coin pushing into her. His hands on her, his warm palms pressing the coins cool onto her skin.

  We all want a promise, she thought.

  “And here’s why,” he said, and they both looked at the coins on her skin. “And here’s why.”

  But it wasn’t just that. She knew that it was the same for them as it was for every cleaning lady, line worker, porter, janitor, seamstress, who would put coins down for the clearinghouse racket; it wasn’t these thin scales of copper, bronze, silver, gold. It was the promise. It was grander than that, and they were smarter. It had to mean more, didn’t it? Yes, she told herself. It was the promise. And what could be hard and mean about a promise?

  And she could feel it and she rested her hands on his and they interlaced and, in the pockets between their braided fingers, she could still see that liberty-head glint.

  And she smiled and kept her eyes fixed down on that flash of mercury because it was the most real thing she’d ever known, this hard-struck illusion. It would be real for them.

  Legend has it that Casper Alexander Holstein, Harlem’s “King of Policy,” invented the clearinghouse totals racket while sitting in a janitor’s closet amid mops and brooms. J. Saunders Redding wrote in 1934 that Holstein “combined the prosaic traits of a financier with the dizzy imaginative flights of a fingerless Midas,” recounting how he was studying the clearinghouse totals late one night when the idea “struck him between the eyes [and] he let out an uproarious laugh and in general acted like a drunken man.” Within a year he owned “three of the finest apartment buildings in Harlem, a fleet of expensive cars, a home on Long Island, and several thousand acres of farmland in Virginia.” A generous philanthropist, Holstein became one of the foremost patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. His luck, however, would run out. By the late 1920s, Dutch Schultz had wiped out all of Harlem’s policy bankers and seized control of the numbers racket. As Claude McKay wrote, “And the ’clat in the atmosphere, which formerly made Harlem hum like a beehive, went out of the game forever.”

  When Holstein died in 1944, the headline read: Former Policy King in Harlem Dies Broke

  THE BASHER

  BY JASON STARR

  Hoboken, New Jersey

  Before 9/11 and after the millennium, when most of the dotcoms became dot-bombs, I got fired from my job as a Java programmer. To say I left Delivero.com on bad terms would be an understatement. It took two security guards to get me out of the office in Jersey City, and if the goons hadn’t shown up I probably would’ve killed Alan Silver, the CEO. Although Silver was too much of a coward to admit it, he fired me for one reason and one reason only—because his wife had a thing for me. He saw her hitting on me at the holiday party, and after that he used every excuse he could think of to get rid of me—lack of motivation, poor interpersonal skills, not a team player, tardiness. Yeah, right. It was because his slutty trophy wife wanted my body. That was it. End of story.

  The job market was tight back then, with so many Net companies folding left and right, and it didn’t help that I’d left Delivero on bad terms and couldn’t get a recommendation. I’d made some money on stock options, but Silver, that cocksucker, had canned me right before annual bonuses were given out, costing me about fifty grand. I explored a lawsuit, but the lawyers I talked to either told me I didn’t have a case or wanted to charge me up the wazoo. After several months out of work, I was starting to go through my money and needed a source of income, so I became a full-time day trader.

  I knew I could make big money in the stock market. Yeah, I know, who didn’t feel that way in the ’90s, right? To hell with baseball; trading stocks had become the new national pastime. But for me, it wasn’t a fad. I had a knack for picking winners, spotting trends, and timing the market, and I felt like I could clean up if I put my mind to it. I wanted to take this thing seriously. I converted the bedroom of my condo in Hoboken into a home office and moved my bed out into the living room. I opened a few online trading accounts, bought all the state-of-the-art software and an Aeron chair to sit my ass down on, and I got to work.

  At first I had good days and bad, mostly bad. My instincts were good, but sometimes I got too cute, tried to hold onto positions to make big scores, when I knew I should’ve been conservative and gotten out. Though I never held positions overnight, so I didn’t get burned after 9/11. Actually, the market volatility after the attacks worked out great for me and I made big money on the swings up and down. I made more money going short than going long, and seemed to have a knack for spotting the stocks that were in deep shit. One day I decided to stop going long altogether and only sell short. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’d ever made.

  I was a natural short seller. It fit my personality, I guess—I was good at spotting the bad in things. I knew when a stock was going to tank before any jackass analyst did, and I knew how to profit from the situation. And with all the Internet crapola out there, spotting trouble wasn’t exactly a chore. Net stocks were still trading at astronomical prices and I rode the suckers all the way down to bankruptcy. Some of the companies were such obvious losers that I broke my rules about not holding positions overnight and went short long-term. I wasn’t an idiot—I covered with options so I couldn’t get burned on the upside, but that rarely happened. It seemed like there were an endless number of dotcraps going belly-up and an endless number of opportunities to cash in.

  In early 2002, when Bush and his boys were bombing the shit out of Afghanistan, I made my first million. But at that point I didn’t really care about the money. It was all about the action, about being right. Although I could’ve afforded some-place bigger, I stayed in my one-bedroom in Hoboken. I almost never went out; what was the point? The things I gave a shit about were the stock market and making money. I saw my friends less and less and I’d never been much of a family guy. I used to have girlfriends. Nothing long-term or serious, but I was a good-looking guy and when I went out to a bar or a club I had no trouble meeting women. Like Silver’s wife. Sometimes I thought about calling her up and taking her out and trying to nail her just for the hell of it. I could’ve, but the truth was I wasn’t interested. Sex just didn’t do it for me anymore.

  I spent more and more time online and less time sleeping. It got to the point where I was spending eighteen to twenty hours a day staring at my computer screen. If I wasn’t making trades or doing research I was posting on stock message boards. My comments were always negative, always designed to inflict maximum damage on the companies I was shorting. I attacked management, put negative spins on positive news, and even wrote outright lies—anything I could do to help crush stock prices. I posted under multiple names—partly because the board monitors on sites like Yahoo and Motley Fool kept kicking me off, and partly because I wanted to create the impression for newbies following stocks that there was massive negativity about the companies. Still, everyone eventually knew who I was. I guess my posts had a style to them or whatever, because I became one of the most well-known stock bashers on the Internet.

  My favorite stock to bash, without a doubt, was Delivero. Part of it was personal. I wanted revenge. I wanted to take Silver dow
n, for him to feel some of the pain I’d felt when he fired my ass. But I also truly believed that the company had despicable business practices and was a perfect example of everything that was wrong with Wall Street. Somehow the piece of shit had managed to stay in business through the height of the Internet bloodbath, though its stock had plummeted from a high of eighty-four to around six bucks a share. Even when I was working for them, I knew their business plan was smoke and mirrors.

  They wanted to be a competitor of Kozmo.com, that other brilliant company that thought delivering Ben & Jerry’s and VHS movies by bicycle was the wave of the future. The problem was that Delivero had no real growth plan and they were burning cash. They’d had a few awful quarters where their numbers didn’t come close to analyst estimates. But every time the company was in dire straits they’d raise more money in a new stock offering or announce a new “partnership,” and somehow the shares managed to tread water, even go up. I’d post like crazy on those days, about how Silver and his cronies were criminals and deserved jail time, but the idiot longs would circle jerk themselves, going on about how Delivero’s stock was going to a hundred a share and how I was the world’s biggest moron.

  It got to the point where I felt like I was the most hated man on the Internet, and the disgust toward me was probably the most glaring on the Delivero message boards. There was a lot of bad blood on those boards from suckers who had got-ten in when Delivero was in the stratosphere and were desperately waiting for the stock to go back up. Yeah, like that would ever happen. They ganged up on me, called me a loser, a retard, the village idiot—every name imaginable that could get through the web filters. A lot of the idiots started calling me a “paid basher” and claimed I’d been hired by hedge funds to bad-mouth stocks all day. One nutcase claimed he knew for a fact that I received five cents for every negative post I wrote. It amazed me how angry I could get these guys, but I liked it too. I knew that in order for me to make money as a short, I needed jackass longs on the other side of my trades, and I thanked God there was no shortage of fools among Delivero’s investors.

  As the months went by, and it seemed like another Net stock/ex high flyer from the ’90s went under every day, Delivero somehow stayed in business. The company was like a cockroach that you stamp on ten times but still won’t die. It had to be a combination of luck and pure stupidity from the delusional longs living in fantasyland who continued to buy the company’s worthless shares—there was no other explanation. It was so obvious to me that Delivero wasn’t in the business to make money—they were in the business to deceive stockholders. The company expanded to other cities, made new partnerships, floated more stock, and issued other bullshit PR releases to make the stock price go up. Then insiders, especially Silver, sold at every possible opportunity. Dipshit longs claimed that the sales were planned, part of the execs’ normal retirement plans—yeah, right. They believed that, there was a bridge I would’ve liked to sell them. Every three months I listened to the webcast of Delivero’s quarterly results and got nauseous as Silver, in his pompous, know-it-all voice, fed his crap to gullible analysts. Some dork from Morgan Stanley or Citigroup would ask Silver why he was lowering estimates for the next fiscal year and he’d go on about “new strategies going forward” and “adapting to the current landscape,” never answering the question, of course. Did the analysts give a shit? No sirree. They had their own agendas, pumping up garbage stocks like Delivero with their Buy and Strong Buy ratings to keep their clients happy.

  When the WorldCom scandal hit, I thought Delivero would go down the toilet too. I was so positive that the company was history that I got out of all of my other positions and shorted the shit out of the stock. It had been trading in a recent range of four to six dollars a share. I profited on the short-term moves downward and covered on options when the stock ticked up. And everything I made, I plowed back into my long-term short position. Every morning when I woke up, I went online and checked for news on Delivero. I knew that one day the Chapter Eleven announcement would appear. It was only a matter of time.

  Meanwhile, since I had no other stocks in my portfolio, I was able to focus full-time on my bashing of Delivero. I tarted posting at least five hundred times a day on various message boards. I attacked the business model of the company and its deceitful accounting, but my messages also became more personal, more focused on Silver. I wrote about how incompetent he was and about how he had an alcohol and drug problem. I posted that he was into child porn, that he had ties to Al-Qaeda, that his trophy wife was a transvestite. I knew my posts came off as bizarre and irrational—that was the point. I wanted to incite rage, to stir the pot—and it worked like a charm. There was no end to the number of longs who got sucked in and started arguing with me. Their posts were even nuttier than mine. Wannabe investors would visit the Delivero message boards and see all of the wacky posts from the longs and get the impression that a bunch of lunatics were investing in the stock.

  I knew Silver read the message boards, or had employees who did, and would find out about my posts. I also knew that when I started focusing on his trophy wife, he’d know it was me posting. This was my intention. I wanted him to know who his enemy was, that it was me who was out to get him. It would make my ultimate victory even more satisfying.

  Some longs—including Silver himself, for all I knew—now responded to my attacks by saying that I had a hidden agenda, that I had to be an irate former employee or have some other vendetta against the company. People put me on “ignore” and tried to block my messages, but I had multiple IDs and was unstoppable. I knew that my posts were having an effect, that I was influencing the stock price. On days when I wrote my most scathing attacks, the stock almost always dropped and I profited. I felt like I could manipulate the buying and selling on a whim. It was just a matter of how often I posted and how effective my bashings were. But there was no doubt that I was in total control of the company’s fate. If I wanted to change my position and go long I could’ve driven the stock up to twenty dollars a share in one month.

  My new goal was to demolish the stock with my most furious attacks yet, to go for the kill. And I got some huge help one morning when Delivero issued a major earnings warning before the market open. The same analysts who had been cheerleading the stock for years finally woke up out of their fucking cocoons and reduced their ratings to “hold” and “sell,” and the stock opened down over two points. I cashed in big time on a day trade but I didn’t put the moolah in the bank, into money heaven; instead, I shoved it into my margin account and upped my short position even more. Armageddon for Delivero was on the horizon and I stood to make millions.

  I increased the frequency of my postings. Sometimes I stayed up all night to influence foreign investors, and one day I set a personal record of one thousand posts in a day. Delivero’s stock was continuing to tank, sinking to under two dollars a share, and I knew it was all because of me.

  Then a registered letter arrived at my apartment. It was from Delivero’s lawyers, threatening a lawsuit if I didn’t stop bashing the company. Silver was just trying to intimidate me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let that happen.

  A week later, as the stock price continued to drop, I tarted getting threatening e-mails. They were from anonymous addresses, but I knew Silver was sending them. All of the notes basically said the same thing—that I’d better stop bashing or else. Some got more explicit, warning me that I’d lose limbs or die in pain.

  I considered calling the police, but I was afraid of what might happen if I did. There were detailed records of me bashing Silver’s stock and I began to fear that I could go to jail for libel for some of the things I’d written.

  I didn’t respond to any of the notes and stopped my onslaught, hoping the thing would die down on its own. Then, one morning while I was sitting at my PC, a brick shattered my window and almost hit me in the head. I looked outside and saw a black car speeding away, but I couldn’t catch the license plate. I didn’t bother calling the cops, fig
uring that Silver would just deny responsibility, try to make me look like the bad guy.

  Then I left my apartment that Sunday afternoon to get a haircut and returned to discover a message spray painted on my bedroom wall:

  DIE MOTHERFUCKING BASHER DIE

  I decided enough was enough. I was surprised that Silver had gone this far, but I remembered that he’d always had a temper, screaming at employees and firing them on a whim—hell, he’d fired me for no legitimate reason—and maybe the stress of his company going under was getting to him and he was snapping. How the hell did I know what was going on with him? All I knew was that he was starting to threaten my personal safety and I had to take some action.

  Years ago, after an attempted break-in at my building, I’d bought a gun for protection. I decided I’d go talk to Silver face-to-face and try to get him to back off. If he caused trouble, started threatening me again, I’d show the gun, just to scare him and make him think I was more psycho than he was. I knew that beneath all of the tough talk, Silver was a big pussy and I could intimidate him easily.

  The next day, Monday, I drove to Silver’s house in Bernardsville. They should’ve called it Snootyville. When I was working at Delivero I went to a company picnic in Silver’s backyard. It was one of the biggest, most expensive houses on a block of big, expensive houses. He probably blew three million bucks of stockholders’ money on it.

  I waited in my car in a spot near his driveway. I figured he’d leave the office at around 6 or 7 and the drive from Jersey City to Bernardsville would take about an hour—an hour and a half with traffic. But at 9 o’clock there was still no sign of him. I knew he wasn’t out of town because I’d called his office earlier from a pay phone and his security said he was busy in a meeting. He was probably out with a client, making one of his bullshit deals.