Either way, you really couldn’t question my logic in the matter. By 1:03 p.m.—just three minutes after I’d bought back my rathole units at $5.50 per—the rest of Wall Street had already driven the units up to $18. That meant I had locked in a profit of $12.5 million—$12.5 million! In three minutes! I’d made another million or so in investment-banking fees and stood to make another three or four million a few days from now—when I bought back the bridge-loan units, which were also in the hands of my ratholes. Ahhhh—ratholes! What a concept! And Steve himself was my biggest rathole of all. He was holding 1.2 million shares for me, the very shares NASDAQ had forced me to divest. At the current unit price of $18 (each unit consisting of one share of common stock and two warrants), the actual share price was $8. That meant that the shares Steve was holding for me were now worth just under $10 million! The Wolf strikes again!
It was now up to my loyal Strattonites to sell all this inflated stock to their clients. All this inflated stock—not just the one million units they had given to their own clients as part of the initial public offering but also my one million rathole units that were now being held in the firm’s trading account, along with 300,000 bridge-loan units I would be buying back in a few days…and then some additional stock I had to buy back from all the brokerage firms that had pushed the units up to $18 (doing the dirty work for me). They would be slowly selling their units back to Stratton Oakmont and locking in their own profit. All told, by the end of the day, I would need my Strattonites to raise approximately $30 million. That would more than cover everything, as well as give the firm’s trading account a nice little cushion against any pain-in-the-ass short-sellers, who might try to sell stock they didn’t even own (with the hopes of driving the price down so they could buy it back cheaper in the future). Thirty million was no problem for my merry band of brokers, especially after this morning’s meeting, which had them pitching their hearts and souls out like never before.
At this particular moment I was standing inside the firm’s trading room—looking over the shoulder of my head trader, Steve Sanders. I had one eye on a bank of computer monitors directly in front of Steve, while my other eye looked out a plate-glass window that faced the boardroom. The pace was absolutely frenetic. Brokers were screaming into their telephones like wild banshees. Every few seconds a young sales assistant with a lot of blond hair and a plunging neckline would come running up to the plate-glass window, press her br**sts against it, and slip a stack of buy tickets through a narrow slot at the bottom. Then one of four order clerks would grab the tickets and input them into the computer network—causing them to pop up on the proprietary trading terminal in front of Steve, at which point he would execute them in accordance with the current market.
As I watched the orange-diode numbers flash across Steve’s terminal, I felt a twisted sense of pride over how those two morons from the SEC had been sitting in my conference room, searching the historical record for some sort of smoking gun, while I fired off a live bazooka under their noses. But I guess they’d been too busy freezing to death, as we listened to every word they said.
By now, more than fifty different brokerage firms were participating in the buying frenzy. What they all had in common, though, was that each one fully intended on selling every last share back to Stratton Oakmont at the end of the day, at the very top of the market. And with other brokerage firms doing the buying, it would now be impossible for the SEC to make the case that I had been the one who’d manipulated the units to $18. It was elegantly simple. How could I be at fault if I hadn’t been the one who’d driven the price of the stock up? In fact, I had actually been a seller the whole way. And I had sold the other brokerage firms just enough to wet their beaks, so they would continue to manipulate my new issues in the future—but not too much that it would become a major burden to me when I had to buy the stock back at the end of the trading day. It was a careful balance to strike, but the simple fact was that having other brokerage firms bidding up the price of Steve Madden Shoes created plausible deniability with the SEC. And, in a month from now, when they were subpoenaing my trading records, trying to reconstruct what had happened in those first few moments of trading, all they would see was that brokerage firms across America had bid up the price of Steve Madden Shoes, and that would be that.
Before I left the trading room, my final instructions to Steve were that under no circumstances was he to let the stock drop below $18. After all, I wasn’t about to shaft the rest of Wall Street after they’d been kind enough to manipulate my stock for me.
CHAPTER 10
THE DEPRAVED CHINAMAN
By four p.m. it was one for the record books.
The trading day was over, and the news that Steve Madden Shoes had been the most actively traded stock in America and, for that matter, the world had come skidding across the Dow Jones wire service for one and all to see. The world! Such audacity! Such sheer audacity!
Oh, yes, Stratton Oakmont had the power, all right. In fact, Stratton Oakmont was the power, and I, as Stratton’s leader, was wired into that very power and sat atop its pinnacle. I felt it surge through my very innards and resonate with my heart and soul and liver and loins. With more than eight million shares changing hands, the units had closed just below $19, up five hundred percent on the day, making it the largest percentage gainer on the NASDAQ, the NYSE, the AMEX, as well as any other stock exchange in the world. Yes, the world—from the OBX exchange way up north in the frozen wasteland of Oslo, Norway, all the way down south to the ASX exchange in the kangaroo paradise of Sydney, Australia.
Right now I was standing in the boardroom, casually leaning against my office’s plate-glass window, with my arms folded beneath my chest. It was the pose of the mighty warrior after the fray. The mighty roar of the boardroom was still going strong, but the tone was different now. It was less urgent, more subdued.
It was almost celebration time. I stuck my right hand in my pants pocket and did a quick check to make sure my six Ludes hadn’t fallen out or simply vanished into thin air. Quaaludes had a way of vanishing sometimes, although it usually had more to do with your “friends” snatching them from you—or you getting so stoned that you took them yourself and simply didn’t remember. That was the fourth phase of a Quaalude high and, perhaps, the most dangerous: the amnesia phase. The first phase was the tingle phase, next came the slur phase, then the drool phase, and then, of course, the amnesia phase.
Anyway, the drug-god had been kind to me, and the Quaaludes hadn’t vanished. I took a moment to roll them around in my fingertips, which gave me an irrational sense of joy. Then I began the process of calculating the appropriate time to take them, which was somewhere around 4:30 p.m., I figured, twenty-five minutes from now. That would give me fifteen minutes to hold the afternoon meeting, as well as enough time to supervise this afternoon’s act of depravity, which was a female head-shaving.
One of the young sales assistants, who was strapped for cash, had agreed to put on a Brazilian bikini and sit down on a wooden stool at the front of the boardroom and let us shave her head down to the skull. She had a great mane of shimmering blond hair and a wonderful set of br**sts, which had recently been augmented to a D cup. Her reward would be $10,000 in cash, which she would use to pay for her breast job, which she’d just financed at twelve percent. So it was a win-win situation for everyone: In six months she’d have her hair back, and she’d own her D cups debt free.
I couldn’t help but wonder if I should’ve allowed Danny to bring a midget into the office. After all, what was so wrong with it? It sounded a bit off at first, but now that I’d had a little time to digest it, it didn’t seem so bad.
In essence, what it really boiled down to was that the right to pick up a midget and toss him around was just another currency due any mighty warrior, a spoil of war, so to speak. How else was a man to measure his success if not by playing out every one of his adolescent fantasies, regardless of how bizarre it might be? There was definitely something to be said for that. If precocious success brought about questionable forms of behavior, then the prudent young man should enter each unseemly act into the debit column on his own moral balance sheet and then offset it at some future point with an act of kindness or generosity (a moral credit, so to speak), when he became older and wiser and more sedate.
Yet, on the other hand, we might just be depraved maniacs—a self-contained society that had spiraled completely out of control. We Strattonites thrived on acts of depravity. We counted on them, in fact; I mean, we needed them to survive!
It was for this very reason that, after becoming completely desensitized to basic acts of depravity, the powers that be (namely, me) felt compelled to form an unofficial team of Strattonites—with Danny Porush as its proud leader—to fill the void. The team acted like a twisted version of the Knights Templar—whose never-ending quest to find the Holy Grail was the stuff of legend. But unlike the Knights Templar, the Stratton knights spent their time scouring the four corners of the earth for increasingly depraved acts, so the rest of the Strattonites could continue to get off. It wasn’t like we were her**n junkies or anything as tawdry as that; we were unadulterated adrenaline junkies, who needed higher and higher cliffs to dive off and shallower and shallower pools to land in.
The process had officially gotten under way in October 1989, when twenty-one-year-old Peter Galletta, one of the initial eight Strattonites, christened the building’s glass elevator with a quick bl*w j*b and an even quicker rear entry into the luscious loins of a seventeen-year-old sales assistant. She was Stratton’s first sales assistant, and, for better or worse, she was blond, beautiful, and wildly promiscuous.
At first I was shocked and had even considered firing Peter, for dipping his pen into the company inkwell. But within a week the young girl had proven to be a real team player—blowing all eight Strattonites, most of them in the glass elevator, and me under my desk. And she had a strange way of doing it, which became legendary among Strattonites. We called it the twist and jerk—where she’d use both hands at once, while she transformed her tongue into a whirling dervish. Anyway, about a month later, after a tiny bit of urging, Danny convinced me that it would be good if we both did her at the same time, which we did, on a Saturday afternoon while our wives were out shopping for Christmas dresses. Ironically, three years later, after bedding God only knew how many Strattonites, she finally married one. He was one of the original eight Strattonites and had seen her ply her trade countless times. But he didn’t care. Perhaps it was the twist and jerk that had got him! Whatever the case, he’d been only sixteen when he first came to work for me. He dropped out of high school to become a Strattonite—to live the Life. But after a short marriage, he became depressed and committed suicide. It would be Stratton’s first but not last suicide.
That aside, within the four walls of the boardroom, behavior of the normal sort was considered to be in bad taste, as if you were some sort of killjoy or something, looking to spoil the fun for everyone else. In a way, though, wasn’t the concept of depravity relative? The Romans hadn’t considered themselves to be depraved maniacs, had they? In fact, I’d be willing to bet that it all seemed normal to them as they watched their less-favored slaves being fed to the lions and their more-favored slaves fed them grapes.