Authors: James Grippando
Tags: #Mystery And Suspense Fiction, #Suspense, #Fiction - Espionage, #American Mystery & Suspense Fiction, #Capitalists and financiers, #Fiction, #Mystery Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense Fiction, #Thriller
I
SPENT A COUPLE DAYS IN BED AFTER THE EXPLOSION
. N
ANA WAS
a retired nurse, so my grandparents stayed in New York to drive me crazy—I mean care for me. I couldn’t stand watching the television, so Papa brought me a book from the library. An old book—ancient, you might say.
When I was a young boy, Nana worked nights at the hospital, so it was my grandfather who used to bathe me before bed, put me in my Spiderman pajamas, and read to me from Aesop’s Fables as he rocked me to sleep. His personal favorite was “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” As the fable goes, the ant was the disciplined one, storing up food for hard times. The grasshopper was the singing and chirping party animal—er, insect—who blew through summer as if life were one red-hot streak at a blackjack table. And then winter came.
Papa was an ant, a Depression-era immigrant raised on an honest wage for an honest day’s work. We never talked about stocks. The first I’d heard of the Dow Jones Industrials was in fifth-grade social studies class, and I still find it unbelievable that when I was ten the Dow was at 802. That was just fine for ants, but the grasshoppers of the 1980s dreamed of riding in limousines. In the 1990s, it was stretch limousines. Then, in the insanity of the twenty-first century, it had to be a stretch Hummer limousine with a hot tub, a posse, and at least one B-list celebrity with no panties. But ants had no use for any of this. They knew winter would come.
Never had I dreamed that I would be a grasshopper. That all my friends would be grasshoppers. That the entire
world
would be one big swarming, borrowing, and spending orgy of grasshoppers—a world in which anything worth doing was naturally worth
over
doing.
Like I said before: There was a time when people all but worshipped guys like me. Now, of course, they’ve come to hate us. It was understandable; the man I’d worshipped deserved no forgiveness.
Eric Volke was one of Bernard Madoff’s feeders.
I’d had no way of knowing that on the night everything blew up—literally—in WhiteSands’ Hangar No. 3. It came out much later, after Madoff pleaded guilty to the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history and became federal prison inmate No. 61727–054 for the rest of his life.
Only then did I learn the chief purpose of Agent Andie Henning’s undercover investigation at Saxton Silvers. After 9/11, the FBI’s focus shifted to homeland security, and the number of agents investigating financial crimes was cut by more than 75 percent. But Agent Henning presented a simple mathematical formula to her supervisors, showing that Madoff’s track record—10 percent returns or better for almost two decades—was the statistical equivalent of a major-league baseball player batting .960 for the season. She got approval to investigate. Her mission was to expose one of the biggest players to steer investors in Madoff’s direction, and hopefully get him to cut a deal with prosecutors and testify against Madoff.
Virtually none of Madoff’s feeders had conducted any due diligence before dropping to their knees and kissing the ground he walked on. The ones who had were even worse; they knew or at least suspected that he was a fraud and still fed him clients. But a very select few—Eric Volke among them—had known the truth from the very beginning. Over the years, Eric’s “fund of funds” at WhiteSands channeled billions of dollars from charities, pension funds, universities, and others into Madoff’s hands. The payoff for these feeders was enormous, and the warm turquoise waters surrounding a 160-foot yacht at the private island of Mustique could wash away a lot of sins. But the fact remained, Volke and people like him made Madoff’s scam into a colossal catastrophe, a giant Ponzi scheme.
Marcus McVee had figured out that Volke was dirty long before anyone else did. All it took was a call to the Chicago Board of Options Exchange to confirm that the total S&P 100 options that Eric’s WhiteSands option fund claimed to have acquired through Madoff exceeded the total open interest in S&P 100 contracts at that strike price. In Papa’s terms, that meant Eric claimed he was buying veal parmigiana when the only thing on the menu was spaghetti and meatballs. But Marcus’ decision to confront Eric rather than go to the FBI had cost him his life. Eric rode with him to the waterfront in the Hamptons, where he forced him to drink a bottle of tequila at gunpoint. I doubt that Marcus knew that Eric had dissolved a lethal dose of Vicodin into the tequila.
Eric Volke died in the hangar explosion at WhiteSands. So did Kyle McVee. Ironically, Ian Burn was dead before the fire even started. Ivy would never have to worry about them coming after her.
McVee’s nephew, Jason Wald, had beat Eric to the exit through the hangar’s maintenance office. He suffered burns on his back, but recovered well enough to talk through his lawyers. He would save some jail time by pointing the finger at his dead uncle for the contract killings of Chuck Bell, Tony Girelli, Nathaniel Locke, my driver Nick, and Rumsey the charter sailboat captain down in the Bahamas.
From one Monday to the next, Saxton Silvers went from a Wall Street landmark to bankruptcy. It was the beginning of the end for investment banks on Wall Street. The nation was one step closer to hearing words like
bailout
and
stimulus
about as often as
hello
and
good-bye
.
A week after the explosion at WhiteSands, I was getting around pretty well, weaning myself from crutches. The leg wound was healing, no signs of infection, no serious vascular damage, no broken bones. Doctors presumed that I’d caught a ricocheted projectile rather than a direct hit. On the following Friday morning the bankruptcy trustee allowed me back into the building to pack my belongings into a cardboard box. My brother helped. Papa came to supervise.
“No offense,” Papa said, shaking his head, “but I still say it’s all one big Fonzie scheme.”
Kevin looked up from the half-packed box in front of him. “Don’t you mean Ponzi?”
“No,” I said, “he really doesn’t.”
My box was full, and I lifted it from my desk. About a dozen clear Lucite cubes pushed right through the cardboard bottom and fell to the floor. Deal toys, they were called. Little desktop mementos that, depending on the nature and size of the transaction, could be anything from a simple rectangle encasing a miniature pineapple to a light-up sculpture of knights in shining armor jousting over the engraved sum of $125 million.
I raised the box higher, letting the rest of the toys drop to the floor.
The bottom falling out.
I almost had to laugh: how quickly things could crumble. In the late 1980s, junk bonds and federal indictments brought down Wall Street’s fifth largest investment bank over a period of years. Twenty years later, Moody’s downgrades the creditworthiness of the world’s largest insurance company on a Thursday, and on Monday it’s on life support. Were we headed for a world in which the destruction of major financial institutions and the people who run them could happen in a matter of hours? Minutes? The click of a mouse?
I didn’t want to hang around to find out.
“I’ll get them,” said Kevin, reaching for the fallen deal toys.
“Leave them,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said, tossing a Lucite-encased replica of a waterless urinal onto the pile. Green investments came in all shapes and sizes, too. “I’m sure.”
Kevin loaded the last box onto the cart. We wheeled it down the hall and got on the elevator.
“Going down,” the mechanical voice said.
“You have no idea,” I replied.
Papa looked at me strangely, not really catching my drift. The door closed, and the elevator started its descent.
“So,” said Papa, “what’s going to happen with all that money you lost in your account?”
“Still working it out,” I said.
Kevin said, “We’re bringing suit against McVee’s estate. Might take a while, but we’ll get it back.”
“Less Mallory’s share,” I said. I had no idea what that would be. Her lawyer had advised her not to attend her dead lover’s memorial service, so they were clearly still posturing. Little did I know that in the coming months it would be the market, not Mallory, to take half of my remaining net worth.
The elevator doors opened and we exited through the main lobby. We had to step around the scaffolding on the sidewalk. Two workers above us were removing the signature gold letters that had once spelled S
AXTON
S
ILVERS
on the building’s black granite facing. It was now down to S
AXTON
.
“I remember when they did that to Mr. Roebuck,” said Papa.
A couple of photographers were snapping away at the change in signage on the former Saxton Silvers’ headquarters, but the bulk of financial media had moved down the street, waiting for the next institution to crater beneath the weight of its own mistakes. It wouldn’t be long.
A taxi pulled up to the curb and stopped. Ivy was in the backseat, but she didn’t get out. She lowered the window and smiled.
“Hey, handsome. Need a ride?”
I hobbled over. “So, are we still hitched?”
Ivy had been meeting with a family-law specialist to sort through our marriage, her disappearance, my marriage to Mallory, Ivy’s return, and my pending divorce.
“Here’s the way I see it. We can pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to research the hell out of this. Or we can pay fifty bucks to the city of New York and get married again.”
There was silence. Of the two choices, the answer was obvious.
Papa stepped in and offered a third option. “Or…you could just have fun and get to know each other again.”
We looked at each other.
Ivy said, “It couldn’t hurt to talk it over.”
“Talk is good.”
“Yeah, let’s definitely talk about it,” she said.
“We could get a coffee.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of the Hôtel de Crillon.”
“In Paris?”
She held up two airline tickets. “We leave from JFK at five-twenty.”
I smiled. “That doesn’t give me much time to pack.”
“You could just run inside and buy a few things from Sax,” she said, pointing.
I turned. The workers had removed three more gold letters—T-O-N, leaving only the phonetic equivalent of the Fifth Avenue department store.
“Hop in,” she said. “I packed for you.”
Papa helped me into the taxi. I was about to close the door, but he stopped me, stuck his head inside and said, “Have fun. And remember: Love each other. That’s the main thing.”
I will never understand how he did it. That was his gift—the ability to say such cornball things and make them sound genuine.
“We will, Papa,” said Ivy, smiling.
I smiled, too—all the way to the airport.
Money to Burn
IS A FIRST NOVEL OF SORTS—MY FIRST WITH
S
ALLY
Kim, my new editor at HarperCollins. If you enjoyed it, give her the credit. If not, blame my agent, Richard Pine. It was Richard who shot me an e-mail way back in 2007 and started me down the road of a “Wall Street thriller”—long before anyone saw the real-world crisis coming. The guy is
that
good.
My thanks also to editorial assistant Maya Ziv; to my assistant, Marie McGrath; and to my early readers, Janis Koch, Jeff Roberts, and Gloria Villa. I also had plenty of help along the way from New
Yawkers
like Julie Fisher, and from a few financial good guys (David McWilliams, Jeff Roberts, Jim Jiao, Mike Moran, and others) who were of more help than they realize. Of course, the mistakes are all mine.
My deepest appreciation goes to Gloria and James V. Grippando, my parents, part of the greatest generation—two “ants” who could teach “grasshoppers” plenty. I wrote most of the outline for
Money to Burn
while at my father’s bedside, then banged out the book after his passing. To the end, he smiled about what he had, never griping about what he’d lost. His strength of character found its way into
Money to Burn
in ways I may never fully understand. He certainly gave me a unique perspective as, in the name of “research,” I watched Wall Street implode in real time. I loved him dearly and miss him terribly, and through Michael Cantella’s “Papa,” I feel his spirit on the pages of this book.
Finally, I thank my wife, Tiffany. Finding the creative juices to write a novel in “My
Least
Favorite Year” was no easy feat. I daresay it would have been impossible without her love and support.
JMG, M
AY
2009
JAMES GRIPPANDO
is the bestselling author of sixteen previous novels, including
Intent to Kill, Born to Run, Last Call, Lying with Strangers, When Darkness Falls,
and
Got the Look,
which are enjoyed worldwide in twenty-six languages. He lives in Florida, where he was a trial lawyer for twelve years.
www.jamesgrippando.com
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