Read Online Fixers by Michael M. Thomas - Free Book Online

Just plain vanilla accounts of planning and negotiations in which I’m involved, meetings at which I’ll have been present as they happened, recorded as accurately as my memory and as soon as is practical.
    All of this is protected by encryption software I’ve installed on this laptop, which itself has no phone, Internet, or Wi-Fi connection. That way it’ll be eyes-only for me—and, of course, depending on what I eventually decide to do with this account, for you, Gentle Reader.
    So off we go, friends. Fasten your seatbelts.
    As the Lone Ranger used to shout, “Hi-yo, Silver: away!”
    That’s “silver.”
    As in thirty pieces of.

FEBRUARY 20, 2007
    Future readers of this account may need a bit of background on STST.
    The firm was founded in 1903 by Lembert Struthers and Herman Strauss, ambitious young clerks chafing under the yoke of their senior partners at Harriman & Co. and Kuhn Loeb & Co.
    They had a very clear idea of what kind of business they would do, and how they would do it, which they laid down in a series of fourteen precepts. The first and uppermost of these statements of principle was this: “We comply fully with the letter and the spirit of the laws, rules, and ethical principles that govern us … and our clients come first” is the exact wording.
    I have it on good authority that the passage is displayed wherever one turns in STST’s far-flung empire: when the firm’s traders, whether in Prague or Johannesburg, turn on their Bloomberg screens at the beginning of the day, there it is—the first thing they see in the crawl; it’s posted in every conference and waiting room from London to Hong Kong, in every restroom and vault between Las Vegas and São Paulo; you can’t agree to a deal or take a leak without the noble motto hitting you in the eye.
    Let it be said that there are many on the Street who are disinclined to take STST’s pious exhortation of client primacy at face value. Finance capitalism, as it’s called, likes to drape itself in a thick, warming blanket of self-congratulatory tributes to its concern for the customer, but when I listen to some of my clients and read the financial news closely, the more convinced I am that in transaction after transaction after transaction, the STST client who
really
comes first is STST itself. The firm itself rationalized such outcomes during the height of the ’20s boom, when (as would later come out) it was unloading pretty egregious junk onits customers. Here’s how Struthers put it in his 1927 Christmas letter to the staff: “Our first loyalty is to the client rather than the transaction. Now and then these coalesce, and we can in all honest good faith serve two masters.”
    This is apparently STST’s justification for a string of deals they’ve put together with the hedge-funder James Polton that one of my clients has told me about, transactions that strike my untutored sensibility as treading an ethical borderline—which is why I wouldn’t dare bring them up with Mankoff. There is one person at STST with whom I feel safe discussing them: Lucia van der Poole, STST’s head of communications.
    Lucia’s become about my closest STST friend, mainly because we’re kindred spirits with somewhat similar backgrounds and because the nature of her work leaves her desperate for someone to whom she can unburden herself. Her remit as senior vice president for communications covers everything that has to do with the firm’s image: media relations and PR. In addition, two years ago, STST added Washington to her portfolio, so she also supervises its extensive lobbying effort, as well as its Capitol Hill and executive branch relationships.
    A friend who knows Wall Street calls Lucia “STST’s house agnotologist,” a ten-dollar word I had to look up. Agnotology turns out to be the art (some might say science) of creating and disseminating ignorance. Ignorance, misconception, misperception, disinformation. Confusion and complexity. The essence