by Turney Duff
As the youngest and the only boy, I would constantly field questions from my sisters about my social life. When they heard through the Kennebunk rumor mill about a girl I was dating or something I was doing in school, they’d try to tease the information out of me. It felt like an attack. And I gave nothing up. In fact, I rarely talked at all at the table. In my senior year of high school, I was voted class flirt and most talkative. When my sisters found out from a friend of mine, they were shocked. They thought it was a joke—they didn’t know I talked. But I knew that the less information I gave them, the less ammunition they had. I’d quietly finish all of the food on my plate, then ask to be excused. I just wanted to get out of the kitchen and go to the living room by myself. Even now, when I finish a meal I’m filled with anxiety. I have to get up and smoke a cigarette and then hang out at the bar. But since I’m the client, it doesn’t matter.
On the outside, the Kennebunk Duffs were the picture of the perfect family—literally. We once posed for an advertising photo shoot for Yankeeland Campground. My mom still has the brochure with the six of us on the cover: my handsome parents and us four towheaded children, all with perfect noses. I don’t, however, ever remember hearing the words “I love you” growing up. They were never said to my sisters, they were never said between siblings, and I never heard them between my parents. And they were never said to me. But outside of an occasional swat from my father at the dinner table, there were no arguments and no malicious behavior. How could anything be wrong when you have three daughters all at the top of their class, who are polite, respectable, and athletic, and a son who is creative, athletic, and—outside of a few childish antics—respectful? What could be wrong when your marriage has lasted forty-plus years? What could be wrong when you live in a nice tidy house with a well-kept lawn? What could be wrong?
At some point, I guess when I entered my teens, the relationship between my father and me became the kind of war that nobody wins—ever. It was just lots of firing missiles back and forth into enemy territory, trying to make a direct hit. If he wanted to punish me, I’d hide behind my mother and flash a smug smile his way. He’d flash one back. He had all the time in the world, his grin said, and there’d be a day when Mom wouldn’t be standing between us. As I got older our relationship matured into a respectable struggle, a gentlemen’s duel with lots of underlying causes and triggers. There’s no anger in it, at least on the surface. And that’s where both of us stay.
When I look at him in the elevator I see everything that I couldn’t wait to leave behind: his small-town attitudes and values … his lackluster, simple life … his perfect stack of firewood. I don’t see the man who has the strongest work ethic I’ve ever known. I don’t see the guy who took a second mortgage out on our home so I could go to prep school and then college; I don’t see the breadwinner who paid for my three older sisters’ education. I don’t see any of that. My father once built an extension on our house—executing every step from laying the foundation to hanging the last door, all by himself. He tried to teach me how to use tools, but I didn’t want any part of them. I saw no future in knowing how to use a level. If only by osmosis, some of what he tried to teach me was absorbed. I remember being on a road trip with Chris Arena, Jayme, and Jason when we blew out a tire. I was the only one who knew how to change it. My dad made me learn how to do that before he allowed me to drive a car. He wanted me to be prepared for life. He taught me how to be respectful to people, to be loyal, and to do the right thing. But on this night I can’t see any of that. All I see is a man who doesn’t know how to operate the elevator to my $9,300-a-month rental in Tribeca.
OCTOBER 2003
I’M ALONE on my roof deck the morning after my thirty-fourth birthday party. I’m not sure what time it is, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s around five. The sun is just starting to rise and the clouds are edged in purple. I’m still wearing my sleeveless flannel, but I’ve lost my sunglasses. I have khaki shorts on and a red bar stamp from the Canal Room on my trembling hand. Sleep isn’t an option at this point, not with the amount of cocaine running through my system. Fifty or so people came back to my apartment for the after-party. I grab an industrial-size garbage bag and begin throwing into it cups, bottles, cigarettes, and god knows what else.
After just a few minutes, I set the garbage bag down. I need to take the edge off. I pack a one-hitter and sit on one of the deck chairs. I look around at the carnage. The place looks like Mötley Crüe’s hotel room. I guess there’s really no worry that I’ll become like my father. When my father turned thirty-four, he was working as a chemical engineer at American Cyanamid. He already had four kids and was struggling to pay the mortgage on a small house in Painesville, Ohio. I push the image of him, the hardworking young dad, from my mind and in its place come flashes of my birthday party, an out-of-order slide show: Treach singing “OPP,” shots of tequila, ecstasy handed out like breath mints, and countless trips to the bathroom to snort cocaine. The marijuana slowly takes charge, soothing my cocaine jitters. Somewhere, deep in my ear canal, a Pink Floyd song plays. With my fingers, I comb back my almost shoulder-length hair and hold it at the base of my neck. I close my eyes and lean back. The early sun warms my face. I want to stay in this position forever. I have become comfortably numb … Then, slithering into my thoughts comes a question I keep asking myself: Why do I feel so empty? There’s no reason I should be sad right now. I just threw a great party. Everyone had fun. I should be happy. And yet, I feel detached, like I’m watching myself in a movie. The character I play is happy. But I wonder if I am.
THE MARKET is going straight up and has been for months. It’s like the heydays at Galleon all over again. And I’m sprinting toward bonus time and my million-dollar goal because I need the money. My salary, two hundred thousand, barely covers the bills. Along with the rent on the triplex, I still have my personal shoppers at Barneys, go on a couple of vacations a year—the last one was a trip to Cancun with Randy and a few other White House guys—and, over the summer, I shelled out fifteen grand for my share of a rental out in the Hamptons.
It’s not like I’m worried I’ll run out of money. If I don’t make a million—a “stick,” as it’s called on the Street—I know my bonus is going to be at least seven or eight hundred thousand. And I think I’ll make that much and more for the next twenty years. I took Looks-Like-a-Larry’s advice and attached myself to revenue. And the best part of making this kind of money is the freedom it brings. I never look at a price tag anymore. If I want something, I buy it. If I want to go somewhere, I go. I don’t owe a cent to anyone.
And in large measure, I’ve acquired this freedom by doing the opposite of what most successful Wall Street traders do. There is an axiom on the Street that goes something like this: If you want to make real money, you have to be willing to make real enemies. If Gary Rosenbach had a family crest, those words would be on it. And he certainly has real money. In 2003, the top one hundred financial traders in the world will earn a total of nearly six billion dollars with an average income of twenty-five million. And Gary’s one of them. But you could fill a Gulfstream G6 with Wall Street people who despise him. I don’t understand how he can live that way. I don’t know what I’d do if I knew people hated me. Being liked is more than my business model. It’s the most important thing in my life.
In most Wall Street careers there are lines drawn and then erased. Greed and power are maybe the biggest erasers. But there are also subtler reasons for lowering standards: the wife wants to move to a bigger house, the kids are about to go to college, you’re having an affair with a girl in the intern program, all of which means you need more money and the line you thought you’d never cross doesn’t seem so uncrossable anymore. I understand that. But I also know that no matter where my career goes, I’ll never put myself in a position where people hate me. I’ll quit before that happens.
Then one morning, the J. P. Morgan light on my turret rings. My sales trader tells me a tech company that deals in healthcar
e information services is having a spot secondary, which is like an IPO for stocks that are already publicly traded. The company’s called Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, symbol MDRX. At Argus we have a focus list of stocks we want to own, and we’ve been waiting for the right price on this one for a while. My J. P. Morgan guy tells me they’re offering two million shares at a discount from last night’s closing price. Perfect. I tell Krishen. “Buy the whole thing,” he says.
There’s no chance we’ll get the two million shares. J. P. Morgan has to keep many clients happy. But by asking for the full allocation, they now know how badly we want the stock. And since we do a huge amount of business with them, I have every reason to believe we’ll get a healthy piece. I call the J. P. Morgan sales trader back.
Now, it usually takes some time to get your allocation, but it always comes before the stock starts trading. I have a pretty good idea of what we’ll get. It has to be at least 100,000 shares. The deal is priced at seventeen dollars, and when MDRX’s shares open it immediately starts trading at nineteen—I’m starting to count my money. But as the minutes tick by, my coverage hasn’t called. So I call him, but he doesn’t pick up. I call again. Some guy I don’t know gets on the phone and then puts me on hold. I slam down the phone. Krishen walks over to my desk and asks what’s wrong. I tell him we don’t have our allocation yet.
I don’t get angry easily, and I hardly ever raise my voice. A few months after I first started at Morgan Stanley, Uncle Tucker took me out to dinner. When he asked how it was going, I told him about two brokers who scream all day. “There are a lot of screamers in this business, Turney,” he said. “They scream so much, no one listens to a word they say.” But, he said, “If you’re not a screamer, when you do scream people tend to listen.” When the J. P. Morgan guy comes back on the phone, I tell him I want my allocation. I’m not yelling, but my words are forceful.
“Now,” I say. He gives me some bullshit response about the deal being oversubscribed. It’s like he’s reading out of the How to Talk to an Angry Client manual. And that’s when I lose it. “Get me my fucking allocation!” I yell. I slam down the phone. Ten minutes later, my coverage calls and tells me what he really knows.
“Sorry, Turney,” he says. “You guys were shut out.”
At first, I’m not sure how to react. I’ve never been shut out of a deal, not at Galleon or at Argus—not even a non-healthcare deal. And MDRX is a healthcare stock. This doesn’t make any sense. But bewilderment quickly gives way to suspicion. “Who made this decision?” I ask the J. P. Morgan guy. He swears he doesn’t know.
“I’ll try to find out,” he says, his voice a high-pitched squeak.
“Do that,” I say, as I hang up the phone.
I’m fired up. One by one, I call people who might know what’s going on, and one by one, I get the same runaround. I call other Healthcare Mafia traders. All of them received an allocation. They don’t tell me how many shares, and I don’t ask. If I pressed them, I could find out. But it’s an unwritten rule to not share this information. The sell side would get really pissed if we ran around telling one another how many shares we received on a deal. At this point, I don’t really care if the sell side is pissed. But all of the healthcare hedge funds I talk to are smaller than Argus. Typically, their allocations would reflect that—we should always get more shares than they do. I call my coverage at J. P. Morgan back. This time he has more information.
For some reason, he says, this deal was orchestrated directly from his bank’s trading desk, a transaction that hardly ever takes place. I ask who was on the desk. When he tells me, I can feel the veins popping out of my neck. I know the trader. He’d interviewed at Galleon when I was there. He wanted the job badly but didn’t get it. But I know he hasn’t given up on the idea. I also know he’s been kissing my old nemesis’s ass.
I haven’t had any real interaction with Gary Rosenbach since he tried to sabotage my start with Argus. But it isn’t like he’s completely disappeared from my mind. He hovers in the background like a vulture on a distant telephone line. I know I’m still in his thoughts, too. Through scuttlebutt, I’ve heard he was saying disparaging things about me, calling me America’s Guest and a Wall Street diva. I also believe, with absolute certainty, that if ever he has the chance to fuck me over, he will.
I get Rosenbach’s friend on the J. P. Morgan trading desk on the phone. He acts as if he has no idea why I’m angry. He tells me it was his firm’s decision. They placed the stock where they saw fit. “Relax, Turney,” he says. “Take a deep breath.”
I repeat his words back to him: “Relax?” I say. “Take a deep breath?” It feels like my face is on fire. I’m holding the phone so tight, my knuckles are white. Put your boss on the phone, I say, using every ounce of my energy to keep my voice level. The thought that he’s deriving pleasure from my discomfort makes the task almost impossible. “Nobody’s around,” he says.
“We’ll see about that,” I say.
I call our research salesman and get the number of J. P. Morgan’s head of equities. His last name is vaguely familiar. He used to be a top producer, but now he sits in his office every day being a manager, one of Wall Street’s many inexplicable misuses of talent. They like to take top producers and make them managers. When I learned about the transitive property in eighth grade, I don’t think this is what they were talking about. One doesn’t equal the other. He says he has no idea what I’m talking about. I explain the whole story without raising my voice. When I finish, in a calm and collected way, I tell him if he doesn’t correct the situation I’m pulling the wire.
Now, when you tell your coverage you’re pulling their wire, it’s a big deal. The “wire” is the phone connection over which all their business takes place. It’s a threat taken seriously. You pull someone’s wire and you’re killing them off. The manager at J. P. Morgan apologizes profusely but says there’s nothing he can do about the MDRX deal. The two million shares of stock they had for sale are already in the hands of other clients. The stock is now up three dollars from where they priced it this morning. “I’ll make it up to you, Turney,” he says. “I promise.”
“That’s not good enough,” I say. And before I hang up the phone, I add: “This is unacceptable. And just so you know, other hedge funds told me their allocations.”
There are few reasons why you don’t share information about your allocations. First, like bonuses, you run the risk of pissing off other traders. If I got, say, 100,000 shares and you were given only 25,000, you might be offended or resentful. You might even go to the seller and ask what the hell is going on, which could affect my future deals. But it’s also a code by which we traders live. It seems almost ludicrous that in the cold-blooded, cutthroat world of Wall Street such gentlemanly agreements exist, but they do. They have to exist to keep the business from descending into total anarchy. People who break these codes are labeled “bad guys.” And for someone like me, having so much invested in people liking me, nothing could be worse than being ranked among them.
Whenever you lower your standards, however, justification follows. I crossed this line for a business reason, I tell myself. The manager at J. P. Morgan now has little choice but to investigate the deal. And when he sees the list of allocations, it’ll become obvious to him that Argus got screwed, and he’ll want to know why. This is no longer about business for me. This is about my getting even with the people who I believe have conspired against me: Rosenbach and his friend on the trading desk.
The next day I’m back at my desk when I get hit on my instant messenger. It’s a friend of mine who’s still at Galleon. He asks if I can call his cell phone. “Dude, what the fuck are you doing to us?” he says. He then tells me Gary called every single Galleon trader into the conference room and accused each of disclosing their allocation on MDRX to Turney Duff. “Everybody here is pissed at you,” my friend says. “They think you said something.” I’d given little thought to any collateral damage my actions might have. I don’t know wha
t to say. “Did you?” my friend asks.
That night I go to bed and the only thing can I think about is what my old coworkers must think about me. I can’t sleep. I get up to smoke a cigarette on my roof deck. It’s past midnight. I sit down on one of my deck chairs and light up. I understand why the guys at Galleon are angry. They’re worried about their reputations on the Street. But mostly they’re pissed because Gary is making their lives miserable. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried bluffing J. P. Morgan. It was a knee-jerk decision; I did it out of anger. The only thing it accomplished was to get people upset with me. I know exactly how those guys at Galleon feel. I watch the smoke from my cigarette dance and disappear in the black night air. All of the gratitude I have for everything Galleon taught me and the opportunity it gave me disappears. I’m thankful I don’t work there anymore. Gary continues to believe he can have his way with me. But when I think about it, there’s no reason he should believe any differently. It’s the culture he swims in and has swum in since I’ve known him.
At some point at Galleon, I just became numb. They could yell at me as loud as they wanted and it wouldn’t affect me. But when I seemed unfazed by the volume, it only made them turn up the rhetoric. And it wasn’t only me. Belittling was a way of life there. Always politically incorrect, Raj and Gary one day walked into the office with a dwarf, whom they introduced as an analyst hired to cover “small-cap” stocks. Other stunts weren’t nearly as innocuous. Once, after I’d left Galleon, Taser International came up to the offices for an investor’s road show. Raj offered five thousand dollars to the most attractive woman in the office if she agreed to get zapped. A fellow employee pointed the Taser as the woman braced herself. Her legs buckled and she collapsed to the floor when she was hit by the darts. The story goes that she may have had an accident in her pants. The odor of burnt flesh and defecation lasted longer than the laughter. Fuck those guys.