Reckless - Andrew Gross

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not the rating agencies, not the press. A giant with muscles, as someone had described it once, stuffing itself with cake.

      That’s what they were. Accountable to no one.

      Well, now the giant was about to take a mighty fall.

      Cantwell rolled the Scotch around his tongue, his mind drifting to a time years before when he was just starting out, wet behind the ears. They had this bond issue from Texas from a basically bankrupt town no one could sell. He was twenty-six, thrust into a job he had no training for, with a boss, Charlie McAfee, a real bastard, Cantwell recalled, who was happy to throw him to the wolves.

      “Sink or swim up here,” the fat fuck said, grinning, puffing on a cigar. “You know how to swim, Roger?”

      Asshole didn’t know who he was dealing with. Roger Cantwell chuckled.

      He swam. With the goddamn dolphins, he swam! He sold it. He got it done. Every last share. Damn thing ended up oversubscribed. He took it across the country, to pension funds and small brokerage houses. He wrapped the purchase into a twofer with solid triple-A’s. Three hundred and fifty million dollars. That night, he had a feeling of self-importance he would never forget. He’d puffed on his first Cuban cigar. Screwed a hot waitress at Doubles like he was some kind of porno star.

      Six months later he had the old fart’s job.

      Cantwell drained the last of his drink. Funny, he thought now, two years later the bond defaulted. They all knew it would. Blamed it all on Charlie.

      It had made his damn career.

      There was a knock at his door. Cantwell turned. Ronald Wu, his CFO, with Brenda Pearlstein. They’d just been finishing up with Treasury and had come to give him the painful news.

      “Come on in,” Cantwell called, resigned. He came away from the window and sat on the long walnut conference table. “So what are the terms?” he inquired. “Just how much flesh do those vultures want us to give up?”

      Wu was a brilliant financial mind and over the years had negotiated many tough acquisitions. But this time he was somber.

      “Terms? There are no terms, Roger. They passed.” He came up and collapsed in a chair at the end of the conference table. “No more discussions. I’ve alerted the attorneys. We’re done.”

       Chapter Eighteen

       The Wall Street Journal

       Once-Mighty Wertheimer Collapses as Treasury Department Declines Bailout; Wall Street Stunned

       Once one of Wall Street’s most historic companies, Wertheimer Grant was forced to shut its doors as last-minute options for the troubled firm, including a prospective bailout by the United States Treasury, failed in the wake of the damage done by a rogue equities trader recently murdered in his Greenwich home. The beleaguered firm was also the victim of a balance sheet weighted down by questionable mortgage-backed assets.

       Wertheimer, whose shares last summer traded at over a hundred dollars, sold off in heavy after-hours trading last night for under fifty cents a share.

       The once-defiant CEO, Roger Cantwell, who is said to have spent the night in constant talks with potential partners from around the globe, was unavailable for comment. Ronald Wu, Wertheimer’s CFO, released a short statement saying the firm “is committed to protecting the interests of its loyal account holders and investor base and right now is studying all available options, including selling off its assets.”

       Employees of the hundred-year-old firm came to its forty-eight-story glass headquarters on New York’s Park Avenue in shock, let in to collect their personal belongings by security personnel. Secretaries and analysts huddled on the street in disbelief.

       “The ship sank,” one veteran hedge fund manager said. “Since the news of that trader, there’s been a weeklong run on the accounts. They no longer had the reserves to fight it off.”

       The firm succumbed to a balance sheet eroded by heavy investments in toxic subprime mortgages and hurt further by the recent admission that one of their most highly regarded traders had lost as much as twelve billion dollars through unauthorized activity. These latest losses only came to light in the wake of the Glassman family shooting deaths, thought to be a robbery at his spacious Greenwich, CT, home, but now questions have arisen as to whether it was indeed part of a recent home break-in spree there.

       “They were too big, too brash,” one Wall Street insider said. “They didn’t see the oncoming train. How fitting that it was being driven by their own star.”

       For the fifth straight day, the stock market was expected to tumble to new lows, dragging the financial sector farther down. Shocking revelations of losses and malfeasance have become part of daily life on Wall Street, and the biggest concern, given the loss of reserves and the increasingly questionable value of all mortgage-related securities, is no longer whether Wertheimer Grant will survive, but which “unsinkable” Wall Street icon will be next.

       Chapter Nineteen

      In her cluttered, windowless office, in the basement of a drab gray building a block from the Treasury Department in Washington, DC, Naomi Blum was trying to put it all together too.

      Everyone was buzzing about it. Wertheimer Grant going under. Years of believing they were the right hand of God had dragged them to the edge. Not to mention huge bets on the subprime mess and leveraging up thirty to one.

      All it took was a single rogue money manager to push them over.

      But what was adding to the trouble was the new news feed on her computer: MURDERED TRADER NOT LINKED TO LOCAL BREAK-INS.

       Not linked…

      Naomi sucked on a kiwi-mango smoothie, her lunch.

      On her desk was a slim blue folder labeled SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL. She had been copied on it by a liaison over at the FBI. The file contained a series of transcripts picked up from the cell phone of a wealthy Bahraini businessman long suspected of being a financial go-between with people in the region who might want to do the U.S. harm. Probably why the transcript had landed on her desk in the first place. She put on her glasses and browsed through the last, cryptic entry, dated February 8.

       What did it mean?

      As the lead investigator for the newly formed Financial Crime and Terrorism Task Force, a unit of eight under the Department of the Treasury, her job was to identify and interrupt wide-scale financial fraud and conspiracies that might have national-security or market-impact implications.

      They were the first responders, so to speak, in potential economic attacks against the United States. They followed money around the world, charted patterns of deposits in nonconforming banks, monitored the real work of certain questionable “charities,” and pretty much “chalkboarded” various potential security threats to the financial landscape here.

      It all sounded very important—at least that’s what Naomi’s mother always told her.

      Still, Treasury wasn’t exactly the glamour posting these days.

      In her two years on the job, they had laid open giant health care schemes aimed at bilking hundreds of millions of subscribers with underpaid claims. They’d prosecuted two prominent hedge fund principals who had diverted billions in duped investors’ assets—one who was apprehended trying to fake his own death in an attempt to flee the country, the other presently serving a twenty-year RICO charge at the federal correctional facility in Jesup, Georgia.

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