Fixers (2 page)

“I have a job for you, Chauncey,” Mankoff said when I answered. “Like the old days. Can you meet me tomorrow at Three Guys, seven a.m.?”

Seven in the morning! On a Saturday! Anyone else, I’d object. But as I’ve said, Mankoff and I have a long-lasting relationship, and he’s been very helpful to me in building my consulting business as well as providing a nice office at a very decent rent. “The old days?” Our CIA fun and games? Had to be. “Sure,” I said. “For you, anything. Want to give me a hint?”

“Bank of West Congo,” he said, then added, “with a bit of that Partagas operation of yours thrown in,” and hung up. Mankoff’s not much for small talk.

Bank of West Congo was a coup he and I had pulled off not long before he left Langley for Wall Street. A $40 million (real money back then) politics-cum-finance chain-jerk that in 1986 destabilized a big chunk of Africa and secured all sorts of lucrative mineral and mining rights for people who Washington thought would help the cause of democracy, as it was then defined by certain friends of then-President Reagan who liked buying underdeveloped countries’ natural resources cheap. In such operations, “democracy” is synonymous with “Chevron” or “Shell” or “Total.”

Looking back, however, I have to say that those friends, compared to today’s Clinton-Bush greedheads, seem positively socialist. West
Congo had been a hugely effective sting, and great fun in the bargain, especially because we managed in the process to eviscerate a couple of Swiss private banks that were playing the long game on the other side. Of course our “clients” turned out to be complete crooks, but you can’t have everything, and the caper itself was flawlessly executed.

I was surprised and yet I wasn’t that he knew about “Partagas” (named after the Cuban cigars), a Havana knockoff of Iran-Contra that I managed the year after Mankoff left Langley, involving some expropriated sugar properties and a phony transfer of title via Honduras, with $5 million ending up in a bank in Liechtenstein. Once CIA, always CIA: we old Langley types keep up with whatever’s doing at our alma mater. Even today, some fifteen years after I left the agency, I consider myself reasonably state-of-the-art in certain tricks and games when it comes to moving money covertly.

Anyway, mention of the old days got the old juices stirring. I could hardly wait to hear what was on Mankoff’s mind.

Mankoff’s choice of venue, Three Guys, is an upmarket coffee shop/restaurant on Madison Avenue across from the Carlyle Hotel, where Mankoff and his wife Grace are camping out at $2,500 a night while their six-bedroom duplex around the corner off Fifth Avenue is being done over by the decorator of the moment. That’s Grace’s domain; when it comes to lifestyle, Mankoff may dress the part and have the accessories the world expects of a man in his position, but basically he’s plain vanilla. He’d live in a yurt, provided there was room for a harpsichord or two.

The Three Guys coffee shop is Mankoff’s preferred setting for breakfast meetings. It’s been around forever; he’s been going there for probably twenty years—since he and Grace first moved into the neighborhood. Smaller shots than he like the bowing and scraping over juice cleanses and egg-white omelets at the Regency or the Mark, but Mankoff isn’t one to show off in public. For him breakfast is about getting business done, not meet and greet.

I set the alarm for 6:00 a.m., called my car service and told them to pick me up at 6:40. I live in a loft in Tribeca, just off Vesey Street. Although I had an uptown upbringing, I prefer living downtown. “Tribeca” still has a pleasantly bohemian ring, even if the name no longer fits the neighborhood, which has been gentrified beyond recognition, and when the weather’s nice, I can stroll home from my office in Midtown in an easy hour.

As I fell asleep, I found myself wondering what exactly Mankoff wanted to talk about. He definitely had his game voice on. “The old days,” was what he’d said. Hmmm. Should I get up extra-early and iron the old cloak and polish up the dagger? I wondered. Well, tomorrow would come soon enough. I soon gave up speculating and drifted off.

At this point, a bit of background is in order.

My name is Chauncey Arlington Suydam III. I’m forty-six years old, about to turn forty-seven (DOB March 22, 1960). As you can guess from my name, I’m white, single, WASP to the core. I was born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; educated at the Buckley School on East 74th Street, class of 1973, then Groton ’77, then Yale ’81: always a year young for my grade.

I’m what people of my parents’ generation used to describe as “a confirmed bachelor,” usually to describe homosexual friends, but don’t take the fact that I’ve never married as some kind of evidence that I’m gay. To put it frankly, the calculations that go into the marriage algorithm leave me puzzled and hesitant. I’ve come close to marrying three times—but either I or the ladies backed off, the last instance being four years ago when the object of my ravishment decided I wasn’t as rich as she needed me to be. I might also say this: my status has kept me out of the arms of a certain kind of woman who prowls Manhattan and other glitter spots in search of well-off early-middle-aged married men needing psychological help with their midlife crises and willing to pay handsomely for it.
When I look at the emotional carnage these entanglements leave behind, I’m even more determined to go it alone.

I can’t complain that I lack for companionship, male or female. I’m an undemanding friend, who doesn’t wear out his welcome or extort confidences, and people seem pleased to have me around. My acquaintanceship is organized in circles more wide than deep; some go back to very early days, to grade school and dancing school; there are a number from Groton, but surprisingly few from Yale (last year I went to my twenty-fifth reunion; it was awful! Everyone showing off how rich they’ve become). What is disconcerting about New York life is the way people drop in and out of each other’s lives, sometimes as the result of a quarrel, more often as the consequence of a change in material circumstances. Why relative wealth should make that much of a difference to warm friendships of long standing baffles me—but nowadays it seems to. I’m often approached by friends on whom Mammon has turned a cold eye and beseeched to explain “why so-and-so has exiled me from his life.” The only answer I have for that is that given the way money is made today, given the sort of people who seem most adept at making it, given the inescapable conclusion that money has been allowed to suffocate most other sources of human satisfaction, I’m not surprised that people disburse their “disposable” affections in terms of relative net worth.

The “III” in my name isn’t an affectation but a form of salute to tradition and my father. It has never occurred to me to drop the roman numerals; in the world in which I was raised such incidentals counted for something, and perhaps it’s the best monument I can leave in place to a father I adored and to whom I owe so much. My father was “Chauncey Two,” Chauncey Arlington Suydam II, Senior Vice-President and Chief Investment Officer at the old Stuyvesant Fidelity Trust (now an unhappy part of Merrill
Lynch), so I naturally became known as “Chauncey Three.” Never for a second have I felt diminished.

Perhaps this is the place to deliver a short testimonial to the man who brought me up by himself (with a governess and housekeeper-cook), my mother having dumped us when I was eight and run off with one of those lockjaw-mouthed, inherited-money assholes who the next year killed them both when he flew his Learjet into a mountain outside Sun Valley.

My father, whom I called “Pop,” was a species now defunct; what in his day were called “gentlemen sportsmen,” a term that denoted not only how well you executed certain athletic maneuvers—drop shot off the back wall, twenty-foot curling downhill putt, fox-trot with an ungainly debutante or bride’s mother, wet fly under a salmon’s nose—but how you conducted yourself in business and in life in general.

Of course, Pop’s palmy days were back when Wall Street was different from the money- and people-grinding machine it is now. The phrase “24/7” hadn’t been coined. One finished one’s working day by 6:00 p.m. at the latest—the “day” including (if he didn’t take one of his clientele of widows and trustees to lunch) a midday or early afternoon game of squash or court tennis at the Racquet Club or at the River Club. After work, one looked in at one’s club for a drink, although Pop was an attentive father, unlike many WASP parents. He was always home in time for dinner with me at 7:00 p.m. (or, if he had a date, to sit with me and my governess while we ate). We spent time together. At least once or twice every autumn we’d drive up to New Haven for a Yale football game; I lived for those outings. On vacation Sunday nights, he’d take me to Rangers games. We saw a lot of plays together. My old man was a good sport and a good guy. Men and women liked him equally well. I like to think I resemble him.

The man I’d be meeting at Three Guys, Leon Simon Mankoff,
is spun from different social cloth. I don’t think he’s ever played a round of golf. He lives for work and the harpsichord. In my view, and I’m certainly not alone, he’s an authentic Wall Street genius. I think my opinion’s worth something, even though I only worked (technically) on the Street for two years after I left the Agency, at a Washington-based hedge fund (hated it—but let’s get to that later), where I learned to talk the talk, even if I couldn’t make myself walk the walk. I know what CDOs are, and the rest of the derivatives stew that has become Wall Street’s favorite entrée, and because a significant portion of my consulting work is with Wall Street people, I’ve more or less kept up with the latest forms of witchcraft and financial prestidigitation. This isn’t to say that you could plunk me down at a trading slot at STST and I’d end the day with my book up $50 million, but I can hold up my end of the conversation with the people who do—although I now and then confuse “fiscal policy” and “monetary policy.”

More important, I’ve seen Wall Street up close, personal and plain, and I think I get the picture. The key to Wall Street is that these people really don’t give a damn about what anyone other than peers and competitors think and their accountants and lawyers tell them. They’ll claim that they do, for public consumption, or when they feel the hot breath of pending regulation, but take it from me: I’ve been around them for almost thirty years, watching them talking the talk and walking the walk, and apart from the 1 percent of the 1 percent, they don’t give a screw about the rest of mankind. That said, you also need to consider that they’ve managed to work things out so that what they do, overpaid though it may be, has become essential to the working of the world. Life runs on fossil fuels and credit. And Wall Street’s the guy at the credit pump, sporting $5,000 pinstripes instead of coveralls with a nametag.

I do confess to a casual interest in Wall Street history, mainly
because it was kind of a hobby of my father’s. His generation appears to have been one of the last to whom times past really mattered, and he passed that perspective on to me: he and my teachers at Buckley, Groton, and Yale, not to mention the goings-on in the tomb. My old man left me a whole library on high finance that I dip into now and then: the biographies of famous financiers, mostly, or old books like Charles Francis and Henry Adams’s
Chapters of Erie
, about the fight for control of the Erie Railroad in the late 1860s. Read that and you’ll quickly conclude that the effect and influence of Big Bad Money has changed very little in the intervening century and a half. Some of it is actually funny: I’ll bet you don’t know that the author of one of the earliest treatises on American banking had the singularly appropriate name of “Gouge.”

One of the things that fascinates me about the Street today is how little its high flyers seem to know about the history of their business. A guy I know at Lehman tells me that since the firm has been taken over by a bunch of lowlifes, not one in a hundred people there knows or cares who Robert Lehman was or how far back in American history the firm goes and where it began life (1857, Montgomery, Alabama). Come to think about it, why should they? That was
then
, and everybody knows that
now
is where the bucks are. Perhaps this is why the Street’s so prone to these boom-bust cycles when everyone seems to forget the past and make the same mistakes that crashed the markets a decade or so earlier (don’t worry, I’m not going to quote Santayana).

Now: Mankoff. How best to sum up the guy? There’s a place in Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel
The Last Tycoon
, where he describes his protagonist, Monroe Stahr, as one of the few men in Hollywood capable of keeping “the whole equation of movies in his head.” Substitute “Wall Street” for “movies,” and that’s Leon Mankoff—at least as far I understand how Wall Street works. And
I should add that with Mankoff, it’s his gut as well as his intellect that rules. His feel for the interactions of human nature helps him read markets as profitably as anything his computer jockeys’ algorithms tell him.

Mankoff’s a round dozen years older than I am. We’re both sons of Old Eli, which is where we first encountered each other, although not as undergraduates: Mankoff was Yale class of ’69 (graduated when he was twenty), summa cum laude in Mathematics and Economics, a dozen years before I graduated magna cum laude in English and Art History. What really links us is Skull & Bones.

I dare say I’m the sort you think of when people say “Skull & Bones”: a button-down, “white shoe” type right out of
Stover at Yale
, a fourth generation Skull & Bones legacy. To the tomb born, as it were. But Mankoff is also a well-recognized Bones type: the campus unknown of whom people remark year after year, when the
Yale Daily News
publishes the list of secret society acceptances the morning after Tap Day, “Who the hell is that guy and how the hell did he get tapped for Bones?” Take it from me: every Bones delegation includes one or more “that guy” (or today, “that girl”). It’s what gives the Russell Trust Association (Skull & Bones’ legal designation) its flair and energy year after year. It isn’t all legacies and connections.