I was in Kingsborough Community College when I saw the movie “The Paper Chase,” which depicted the life of a Harvard Law student. A world of possibility opened up before me. I admired the protagonist’s ambition inside this incredibly intense experience, which seemed like a direct way out of the hell I lived in. But things like that did not happen to people like me, my mother said. Her words rang in my ears: That’s for rich people, not us. Don’t dream so big, my son. You will only disappoint yourself. Yet I knew there was something else that my life held.
My father was a postal worker and sorted mail in the main post office on West 33rd Street. Every day he came home and complained about the job. He would lock himself in his room and listen to opera rather than speak to my brother or me. On paycheck days he would not come home right away. No one knew where he went, but when he returned, he had spent half of our food budget. A man was supposed to take care of his family; but my father failed at this. Fortunately, my grandfather took care of us. I did not respect my father for abdicating his responsibility. His apathy for making money was my incentive to make more and helped pave the way for a future in finance.
My first job was at age twelve, delivering oil to the neighborhood. The harder the job, the more I loved it. As a kid I loved climbing onto the giant truck before school on snowy days. It felt like a bigger world. The job was rugged, and I loved the smell of the oil and getting dirty picking up the hose. I could buy my own food and not feel hungry anymore. It was worth getting up so much earlier than my classmates. These would be the tools I cultivated years later when I landed on Wall Street and began working eighty hours a week. Getting to work early and staying long after my colleagues went home gave me an advantage that catapulted my career.
To me, poverty was a choice my father had made, and I was determined not to do the same. His brother, my favorite uncle, had gone into the Marines and come out confident and ambitious. Tall and muscular, he trained the Fort Lee, New Jersey police force in martial arts. He worked in the Garment Center, later opening his own coat company like so many New York Jews in the 1960s. He drove a Cadillac, had a beautiful wife, a four bedroom home and lived in an opulent suburb with a swimming pool in the backyard. That is what I wanted—a life where I called the shots and was not trapped by circumstance.
In my family, only my grandfather had gone to college. Everyone called him “Doc” because he held a PhD in Chemistry. I had gone to Kingsborough because I promised Doc I would. But once I got there, it was so different than my high school, and I absolutely loved it. Here was a place where you did not have to worry about being jumped on your way in—no one would think you were a “pussy” for doing well. The lectures opened my mind to things I had never known. Perhaps, best of all, for me, you could smoke in class. I got a 4.0 average and suddenly the thought of going to Cornell University popped into my mind. When I told my family and friends, everyone doubled over in laughter. They all said that it was the funniest thing they ever heard. You are out of your mind—that will never happen, I heard this line over and over. But it only motivated me more. Only Doc did not laugh. He said, “Give it your best shot. If you get in, we will find a way to pay for it.” My business professor did not laugh either. I told him I wanted to go to Cornell. After he confirmed that I was serious, he arranged a meeting with the Director of Admissions, Dr. Wendell Earle, who happened to be his personal friend.
My first memory of Cornell was orientation week. Away from home and city life for the first time, it was like being reborn. The first week of school, however, the workload overwhelmed me. I wondered how the professors expected anyone to read that much in one day. Sheer excitement kept me going. I loved walking through the rural campus 240 miles from Flatbush. I could eat as much as I wanted in the cafeteria. Never had I seen so much food in one place before. I would go back for two or three helpings every meal. I was like a fish out of water with my heavy Brooklyn accent and very Brooklyn ways. I stood out in a crowd in my leather bomber jacket amid the Ivy League blazers. Somehow the “On the Waterfront” look helped with the girls. I spent my evenings after studying winding down at the Thirsty Bear Tavern. Drinking had become my best method for relieving stress.
Graduation Day came all too soon. I was not looking forward to going back to the old neighborhood. But the winters had been hard in upstate New York. It literally snowed from mid-October to May. February and March were depressing, with five feet of snow, no sun. I do not know if the weather has anything to do with it, but Cornell has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. The Gorge is a cliff where desperate students jump off when they can no longer take the pressure. It was both a beautiful spot and a place of death at the same time. No one made it out alive. I never thought about jumping. I was thrilled to be there in the same way I would feel on the trading floor a few years later. The intensity was part of the fun. No one in the old neighborhood expected me to graduate. I wanted to prove to them—and myself—that I could. Only Doc would be disappointed if I didn’t make it. On days when it felt too tough to bear, I thought of Doc and knew I couldn’t let him down.
The Street
I had no idea what to do after college. I thought about working on Wall Street, but I was not sure what I could do since I never felt too comfortable with the complexities of bond math. All I knew was I could sell just about anything. A friend told me about executive search, saying, “You sell jobs to people. You’re good with people.” I interviewed for a big recruiting firm, AJ Consulting, located in midtown Manhattan. It specialized in banking and I was hired on the spot. The president’s name was “Joel” and we hit it off immediately. “Headhunting,” it was called in those days. The cannibalistic nature of it was confirmed when Joel advised: “Visualize every potential candidate with a dollar sign across his face.”
Joel was a great guy, a fifth degree black belt in karate. We soon began working out in the dojo together. He was two different people, one in business and the other in the arts. At the office, anything goes was the strategy; do whatever it takes to close the deal. There was no talk of honor or ethics: it was simply go for the kill and get the job done. There was a saying I learned in those days that is still used in the financial industry today: Eat what you kill. It embodied the savagery inherent on the Street. On the dojo floor, Sensei Joel was a different man. The martial arts world was the essence of honor and ethics. The irony was here we were learning how to kill, yet the code was to use our skills only as a last resort in self-defense. It was repeated over and over that we were never to attack first. You carried deadly weapons in your hands and your feet, yet the hope was to never have to use them.
Back in the bullpen at AJ, it was dog-eat-dog. It was a commission-only job, so the burden was on us to produce. When I learned how much bankers made, I almost fell off my chair. I never knew anyone who made $150,000 a year before. I was stunned to find out that I would get paid a percentage for every deal I closed. My first commission check was $2000—more money than I had ever seen at one time before. All I had done was make a phone call. I was hooked. I sat next to a guy who later became a huge success in search. I called him Clint because he would pick up the phone and shout, Make my day! Clint was irreverent and funny, and we had a great time working together. We competed heavily to see who would hit the top of the board first. We were neck and neck on production. Our ambition made our numbers better; it became part of the game. Every night I would hit the local bar, knocking back a few beers and shots of gin. It was a way to make the stress of the job more bearable. At least that was how I justified it. I did not want to face the truth that I might have a growing drinking problem. One thing about Clint had always bothered me. I would hear him lie repeatedly to candidates: “Oh yeah, great opportunity for advancement,” despite knowing full well this was untrue. Then I would hear him deceiving clients the same way: “No, he’s not ambitious. He doesn’t want to move up.” When he hung up, I would ask him, “Why do you have to lie like that?” He replied without a beat: “I just tell them what they want to hear.” The year was 1982; Gordon Gekko was only a dream away. Clint and I developed client lists from our different styles. We went on to represent some of the same firms in different sectors.
I became the top producer at AJ despite my increasingly heavy