Nothing But Money Read Free Page B

the millions just beginning to awaken. The lights on the 59th Street Bridge still twinkled in the gray dawn, and one by one, the good people of Manhattan were rising to face the day. Lights went on all around him. He was up at 5:30 a.m. every weekday, out the door by 6:30, at his desk by 7. He embraced his early morning enthusiasm. He couldn’t wait to get to work. He was going to make money, lots of money, more money than a young man of twenty-seven deserved to make. This was it. He had arrived. He stepped into the shower and prepared to march forward.

    He told people he lived on Sutton Place, an address synonymous with wealth and Upper East Side taste. He told people he lived down the street from the secretary general of the United Nations, who lived in a house built for the daughter of J. P. Morgan. Henry Kissinger was his neighbor.

    Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller once lived within these city blocks of exclusivity. Sutton Place was a place unto itself, blocks from the subway but attractive to people who wouldn’t think of riding the A train. Buildings designed by architects famous twenty years ago. A “TAXI” light from the 1940s on the corner of Sutton and 57th Street that hadn’t stopped a cab in years. This was Sutton Place, a neighborhood that stubbornly clung to Old New York. An address steeped in old money. A place where guys who wanted everybody to know they’d made it might choose to live.

    Of course, he really didn’t live on Sutton Place.

    Actually he lived a block away, on East 54th Street and First Avenue. But he still had the views, and for somebody who didn’t know the difference, he could keep the line going. Sutton Place was where he lived, as far as he was concerned. And Sutton Place or not, he had come a long way.

    When he started out, he had almost nothing. He had come to believe that, through sheer force of will and a good story line, he could do anything he wanted to do and be anyone he wished to be. Women inevitably loved him. Men wanted to be him. He was handsome in a predictable way. People often told him he looked like the actor Mickey Rourke, with square jaw and sly smile turned up at the corner. He was always tan—summer, winter, spring or fall. He knew how to turn on the boyish charm. He was a Wall Street buccaneer, the lone rider on the plains of Capitalism with no attachments, no real responsibilities other than to continue making money for people who already had plenty. He was up with every sunrise and ready to be at his desk at Oppenheimer by seven. That was the Wall Street way.

    This was the 1980s. This was Reagan and supply-side and trickle-down. This was a market trading in the thousands after trading in the hundreds for decades. Money was the new frontier. Every day the heroes of Wall Street came up with new ways to make more and more money. And there was so much money floating around, you couldn’t spend it all. There weren’t enough hours in the day. Maybe the old guard still took the subway to work, but the new guard knew better. Why hide success? Screw the subway. Hire a limo. Order top-shelf, smoke Cubans, collect Italian suits. Spending theatrically sent a message, made a statement, proclaimed that you were a man of substance who spent only what he’d earned. Excess was acceptable, even expected. The young man’s apartment may have been a block from Sutton Place, but the suits and the guy waiting to drive him down to Broad Street were real enough. They were what was required if you wanted to be somebody down on Wall Street.

    Getting ready for the office, the young man was quite aware that he was the luckiest guy in the world. Ten years earlier a lot of guys his age would have been struggling to work their way up the ladder, nowhere near this wealthy this soon. His timing had been impeccable. He lived top-of-the-line, in a high-rise with a twenty-four-hour doorman in an old-money section of Midtown Manhattan perched over FDR Drive and inhabited by people whose