Read Online To Catch a Bad Guy by Marie Astor - Free Book Online Page A

own.
    During his years at
Duke, Jonathan Bostoff fervently had wished he could alter his family history.
The idea was not all that far-fetched, as many who rose to money and wealth
from obscure origins often replaced their less than stellar beginnings with
glamorous pasts, but in Jon’s case, it was utterly impossible. Hank Bostoff was
fond of reminiscing about his “humble beginnings” in interviews and speeches. A
son of a construction worker and a homemaker, Hank Bostoff went to the
University of Life, as he liked to put it, and did not have any formal
education beyond a high school degree. Even that he had finished at night.
While he went to school at night, Hank got a job as a shoeshine boy on Wall
Street. That was his first exposure to the world of finance, and even though at
the time he had no idea how to accomplish it, Hank vowed to one day join the
ranks of the expensively suited men who tipped him generously for polishing
their fine leather shoes. While he thought of a way to materialize his
aspirations, Hank bided his time by polishing his clients’ shoes vigorously
enough to see his own reflection in them and reading left-over copies of the
Wall Street Journal he found on the train and took home to his parents’
multi-family house in Brooklyn.
    As luck would have it,
Hank did not have to wait long. After about a year on the job, an old floor
broker noticed how quick Hank was on his feet and offered him a job as a floor
runner on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The job was exactly
what it sounded like: it involved running orders up and down the trading floor.
Sometimes the order entrusted to Hank could be as large as several hundred
thousand dollars, but that never worried Hank Bostoff: his feet were fast and
nimble, and he had a stellar memory aided by a mind that could tally up numbers
quicker than a calculator. Within two years, Hank was promoted to a broker.
From that point on, Hank Bostoff’s life was on the upswing. Within the next
three years, he paid off the mortgage on his parents’ house and bought a
three-bedroom house for himself in an adjacent neighborhood in Brooklyn. A year
later, Hank married his high school sweetheart, and nine months later his first
son, Jonathan, was born.
    Jonathan remembered vividly
the gradual transformations of his family’s house in Brooklyn: the addition of
extra bedrooms and bathrooms, the expansion of the kitchen, and then, one very
exciting spring, the sight of sweaty men in work clothes digging up the ground
in the backyard for the pool. The pool was only fifteen feet long, but to Jon
it had seemed huge. He relished picking and choosing among his friends, who
suddenly almost doubled in numbers, the lucky ones who would get to enjoy the
cool water reprieve from the stifling summer heat. Jon had heard it many times
that money could not buy happiness, but he knew firsthand that money could most
certainly buy popularity and respect, and if that was not happiness, he did not
know what was.
    Several summers later
came another big change: the Bostoffs’ move to Connecticut. By then Hank
Bostoff owned his own firm: Bostoff Securities. His wife had convinced Hank
that it was time for them to upgrade their living quarters. After all, Hank
often entertained at home, and he could not very well bring business associates
to Brooklyn. Jon had been fourteen at the time, and he became keenly aware that
while money was important, it was not enough in itself. It might have been
enough in Brooklyn, but in Connecticut people wanted to know where you came
from and what school degrees your father had. At neighbors’ barbecues, Jon
flushed red when he heard whispers behind his father’s back, ridiculing his
Brooklyn accent and saw Connecticut housewives raising eyebrows at his mother’s
choice of makeup and dress.
    Thankfully, his mother
was as perceptive as Jon. Within a matter of weeks, she had reinvented herself,
shunning loud prints for subdued pastels and