Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

Overview

Wall Street Noir casts a stark light on the darkest ends of The Street.

—“At the Top of His Game” by Stephen Rhodes was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2008 anthology

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.

Brand-new stories by: John Burdett, Henry Blodget, Peter Blauner, Jason Starr, Megan Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, Stephen Rhodes, Twist Phelan, Tim Broderick, Jim Fusilli, David Noonan, Richard Aleas, Lawrence Light, James Hime, Mark Haskell Smith, Peter Spiegelman, and Lauren Sanders.

From a distance—on television, say, or in the pages of the business section—it looks like such a clean, well-lighted place, a place where decisions to buy or sell are guided by formulas and subtle strategy, and thorough, dispassionate consideration of all available facts. A place where cool reason prevails. And sure, that’s one version of Wall Street—call it the CNBC edition. But this book is about another place, just beneath that shiny surface—a place where fear and greed have always held sway. Think WorldCom or Tyco; think Enron. Think Gordon Gekko.

Wall Street Noir illuminates a place whose boundaries have spread well beyond Trinity Church and the East River. In today’s relentlessly global economy, Wall Street is everywhere: a borderless, virtual city encompassing Midtown Manhattan, Main Street, U.S.A., the maquilas of Honduras, the office towers of Shanghai, and the brothels of Bangkok. It’s a shadowy metropolis, as the stories in this exciting collection reveal, and one that’s far more Jim Thompson than Warren Buffet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933354231
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	06/01/2007
Series:	Akashic Noir Series
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Spiegelman is the Shamus Award-winning author of Black Maps (Knopf, 2003), Death's Little Helpers (Knopf, 2005), and Red Cat (Knopf, 2007), which feature private detective and Wall Street refugee John March. Mr. Spiegelman is a twenty-year veteran of the financial services and software industries, and has worked with banks, brokerage houses and central banks in major markets.

Read an Excerpt

Wall Street Noir

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Akashic Books

Copyright © 2007 Akashic Books
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-933354-23-1

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Introduction

Tradition

Wall Street is long on tradition. The opening bell, the floor traders' vivid jackets, black Town Cars at curbside, long nights spent hunched over spreadsheets, helicopters to the Hamptons, lap-dance tabs that run to five figures-these shared rituals and experiences bind generations of money folk one to the other, and so preserve and propagate the culture. But there's one link in that chain more tarnished than the rest, and less fondly regarded: crime.

Financial crime has a history much longer than Wall Street's-by several thousand years at least. Conflicted interests, insider trading, and outright fraud are as old as the first marketplaces-as old as the first swap of flint chips for bearskins, no doubt-and they've been part and parcel of Wall Street since the days of the old Dutch barricade. Just as Wall Street has raised finance to high art (or at least, to expensive spectacle), so has it done crime bigger and flashier than its Old World antecedents. Sure, there was the South Sea scam, and that business with the Vatican Bank, but Wall Street has given us Robert Vesco, Ivan Boesky, and the Hunt brothers, not to mention playing midwife to Enron, Adelphia, and Qwest. And unlike some traditions (floor traders are an endangered species at the NYSE, and the bean counters are ever more skeptical about receipts that come dotted with glitter), crime on Wall Street actually has a future.

Caveats about past performance and future results notwithstanding, I feel pretty safe in this prediction. The news gives me comfort. Every day seems to bring more stories of front-running, insider trading, and cooked books, and some business blogs (the more ironic ones, to be sure) even offer travel tips for white-collar bail-jumpers. Crime endures on Wall Street through cycles of boom and bust, and waves of regulation, deregulation, and re-regulation-a constant in an otherwise changing world.

This persistence and bright future of crime stands in marked contrast to the public image the Street projects these days. Viewed from a distance, on the cable business channels, say, it seems like such a clean, well-lighted place. The sort of place where investment decisions are guided by careful formulae and subtle strategies, by dispassionate consideration of all the facts and figures; the sort of place where cool reason prevails. The information is out there for all to see; you just need to interpret it correctly. It's as pure a meritocracy as one could ask for, so get some software, open a margin account, and knock yourself out. It's a comforting notion-but it doesn't hold up on close inspection. Close up, you see distortions in how the information flows (remember that suspicious trading activity before the merger announcements?). You see the sheen of sweat, and you can almost smell the fear and greed.

News reports of Wall Street crime don't often focus on the gritty parts. Not surprisingly, they're usually more concerned with the nuts and bolts of a scam-the who did what when, the mechanics of the money laundering. The human details get lost in the numbers and technique. But it is in those details-in the textures of fear, greed, envy, and paranoia, in the class, race, and sexual frictions-that Wall Street is revealed as a very noirish place indeed, a place that is far more Jim Thompson than Warren Buffett.

Beyond the buying and selling, the dealing room is a theater of outsized, often dysfunctional personalities, banging heads (and other body parts) in sometimes ugly, sometimes entertaining, and usually noisy and fascinating ways. And always there's money at stake-big money. Of course, as the cliché goes, that's just for keeping score. To many of the players, money is a proxy for more desperate stakes: the sense of self is on the line. Who has the biggest, brassiest pair? Whose is longest? It's a zero-sum game, and if he's the Man (or she is), then you are not. Step onto any trading floor, anywhere in the world, and watch the action for a while-you'll get what I mean.

The writers in this collection get it, and that's no surprise-many of them are industry insiders or refugees, and all are keen observers of the Wall Street scene. Their stories are dark (sometimes darkly funny) tales of hungry egos, cutthroat competition, cultural dislocation, sweaty suspicion, not-so-innocent bystanders, and desperate deals with a variety of devils. And while these tales offer not a shred of advice about what to do with that 401k, their cautionary aspects are unavoidable.

Hard to miss also is that many of these stories are not set on those short, crowded blocks between Trinity Church and the East River. This too should not surprise. In the past couple of decades, Wall Street has decamped from its historic home in lower Manhattan and-riding a wave of globalization and deregulation-conquered vast new territories around the world. There are stones from the old Dutch wall in Midtown Manhattan; Greenwich, Connecticut; London; Moscow; Mumbai; and in the shining sci-fi skyline of Shanghai, too. Today, Wall Street is everywhere-the undisputed capital city of money-and these writers explore its neighborhoods old and new, from its downtown roots to its glossy uptown digs, from Main Street, U.S.A. to the wider world beyond. It's a shadowy landscape, to be sure, but they are savvy guides.

Peter Spiegelman Ridgefield, Connecticut December 2006

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Wall Street Noir Copyright © 2007 by Akashic Books. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Downtown

“At the Top of His Game” by Stephen Rhodes (40 Broad Street)

“A Trader’s Lot” by Twist Phelan (1 North End Avenue)

“Feeding Frenzy” by Tim Broderick (40 Wall Street)

“A Terrorizing Demonstration” by Jim Fusilli (23 Wall Street)

“Town Car” by David Noonan (85 Exchange Place)

Part II: Uptown

“The Quant” by Richard Aleas (Times Square)

“Make Me Rich” by Lawrence Light (257 W. 36th Street)

“Rough Justice” by James Hime (200 Park Avenue)

“The Consultant” by Peter Blauner (1313 Avenue of the Americas)

Part III: Main Street

“The Day Trader in the Trunk of Cleto’s Car” by Mark Haskell Smith (Los Angeles, California)

“Five Days at the Sunset” by Peter Spiegelman (Lethe, South Dakota)

“Today We Hit” by Megan Abbott (110 W. 139th Street)

“The Basher” by Jason Starr (Hoboken, New Jersey)

Part IV: Global Markets

“The Enlightenment of Magnus McKay” by John Burdett (Bangkok, Thailand)

“Bonus Season” by Henry Blodget (Shanghai, China)

“Everything I’m Not” by Lauren Sanders (Tel Aviv, Israel)

“Due Diligence” by Reed Farrel Coleman (Tegucigalpa, Honduras)