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The Buy Side

Page 10

by Turney Duff


  Peter tells me to strip down to my underwear. The changing room doesn’t have a door. Awkward. I guess this is normal. Nearly naked, I stand in the dressing room and wait. Someone new brings in a worn pair of dress shoes and a pair of socks. Smiling, I give him a short-armed wave and say hi.

  Over the next two hours, suits are whisked into the room. I have a “yes” rack and a “no” rack, both of which fill quickly. I feel like I’m in the movie Pretty Woman, but I’m unsure if I’m Julia Roberts or Richard Gere. I look in the mirror at myself draped in Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, and Prada. With each suit I try on I feel more powerful. “Hi there, buddy,” I say to my reflection clad in the navy blue Prada. Peter is confused by my Gordon Gekko portrayal. “Sandbagged me on Bluestar, huh? I guess you think you taught the teacher a lesson that the tail can wag the dog, huh? Well, let me clue you in, pal. The ice is melting right underneath your feet.” Kevin, who has seen the movie, laughs at my performance.

  I end up buying five suits, two pairs of shoes, and a bunch of shirts. I don’t even look at the amount on the American Express receipt. I just sign it and shove it into my shorts pocket. “It’ll take a couple of days to do the alterations,” Peter says. That’s fine, I think to myself, as long as I have them next week. That’s the first meeting of my brokers tour.

  When I finally work up the courage to look at the receipt, it’s for over twenty-one grand, just a few grand less than what I made my first year on Wall Street. But as it turns out, my shopping spree at Barneys is worth every penny. I get the red carpet treatment from each of the brokers I visit. In all of my meetings I’m introduced to my new sales traders. The managers at these firms must have done their homework, because almost every person I get paired up with is a young single guy who loves to entertain, which is now fine with me. I like exclusive clubs, sporting events, concerts, and fun dinners. I salvage only a few of my old salesmen from my Galleon days. Now I know twice as many people on the Street. Thanks, Gary.

  MAYBE IT’S the suit, or the confidence I gain wearing it, but my meeting with Goldman Sachs goes so well that they ask if I’ll speak to their new class of summer associates. When the day comes, I stand in the bar area of Bottino, an eclectic Tuscan Italian restaurant trying to be swanky. It’s just up the street from Red Rock West. I peek into the private dining room to assess my audience. Gathered around the tables are thirty or so MBA students. There isn’t a more sought-after internship than the one at Goldman Sachs, and every big business school in the country, from Harvard to Stanford to Duke to Wharton, is represented. I run back to the bar and order two shots of tequila. I want to steady my nerves. I didn’t think to prepare anything to say. “Just keep it clean,” says the guy from Goldman who asked me to speak. “You know how the Ivy Leaguers are.”

  I look out into this small sea of blue shirts and red ties, with a few professional females mixed in. I hold a microphone. Thirty sets of expectant eyes look back. I clear my throat. Just then the tequila hits my cerebral cortex, setting off an explosion of warmth that spreads through my entire body. I don’t even know why I was nervous. I bring them through my early days at Morgan Stanley and then my time at Galleon. I pepper my talk with hedge fund jargon and insider statistics, and I keep my manner folksy. “It’s like anything else,” I say to my rapt audience. “Just be human.” Heads bob in appreciation. I look over at my Goldman contact, an Ivy Leaguer himself, who smiles proudly back.

  Then I notice a raised white and skinny hand in the back of the room. The question comes from a young man wearing glasses. “If I’m your broker and I want to increase my business with your hedge fund, what’s the best thing for me to do?”

  “Well,” I say, “you can start by taking me to Vegas.”

  I’M ON the roof of the Thompson Hotel. With small tables lit by candlelight, potted trees, and a view of the Empire State Building, it has a look that some might call chic. It’s not exactly easy to gain entrance here. The booze is flowing, beautiful women surround me, and wealth is everywhere I look. I’m here to meet two new guys, Randy and James. They work at different firms but they’re roommates. And as fortune would have it, they’re both now covering me. Randy is tall with dark wavy hair, and he wears a sharp suit. He played lacrosse in college, and owns an athlete’s confidence. James is his sidekick. He has dirty blond hair and is a little rough around the edges, the kind of guy you want to stay a couple feet away from for fear of rogue saliva projectiles. Randy works for a big firm. I think he understands the business. He doesn’t jump right into trader talk. He wants to get to know me. I like Randy immediately. James seems like he can only talk about booze and girls—I’m not sure about him yet. They’re with a few other Wall Street guys, who form a small semicircle around me. I’m the only one on the buy side here. I never have an empty glass. I don’t even notice my new friends ordering me drinks, but I do notice Randy banging my arm with his fist. And this time I’m ready.

  Randy holds his fist in front of me, as though he wants to play a game of one potato, two potato. I hold out my hand and he drops a bag of cocaine into my palm. A warm breeze flutters across the rooftop. I’m six cocktails deep and everything is wonderfully gauzy. I follow him to the bathroom and we enter separate stalls. I hold the tiny bag for a moment; a lot has changed since the last time I was holding cocaine, primarily my bank account and social status. The white stuff doesn’t look so menacing this time. There are no alarming thoughts about Len Bias. It makes sense now. It’s part of the culture. I might as well see what all the fuss is about. It’s not really a big deal. I should just try it once. I dig my pinky deep into the bag and pull out a hefty amount and jam it up my nose and snort as hard as I can.

  The high is immediate: a rush of energy like someone pushed a reset button. Gone is the gauze from the alcohol, and in its place every one of my senses is heightened. I feel invincible. When we return to the roof, I can’t stop smiling. I take in the whole scene with a glance. There’s a guy twenty feet away from me trying to hit on the girl at the bar. He’s going to fail. Three girls are sitting at a table across the roof; they’re looking at me and talking about me. They like me. As the cocktail waitress hands me my tequila, I look into her eyes and her whole backstory unfolds. She is from the Midwest, wants to model, but has low self-esteem. “Where you from?” I ask. “Ohio,” she says, as though she’s embarrassed by it. I’m Michael Jordan in the fourth quarter. I can’t miss. And all I want to do is fuck someone. I can have any girl I want, and I’d be doing them a favor. I never want this feeling to end.

  “You should come over to our place next week,” Randy says.

  “Yeah, dude, its fuckin’ tendy,” James adds.

  “Tendy,” I say, laughing. It must mean something good.

  ONE BROKEN leg, 2 prescriptions of Vicodin, 4 planes hijacked, 7 escorts called, 10 percent loss in the market, 12 nights of cocaine, 16 weeks of mono, 19 terrorists, 24 one-night stands, 30 cartons of cigarettes, 75 new sales traders, 100 miles to the summer house, 150 business dinners, 250 nights out, $300 million in capital, 365 days later …

  SUMMER 2002

  I CAN smell the tequila I drank last night. It oozes from my pores. I’m still wearing my blue Prada suit from yesterday. It looks like I’ve just pulled it out of a gym bag. I have ten clean ones just like it hanging in my closet, but I woke up late again. I wonder what my personal shoppers at Barneys would think if they saw me right now. I reek of cigarettes too. It feels like my teeth are wearing little wool sweaters.

  The trading desk is surrounded by glass. I work in a fish bowl. I’m in the middle of a newly renovated office on Park Avenue. New everything. Thank god Krishen isn’t in today, or anybody else for that matter. My elbows are on my desk. I slowly raise my head and check the clock. As the opening bell rings every muscle in my body clenches. I sit upright and try to focus on the eight computer screens in front of me. There are twenty-five orders on my desk, each from five to ten million dollars and involving some sort of investment decision. My head throbs.
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  If I can just make it to lunch, I tell myself. A cheeseburger with a fried egg will help. I try to see how many minutes I can go without looking at the clock—sixteen is the record for the day. I can’t keep my eyes open. I just need to make it to the closing bell.

  2:55 p.m.… 3:17 p.m.… 3:58 p.m.…

  I count down the final minute like a Canadian in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

  I’m free.

  Forty-five minutes later: There’s an ounce of cocaine piled in the microwave. An additional few thousand dollars’ worth of blow sits on a single plate in the kitchen. The place is littered with Grey Goose bottles, ice, cups, and straws for snorting. We call this East Side apartment the White House for obvious reasons, but it’s more like a Wall Street crack house. Randy and James live here. I’m not sure what they do when their parents come to town. Everything is provided and paid for, compliments of the sell side. I never did tell Randy and James that the first time I tried cocaine was a year ago when I was with them at the Thompson Hotel. I guess I was embarrassed. I only come about once a month, but they treat me like a regular. They like to please all of their clients. Tonight they were kind enough to order in: Chinese and Mexican escorts.

  I watch as two American Express black cards fly through the air across the kitchen. They land right on top of the blow. James uses the cards to chop the cocaine as twelve guys roll up their shirtsleeves. One of the hookers, Adelina, a large-breasted firecracker, drags a finger across my chest. Two traders who work for a hedge fund in Connecticut—and raced here by car service—grab the Asian twins and head to the bedroom. Dr. Fish, a three-hundred-pound sales trader who grew up in the Florida Keys, lays claim to Adelina and escorts her to the other back bedroom.

  As I watch Adelina disappear behind the wall of Fish’s girth, a guy approaches me and introduces himself as Gus. He’s in his late twenties, with short dark hair. He wears a blue dress shirt that’s open at the collar. He lives in New Jersey. He hands me a straw. All the other faces in the apartment are familiar; it’s like a gang meeting with one inductee. I’m not sure who invited him. “So you’re the Turney Duff,” Gus says to me. I smile and pass the plate of cocaine. An internal warning light begins to flash.

  “It’s Gus, right?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but everyone calls me Turbo,” he says. “ ’Cuz of how I snort the ’caine.”

  He’s smiling way too much for someone who hasn’t snorted their first line of the night yet. The nickname’s bad enough, but then he has to explain it? This guy is trying too hard. Strike one, I say to myself. “It’s a pleasure to meet someone from the Healthcare Mafia,” he says.

  I roll my eyes. I want to turn my back. I wish he’d just leave, but he’s holding the plate.

  “That’s really more of an urban legend than anything else,” I say. Except it’s not a legend. A trader at Fidelity in Boston named Tom Bruderman first coined the name. One day Bruderman—who owns a permanent place in Wall Street lore for an outsize bachelor party that included several rounds of dwarf tossing—was making a large buy of a biotech stock. Amgen, I think. “Don’t tell the Healthcare Mafia,” he told the broker. He was talking about a select group of hedge funds, including me at Argus. Though we wore the moniker with pride, it might have been more accurate to compare us to the team in Ocean’s Eleven. While huge firms like Fidelity have a bureaucratic process to make investment decisions, hedge funds are much quicker. As head trader, as soon as I get the info, I can pull the trigger on a trade. Plus, we run in a pack, sharing information. So if we knew that Bruderman was buying, say, seven million shares of Amgen, we could front run his trade, buying the stock ahead of Fidelity. The Fidelity trade would push the price of the stock up, and we’d reap the profits. Front running is illegal, but extremely hard to prove. Still, the nimbleness and information sharing among “Mafia members” is something I use to my advantage.

  But I’m not going to get into a conversation with Gus about it. Whether I belong to a mafia or play the role of Danny Ocean, we have a code of silence, omerta. I grab back the plate of cocaine and inhale a rope-size line. I snap my head back and wipe my nose. Gus is still talking.

  “I’ve heard so much about you,” he says.

  “What’d you hear?”

  “That if we ever met, we’d end up dead in a Vegas hotel room together,” he laughs.

  I laugh too. I picture a sleazy motel off the strip with two chalk outlines of guys holding BlackBerries and rolled-up dollar bills.

  I always thought moans sounded the same in every language, but Adelina’s are Spanish-accented. Even in the kitchen, it’s clear how well things are going in the back bedroom. Fifteen minutes later, the guys from Connecticut emerge and shortly thereafter so does Dr. Fish. The three guys bump fists with three other guys, who head back to the bedroom—like tag-team wrestling. Fish and company gladly divulge the most intimate details of their conquests: nipple shapes and colors, bushes or lack thereof, positions. In no time we can hear the moans again. They sound exactly the same as before. After the second round of guys, the girls have reached their limit. Now they’re in the kitchen with the twelve of us: six of whom have fucked them and six of whom haven’t. The guys who had sex try not to act awkward. I guess they feel like they’re standing in a police lineup, but nude—and the guys who didn’t don’t know exactly what to say.

  “You girls can stay here and party,” Randy says. The girls politely decline.

  By eight p.m. the last of the guys are putting on their coats. They have wives, girlfriends, and children to go home to. I try not to judge, but I tell myself that when I’m married and have kids I won’t carry on like I do now. I’m left standing with Gus, Randy, and James. I’ve started to do a lot of business with Randy. We might pay his firm a million dollars this year. I do business with James also, but not nearly as much. I don’t know Gus at all, but I know his kind. The four of us head out for the night.

  The Wetbar in the W Hotel is easy. James and Randy are regulars, and we’re afforded full access. Several female bartenders in tight black shirts and skirts work the long bar that runs along the Lexington Avenue side of the lounge. The place is dark and sexy. Candlelight is the primary form of illumination. Hotel guests camp out on the back wall, but the Street owns the middle, and that’s where the action is—if you want to call girls looking for a husband “action.” The four of us sit in the corner booth. Before we left the apartment, we each took a spoonful of blow and dumped it into our cocaine doggy bags. When Desirre, our waitress, takes our order, Gus insists on paying. He puts his credit card on the table. Desirre, an attractive girl with dark hair and eyes, knows Randy and James well and asks if they want their usual. I order Patrón Silver on the rocks with three limes. “That sounds good,” Gus says, and orders one too.

  No, it doesn’t, I think to myself. I don’t love the taste of tequila; I love what it does to me.

  We sip our fifteen-dollar drinks and take turns going into the bathroom to snort key bumps of cocaine. After a few big nights, sometimes it takes a couple of minutes to insert my apartment key into the lock because of the crusted powder on it. The bathroom is not the most conducive for illegal activity. Its unsuitability gives me an idea. I’m going to start keeping copious notes of bathrooms in New York. I’ll call it a Zippets guide for snorting. The best bathrooms (five Zips) have a single lock, with no attendant. A mirror inside with a sink for cleaning up is preferred. It also helps when the bathroom is off of a hallway, away from the crowds. The Wetbar’s bathroom garners only two Zips. There’s no attendant, but there are four stalls, and it’s a stressful walk from the stall over to the sink and mirror to check your nose. Randy and James are friendly with the general manager, who told them there’s a hidden camera in the bathroom. To snort blow, you have to use the fourth stall and face sideways. When I hear that, I downgrade the bathroom to one Zip. Hidden cameras? In the bathroom? Sounds ridiculous, but ten minutes later I’m in the fourth stall, standing sideways, snorting away.

 
Gus digs in his pocket and surprises us with a few ecstasy pills and some weed. We traders on Wall Street pride ourselves on being the ultimate alchemists. Drugs, alcohol, money, and sex are all ingredients in the elixir of power. I grab two pills and pop them immediately. James and Randy both take one and Gus puts the remaining pill in his pocket, saving it for later, I guess.

  One of the bartenders catches my eye. She’s tiny, but busty. Exactly my type, pure and purely sexy. Her hair is auburn brown with a perfect Jennifer Aniston wave. I try to make eye contact, but I’m twenty feet away and she’s busy filling glasses with ice and bourbon. After a few moments, I tell Randy to investigate. He knows most of the girls working here and enjoys doing me the favor. He also likes making his own moves. Randy runs his fingers through his wavy hair. The girls love him. It must be the ex-lacrosse thing—even the twenty pounds he’s put on since his playing days don’t diminish his allure. As he gets up to find out more about the bartender, he starts peppering Desirre with his own questions: “You single yet? What’s your real name? You throw the cat around?”

  Meanwhile, Gus, who works for a small broker-dealer, starts telling me how much he loves trading. “Yo, I had a buyer and a seller of Forest Labs today,” he says. He keeps talking. He’s coming dangerously close to being labeled Johnny Wall Street. Randy and I have names for guys like this—we just say “J Wall” for short. He’s the guy who wears button-down shirts untucked over his khakis. In the office he tells you to protect him on the lunch print, his cool way of telling you to order him lunch. Johnny Wall says he’s a size buyer when he sees a hot chick. He tells you at happy hour how he whacked a bid and sold another 250,000 shares behind it. At dinner he brings up commissions and research. He asks you what your favorite stock ideas are as you put a slice of buffalo mozzarella in your mouth. He doesn’t own any stocks; he just wants to impress. Johnny is the last one to show up at your high school reunion, driving his new car and checking his Rolex. Johnny Wall is a douche.

 

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