It was the sixties, the age of the conglomerate, and Wall Street was in the thrall of the “Nifty Fifty,” the fifty or so companies that seemed to be solely responsible for powering the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s move from 300 to nearly 1,000. But Weiss was never one to follow the herd. His goal wasn’t to beat the Industrial Average by a few percentage points. He wanted to kick its ass and leave it begging for mercy on the ticket-littered floor of the Exchange.
Weiss hung out his shingle as a “stock picker.” It was his practice to place enormous, highly leveraged bets on the shares of only two or three companies at a time. Some called him a gambler, but he thought it the other way around. Weiss knew the companies he invested in, inside and out. It wasn’t a gamble so much as a well-calculated risk. The first year he made fifty percent on his investments, the next year forty-five. It wasn’t long before word of his impressive track record spread. Within ten years, the firm of Harrington Weiss had grown from five employees to five hundred, and his assets under management from one million to one billion dollars. That was just the beginning.
In fact, there never was a Mr. Harrington involved in the firm’s day-to-day business. The man didn’t exist. Weiss chose the name because of its phonetic similarity to “Harriman.” Brown Brothers Harriman being the epitome of the well-heeled “Waspy” firm. Or as he put it more eloquently, “No blue-haired society matron is going to hand over her grandson’s inheritance to a bunch of pushy New York Jews.”
Weiss was a character only Wall Street could create. He was short, fat, and homely with large, tragic brown eyes, great sagging jowls, and hair the color and texture of a Brillo pad that he unsuccessfully camouflaged with gobs of gel. He was given to wearing bold pin-striped suits with even bolder striped shirts. A four-carat diamond stickpin held his necktie in place. He wore his solid gold Breguet wristwatch over his French cuffs, in the manner of Gianni Agnelli, the late Italian billionaire and chairman of Fiat. It didn’t matter that Weiss didn’t know Agnelli, that he didn’t speak Italian, or that he’d never been to Europe. Weiss knew class when he saw it. And that went for the seven-inch Romeo y Julieta cigar he clasped between his fingers ten hours a day, seven days a week.
And yet, for all his flamboyance, Weiss was the picture of discretion. Soft-spoken, sincere, deeply religious, at the age of sixty-six, he had assumed a near-mythic stature in the investment community. Weiss was the last honest man, integrity personified, and, as such, the consigliere of first choice among America’s most prestigious corporations. Over the years, he had received many offers to sell his company, a few at wildly inflated sums. He’d turned them all down. The company was family, and family counted for far more than money. He was addressed by one and all as Sol.
Harrington Weiss concentrated on the high end of the business: institutions, banks and brokerages, the larger family trusts. The minimum balance set for managed accounts was ten million dollars, but those valued at fifty million and above were preferred. The investment-banking arm specialized in mergers and acquisitions advisory and corporate finance work to a handpicked coterie of firms.
On the Street, HW had a reputation for steering winning deals to its clients, i.e., deals that were nearly always profitable. Some talked about Weiss’s “golden touch,” but there was no luck involved, thought Bolden as he lowered his shoulder and passed through the revolving doors. Just hard work. Long hours taking apart balance sheets and P and L’s and figuring out what made a company tick. And then, more hours figuring out what needed to be done to make it hum.
Bolden slid his ID card over the scanner and pushed his way through the turnstile. “Morning, Andre,” he said, with a nod of his head to the security guards. “Morning, Jamaal.”
“Hey, there, Mr. B.”
Bolden hurried across the crowded lobby to the bank of elevators that serviced the thirty-sixth through forty-fifth floors and squeezed into a packed car. He was dressed in a charcoal suit, blue chalk-striped shirt and navy tie, a trench coat to ward off the cold. He carried a worn but polished satchel in one hand, and an umbrella in the other. He glanced at the faces surrounding him. The men fatigued, dark circles beneath the eyes, preoccupied. The women resigned, overly made up, anxious. He fit right in.
He got out on forty-two and waved a hello to Mary and Rhonda at the reception desk. Copies of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times were fanned across the counter like a deck of cards. Bolden didn’t bother picking one up. Reading a newspaper at your desk was a firing offense. You’d be safer keeping an open bottle of Jack Daniel’s in plain sight and a spliff burning in the ashtray.
The office was richly decorated in English Regency style: wooden floors covered with plush maroon runners, muted silk wallpaper the color of antique ivory, and polished nineteenth-century tables lining the halls. Prints of gentlemen riding to hounds, old American warships, and pastoral landscapes adorned the walls. Somewhere there was even a bust of Adam Smith.
At seven-thirty, the place was still coming to life. As Bolden walked the hall, he saw that most of the executives were in, sitting at their desks answering e-mails, sorting through offering memorandums and analysts’ reports, writing up call reports, and generally figuring what ploy they might devise that day to earn the firm a few greenbacks. Harrington Weiss was a partnership. Revenue was strictly recorded, and bonuses were meted out accordingly. In the lingo, you ate what you killed.
“Hey, Jake,” he said, ducking his head into an office. “Thanks for coming last night. The donation… it was too much. Really, I can’t say enough…”
A dark, mousy man worked busily at his computer. “You da man, Tommy,” he answered in a booming voice, without ever taking his eyes from the screen.
Jake Flannagan. Head of investment banking. Bolden’s boss.
Six years had passed since Bolden had begun work at HW. He’d started as just another galley slave, one of a class of twenty, paid an even hundred thousand dollars a year before bonus. His first assignment placed him in mergers and acquisitions, where he spent endless hours tinkering with financial statements to arrive at a targeted company’s true market value. What if revenue increased by two percent? Three percent? Four percent? What if expenses decreased? An infinite string of permutations calibrated to match the exact depth of the client’s pockets.
From M and A, he’d moved to capital markets, where he’d learned how to price securities, IPOs, mezzanine debt, junk, you name it. And then, on to investment banking proper, where he’d jumped a flight three days a week to visit companies and pitch them ideas about what they needed to buy, the divisions they should divest, and the benefits of doing a secondary stock offering. Thomas Bolden: the Fuller Brush Man in a thousand-dollar suit with something in his satchel to fit every CEO’s taste.
“Adam, Miss Evelyn,” he said to two assistants, making way for them to pass.
Bolden knew everyone’s name. He made a point of it.
Passing the cloakroom, he deposited his trench coat and umbrella, then moved across the corridor to grab two cups of coffee, one for himself and one for his assistant, Althea.
A year ago, he’d been promoted to director and given a spot in the special-investments division. The special-investments division was tasked with maintaining the firm’s relationships with the growing rank of private equity firms. His clients were the crème de la crème: the Halloran Group, Olympia Investments, Atlantic Oriental Group, and Jefferson Partners.
Private equity firms, or financial sponsors, as they were known in the trade, made it their business to buy companies, fix whatever ailed them, and sell them at a profit a few years down the road. To do this, they raised pools of capital from investors, called funds. The funds ranged anywhere in value from five hundred million to six or seven billion dollars. His most important client, Jefferson Partners, was due to close the industry’s first ten-billion-dollar fund any day now. Bolden was due at a swank dinner in D.C. that night to help Jefferson convince the last holdouts.