Rigged (9 page)

F
our hours later, David was so deep in oil, he felt like one of those ducks they used to show on TV after the
Exxon Valdez
destroyed the coast of Alaska. The task Giovanni had assigned—via Harriet, of course, who actually smiled as she dropped the offending material into the in-box that had miraculously appeared on the desk in his cubicle while he was at home recovering from his appendix bomb—was fascinating in theory. David had to calculate what the potential risk to the oil market in general—and the NYMEX in particular—would be if a short but successful revolution ever took place in Iran. But given David’s lack of knowledge of the industry, and his even more pathetic grasp of what really went on down on the trading floor, he was forced to start at the basics and work his way up. Four hours of Internet research and visits to the Merc library, and still he felt like a third-grader trying to write a college term paper.

After a fifteenth attempt at putting his thoughts together, he let his pencil clatter against the desk and rubbed his hands against his eyes. He had a feeling that Giovanni had assigned the task as an introduction by fire—and David was beginning
to feel a little more than singed. He realized that he was going to need help.

He could really think of only one option. He grabbed a notepad from the drawer in his desk and strolled across the fifteenth floor toward an office to the left of the elevators. He was about to knock when the door swung inward with a creak of mechanical gears.

David stood in the open doorway, his closed fist still in the air.

“Isn’t that cool? I had a guy install it after I saw it in a movie. Gives me an edge, right from the get-go. And it’s really fun to see the looks on people’s faces. Although in your case, it’s a real improvement, considering the last time I saw you, you had a mouthful of carpet.”

Still seated behind a desk nearly twenty feet away, Mendelson waved David into his office. As soon as David started to move, Mendelson hit a button on the underside of the desk, and the door slammed shut—nearly taking David’s heels off in the process.

Mendelson’s office wasn’t as large or expensively attired as Giovanni’s sports museum, but it still had more character than anything David had seen at Merrill Lynch. The dominant theme seemed to be air travel—or more specifically, luxury air travel. Photos and models of private airplanes lined two sets of steel shelves, and the open carpeted area in the center of the picture window–lit room was dominated by a scale model of some sort of futuristic-looking jet with a shiny tubular body, short curved wings, and a streamlined tail that made it look more rocket than plane.

“That’s my baby,” Mendelson said as David navigated around the model to take a seat on a small leather divan by Mendelson’s desk. “She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met, and she can do New York to Paris in five hours.”

“Sounds like you’re in love,” David said.

“You don’t know the half of it. I left my second wife for that plane. Or more accurately, my second wife left me when I put seventy million dollars more into my baby than I had into my wife’s wedding ring.”

David laughed, then realized Mendelson was serious.
Seventy million dollars.
The number was staggering. He remembered what Reston had told him—that Mendelson had been one of the biggest traders around. Obviously, David had come to the right place for information about the trading floor.

“Mr. Mendelson, I need a crash course in trading.”

Mendelson smiled. “From what I hear, you’ve already got the basics down. Pick out the biggest guy on the floor, insult the fuck out of him, then get out of the way.”

David grinned. “If that was all there was to it, I’d be down there decking meatheads all afternoon.”

“Hah. No, that’s not all there is to it. Because those meatheads are actually pretty impressive, when you think about ’em. Not one of them is making less than five hundred thousand dollars a year. A few are bringing down millions, and an even smaller few are bringing down tens of millions.”

David whistled. It was hard to imagine a guy like Vitzi making that kind of money. David knew the basics of trading—buy low, sell high, and the reverse—but when it came to oil in all its forms, he was a neophyte. How did you judge supply and demand? How did you factor in all the variables, from the weather to wars in the Middle East to drunk captains driving oil freighters into the Alaskan shoreline?

“It’s like that scene in
The Matrix
where all the numbers are floating down the screen,” Mendelson said, leaning back in his chair and lifting his bare feet up onto his desk. “At first, it seems like noise, none of it makes sense. It takes time to adapt to what’s going on. And one day, suddenly, those numbers have meaning.”

There’s a method to the madness, he continued to explain, as David furiously filled his notepad. The chaos downstairs was actually a choreographed market system: the traders in the brightly colored jackets reacting to the shifting prices of the different categories of oil derivatives, buying and selling based on the supply and demand of the outside world. The traders were speculators
trying to guess which direction the price of crude oil was going to go and buying or selling future contracts—in blocks of a thousand barrels per contract—to take advantage of their educated guesses. Some acted on instinct, some on various sources of information—and some were pure gamblers. Some worked in groups—like Gallo’s zebra-striped jackets—because groups of traders could keep tabs on one another and make sure each member was reacting to the volatility of the market as efficiently as possible. Others were lone wolves playing the market as their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, had taught them.

“Whatever the method, the root of making money as a trader is actually all math,” Mendelson finally summed it up, and David tapped his pencil against the notepad.

“You mean to tell me those meatheads are math geniuses?” Guys who’d never gone to college, who grew up playing stickball and stealing hubcaps from Camaros?

“Genius is a strong word,” Mendelson said. “They’re more like savants. They know numbers the same way a gambler knows cards—instinctively. And more importantly, they’ve got balls. You have to know the math, and you have to be a scrapper. You have to know how to fight.”

David liked the sound of that, because nobody had ever accused him of not being able to hold his own in a fight. He had never been the biggest guy on the playground, but he’d been the one willing to keep getting up, no matter how bloody he got. He realized what Mendelson was really telling him—to understand trading, he needed to understand the traders, to know what made them tick. He already had the basics, because he came from the same place they did. But he needed to get to know how they used that background day to day.

“The key to getting close to the traders is what happens after the closing bell,” Mendelson said. “There are three types of people who trade the Merc. At two forty-five in the afternoon, after the market’s done and the papers have been filed, one third of them are on the first train back to their wives and kids. An
other third—guys like me—are on their way back to the office to start preparing for the next opening bell.”

“And the last third?” David asked.

“The last third,” Mendelson said with a grin, “are already on their way to the nearest bar.”

D
avid grimaced as he kicked sawdust off his only pair of good leather shoes and lowered himself onto what looked like an overturned wooden barrel. The table in front of him was supposed to be some sort of wagon wheel, but the wooden spokes were marred, warped and so heavily shellacked that the thing looked more like some sort of enormous circular fungus sprouting right up from the sawdust-covered floor.

To call this place a dive bar would have been an insult to the form; it was really more of a cowboy-themed cave, tucked into the shadows of a narrow alley two blocks from the exchange. The place was dingy, dark, and smelled of old beer and new sweat; even though it was barely three in the afternoon, the place was crowded—wall-to-wall men in their twenties and thirties, most of them in brightly colored jackets.

It hadn’t been hard to track down the most popular NYMEX hangout in the area; all David had had to do was wait for the closing bell, then follow the stream of colored jackets as they traveled the short distance from the eighteenth-floor bar to the cowboy cave two blocks away. The place was called the Roadhouse, but
it may have well been a raucous extension of the trading floor. The only real difference David could see from his perch near the back of the bar were the massive pitchers of cheap beer. And the waitresses of course—cute girls in jeans shorts and tied-off tank tops, probably NYU students from the looks of them, who had been lured to this armpit on the southern tip of the city by the promise of huge tips in the middle of the afternoon. It was either this or a strip club, and even Scores didn’t do business like this at three in the afternoon.

The party had already been in full swing when David arrived. He had spotted Vitzi and the rest the minute he passed through the heavy double doors, but he had quickly taken his place at the table as far away from the action as possible. Still, he knew they had seen him come in. A few traders had looked up when he first arrived, using elbows and gestures to communicate the news to the other meatheads. David had done his best not to look directly at them. He was just there on a break from work, having a drink to blow off steam—he was just one of the boys.

It was a game, and David knew the rules—because he had played this game before. When he had first arrived at Oxford, he was the ultimate outsider—a brutish Yank at the most uptight bastion of English education. He had been an interloper, unwanted, ignored. So he had engaged in the old schoolyard game. He had kept quiet and just followed the other students around from pub to pub until they were forced finally to acknowledge him. And slowly they had grown to accept his presence. Eventually, that acceptance had turned into real friendships. The bumps in the road—a few black eyes, a few near-arrests—were all water under the bridge. Along the way, he had learned to drink like a Londoner, something that he knew was going to come in handy with this bunch as well.

He ordered a beer from one of the passing waitresses. When she returned with a glass the size of a vase, he tried not to think about the report he still had to write for Giovanni—or what Serena was going to say when he came home from work in the
middle of the night, reeking of Milwaukee’s Best. Still, he wasn’t planning on spending the whole afternoon in the bar, just enough time to let the traders know he was going to be a fixture in their lives whether they liked it or not. He didn’t expect them to approach him—just to accept his presence.

Assuming they would ignore him, he was surprised when a shadow crossed over his table, a dark reflection swimming across the foam of his oversized beer. He looked up—but it wasn’t one of the traders. It was a huge man with curly dark hair, a thick beard, and a stained gray sweatshirt with the word
SECURITY
printed in big block letters across the chest. Of course, the guy hadn’t needed the sweatshirt—because he had bouncer written all over him, especially when he put two huge paws on the table and leaned in close over David’s beer.

“You got a problem, buddy?”

David stared at the behemoth of a man.

“Do I look like I have a problem?”

The guy’s lips turned down at the corners, and he made a gesture toward the door.

“I suggest you get the fuck out of here before I throw you out.”

David had been kicked out of bars before, but never for sitting quietly in a corner. He assumed that the traders were behind this. He had to hand it to them, getting him kicked out by a bouncer was going to put a crimp in his plan. He decided instantly that the worst thing he could do was to go quietly.

So instead he stood up from the table and got right in the guy’s face.

“Look, dickhead, I’m having a really bad day. So if you want me to leave, it will have to be through the window, because there’s no way in hell I’m going out through the door.”

The bouncer’s eyes widened. David doubted the huge man had ever been talked to like that before.
Probably for good reason.
David was mentally preparing himself for a second visit to the hospital in a single week when suddenly someone was shoving a
hundred-dollar bill in the bouncer’s meaty hand and leading him away from David’s table. Before David could react, Vitzi was standing in front of him, his own meaty hands on his hips. He shook his cherubic head, his hair flopping over his forehead with the motion.

“Man, do you have balls.”

David shrugged. His heat was still up, and if he hadn’t backed down in front of the monstrous bouncer, he sure as hell wasn’t stepping back now.

“They’re big and brass, so go ahead and send over a few more bouncers, because I’m not leaving until I finish my goddamn beer.”

Vitzi grinned at him.

“Okay, Russo, calm down. We were just fucking with you.”

“Yeah, I know. I might have gone to Harvard, but I know how this shit works. My background isn’t all that different from yours.”

Vitzi crossed his arms against his chest. “I kinda doubt that. Unless your dad is also doing ten years at Rikers for a misunderstanding involving a dozen stolen BMWs. But hey, what do I know, I’m just a goddamn meathead.”

David raised his eyebrows, then realized Vitzi was still grinning.

“Okay, my mistake. Maybe I had it a bit easier than you,” David said. “So how the hell did you end up trading oil?”

Vitzi shrugged. “Same way most of us got into the Merc. Clawed my fucking way inside. I had a cousin who was clerking for one of Gallo’s boys, and he managed to squeeze me in with him. I found out I was pretty good at keeping ten numbers in my head at the same time. Not a skill that means shit on the outside, but at the Merc it meant I had a chance. One in ten clerks become traders; I was lucky enough to be that one in ten. I went from being one of Gallo’s shit heels to standing right next to him in the pit. Now I own the house I grew up in, and when I make my millions, I’m going to buy the rest of my fucking block.”

David couldn’t help but be impressed by Vitzi’s story. Doubly
amazed that the kid had stayed true to his Brooklyn roots—choosing to settle in the same place he’d grown up, even though he could easily be living in Manhattan, working his way toward Park Avenue. David guessed that was yet another difference between the traders of the Merc and those David had met at Merrill, those who worked on the NYSE. The NYSE boys wore Brooks Brothers suits and lived in apartments on the nicest blocks in New York. The Merc boys wore jeans and sweats and lived in the nicest houses on the shittiest blocks in Brooklyn.
Because that’s where they had grown up, that’s what they knew
.

“And here I just thought you were another asshole,” David finally said. “I had no idea you were an asshole with a dream.”

“An asshole
living
the dream,” Vitzi corrected. “Now come over to the bar and I’ll buy you the next round.”

And with that, David suddenly found himself swept up into the crowd of brightly jacketed young men. He was introduced to Vitzi’s cohorts: Joey Brunetti, a thick-necked twenty-seven-year-old punk from Staten Island with greasy brown hair and tattoos of pythons running up both arms—who also happened to be an expert in natural gas. And Jim Rosa, who wore a sweat suit every day beneath his trading jacket, was a part owner of a string of strip clubs in Brooklyn that had the most permissive dances on the East Coast, and knew more about trading crude than anyone since Alex Mendelson himself.

Over the next hour, David kept his mouth shut and his ears open; it wasn’t a difficult task, because the only thing the meatheads seemed to like more than trading was talking about trading. Like Giovanni had said, these guys lived for their stories. And to David, who was just trying to understand the insanity of the Merc, those stories were gold: Tales of overwhelmed traders carried off the floor on stretchers, right in the middle of trading. Of new traders hazed by veterans, shoved out of the pit or isolated in corners without access to the rest of the floor. Of parties in hotel rooms after particularly profitable days, parties that usually involved strippers and lasted all night—right up until
the next opening bell. Of the fierce lifestyles of the more successful meatheads, of weekend gambling jaunts to Vegas, of Ferraris parked right on the streets of Brooklyn.

“Yeah,” Brunetti explained as he poured the last few ounces of a pitcher into David’s glass before Vitzi ordered another round. “Leaving a car like mine on the street where I grew up is a fucking gamble. But there’s nothing we love more than a gamble.”

“Even when we lose,” Rosa said. “I’d rather lose a bet than not make a bet at all.”

“Like just three weeks ago,” Vitzi chimed in. “Brunetti here was talking shit about how fast he is. How he ran track in junior high or some crap like that—”

“As if this dumb fuck ever made it past eighth grade,” Rosa interrupted.

“Hey,” Vitzi spat, “let me finish the goddamn story. So Brunetti says he can beat any one of us in a race, any time. It’s like eleven in the morning, right in the middle of trading, and one of the natural gas guys decides to take the bet. We all head outside in our jackets, with our buy tickets still jammed in our pockets, and they go at it. A hundred yards, right along the East River. Brunetti wins by a hair.”

David gave the tattooed trader a thumbs-up. “So how much did you win?”

“Something much better than money,” Brunetti grinned. “The next day, the other guy’s clerk had to show up dressed like a woman. And, man, the kid was really decked out. Tube top, high heels, blond wig, full makeup. He was so cute, I thought Rosa here was going to get his number.”

“Fuck you,” Rosa said as another pitcher arrived in front of them. Then he shrugged. “I’ve always been a sucker for a good tube top. Last month we were at the Yankees game—”

“The three of us had a whole box rented out. One of the prime ones, maybe fifty, sixty thousand dollars—”

“And not halfway into the first inning,” Rosa continued, “I see this chick walking past the entrance in this silver tube—man,
she had some rockets on her—and I went right in for the kill. Okay, maybe I was a little aggressive, but I had no idea she was on her way to the owner’s box. Or that she was Steinbrenner’s second cousin. Before I know it, I’m getting hauled out of there by five security guards who don’t even have the decency to let me take my beer with me.”

“Hell, we paid fifty thousand dollars for that beer!” Vitzi shouted. They were getting louder now, but David didn’t care. He was in heaven, listening to the stories.

For the next hour, the stories continued—sometimes bawdy, sexual, even disturbing, but always entertaining. Often they involved gambling; the traders would bet on almost anything, from a one-hundred-yard dash down the East River to a push-up contest—right in the middle of the trading floor—to seeing how quickly they could get themselves thrown out of a bar. Just as often, the stories involved excessive drinking and even more excessive womanizing. The young traders obviously lived a wild life, fueled by the money they were making and enabled by the hours they kept. Getting off work at two in the afternoon meant that there was much more time for them to get into trouble—and with the bankrolls they were developing, that trouble often grew to epic proportions. They’d been kicked out of hotels, strip clubs, restaurants, and, of course, bars. And the bigger the story they could retell the next day, the more valued the escapade itself.

Even more than the stories, David found himself truly enjoying the camaraderie as the afternoon progressed and turned into evening. He assumed it was still a temporary warm front—but he had definitely taken the first baby steps. David hoped that if he played his cards right, sooner or later, these crazy, hard-living traders would begin to accept him as one of their own.

D
AVID DIDN’T MAKE
it back to the fifteenth floor until well after 9:00
P.M.
He was flushed and alive in a way he hadn’t felt since he’d graduated from business school, and the feeling was only
partially due to the numerous pints of beer he’d imbibed over the past six hours. It was late, to be sure, and he had a lot of work still ahead of him. But after a full day in the company of a dozen young traders, David was sure he could give Giovanni something that would make the man proud.

He came out of the elevator at full speed, determined to get right to work. But before he’d made it two steps toward his cubicle, he saw something that made him change direction: Harriet, directly ahead, on her knees in front of her desk, a huge mess of binders open on the carpet in front of her. She was cursing loudly, and even from a distance David could see that tears of frustration were making a mess of her heavy green eye shadow.

David quickly hurried over to her.

“You look like you could use some help,” he said, lowering himself to her level.

She angrily dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve.

“It’s these fucking reports from the rest of the board members—Giovanni needs them wrapped up and collated first thing in the morning, and the photocopier is on the blink, and I was supposed to be home two hours ago because I come home so late every night my boyfriend thinks I’m cheating on him, and I really wish I was cheating on him instead of locked away in this hellhole—”