Money to Burn

Epilogue

I SPENT A COUPLE DAYS IN BED AFTER THE EXPLOSION. NANA WAS a retired nurse, so my grandparents stayed in New York to drive me crazy-I mean care for me. I couldn’t stand watching the television, so Papa brought me a book from the library. An old book-ancient, you might say.

When I was a young boy, Nana worked nights at the hospital, so it was my grandfather who used to bathe me before bed, put me in my Spiderman pajamas, and read to me from Aesop’s Fables as he rocked me to sleep. His personal favorite was “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” As the fable goes, the ant was the disciplined one, storing up food for hard times. The grasshopper was the singing and chirping party animal-er, insect-who blew through summer as if life were one red-hot streak at a blackjack table. And then winter came.

Papa was an ant, a Depression-era immigrant raised on an honest wage for an honest day’s work. We never talked about stocks. The first I’d heard of the Dow Jones Industrials was in fifth-grade social studies class, and I still find it unbelievable that when I was ten the Dow was at 802. That was just fine for ants, but the grasshoppers of the 1980s dreamed of riding in limousines. In the 1990s, it was stretch limousines. Then, in the insanity of the twenty-first century, it had to be a stretch Hummer limousine with a hot tub, a posse, and at least one B-list celebrity with no panties. But ants had no use for any of this. They knew winter would come.

Never had I dreamed that I would be a grasshopper. That all my friends would be grasshoppers. That the entire world would be one big swarming, borrowing, and spending orgy of grasshoppers-a world in which anything worth doing was naturally worth overdoing.

Like I said before: There was a time when people all but worshipped guys like me. Now, of course, they’ve come to hate us. It was understandable; the man I’d worshipped deserved no forgiveness.

Eric Volke was one of Bernard Madoff’s feeders.

I’d had no way of knowing that on the night everything blew up-literally-in WhiteSands’ Hangar No. 3. It came out much later, after Madoff pleaded guilty to the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history and became federal prison inmate No. 61727-054 for the rest of his life.

Only then did I learn the chief purpose of Agent Andie He

Virtually none of Madoff’s feeders had conducted any due diligence before dropping to their knees and kissing the ground he walked on. The ones who had were even worse; they knew or at least suspected that he was a fraud and still fed him clients. But a very select few-Eric Volke among them-had known the truth from the very begi

Marcus McVee had figured out that Volke was dirty long before anyone else did. All it took was a call to the Chicago Board of Options Exchange to confirm that the total S &P 100 options that Eric’s WhiteSands option fund claimed to have acquired through Madoff exceeded the total open interest in S &P 100 contracts at that strike price. In Papa’s terms, that meant Eric claimed he was buying veal parmigiana when the only thing on the menu was spaghetti and meatballs. But Marcus’ decision to confront Eric rather than go to the FBI had cost him his life. Eric rode with him to the waterfront in the Hamptons, where he forced him to drink a bottle of tequila at gunpoint. I doubt that Marcus knew that Eric had dissolved a lethal dose of Vicodin into the tequila.

Eric Volke died in the hangar explosion at WhiteSands. So did Kyle McVee. Ironically, Ian Burn was dead before the fire even started. Ivy would never have to worry about them coming after her.

McVee’s nephew, Jason Wald, had beat Eric to the exit through the hangar’s maintenance office. He suffered burns on his back, but recovered well enough to talk through his lawyers. He would save some jail time by pointing the finger at his dead uncle for the contract killings of Chuck Bell, Tony Girelli, Nathaniel Locke, my driver Nick, and Rumsey the charter sailboat captain down in the Bahamas.

From one Monday to the next, Saxton Silvers went from a Wall Street landmark to bankruptcy. It was the begi

A week after the explosion at WhiteSands, I was getting around pretty well, weaning myself from crutches. The leg wound was healing, no signs of infection, no serious vascular damage, no broken bones. Doctors presumed that I’d caught a ricocheted projectile rather than a direct hit. On the following Friday morning the bankruptcy trustee allowed me back into the building to pack my belongings into a cardboard box. My brother helped. Papa came to supervise.

“No offense,” Papa said, shaking his head, “but I still say it’s all one big Fonzie scheme.”

Kevin looked up from the half-packed box in front of him. “Don’t you mean Ponzi?”

“No,” I said, “he really doesn’t.”

My box was full, and I lifted it from my desk. About a dozen clear Lucite cubes pushed right through the cardboard bottom and fell to the floor. Deal toys, they were called. Little desktop mementos that, depending on the nature and size of the transaction, could be anything from a simple rectangle encasing a miniature pineapple to a light-up sculpture of knights in shining armor jousting over the engraved sum of $125 million.

I raised the box higher, letting the rest of the toys drop to the floor.

The bottom falling out.

I almost had to laugh: how quickly things could crumble. In the late 1980s, junk bonds and federal indictments brought down Wall Street’s fifth largest investment bank over a period of years. Twenty years later, Moody’s downgrades the creditworthiness of the world’s largest insurance company on a Thursday, and on Monday it’s on life support. Were we headed for a world in which the destruction of major financial institutions and the people who run them could happen in a matter of hours? Minutes? The click of a mouse?

I didn’t want to hang around to find out.

“I’ll get them,” said Kevin, reaching for the fallen deal toys.

“Leave them,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” I said, tossing a Lucite-encased replica of a waterless urinal onto the pile. Green investments came in all shapes and sizes, too. “I’m sure.”

Kevin loaded the last box onto the cart. We wheeled it down the hall and got on the elevator.

“Going down,” the mechanical voice said.

“You have no idea,” I replied.

Papa looked at me strangely, not really catching my drift. The door closed, and the elevator started its descent.

“So,” said Papa, “what’s going to happen with all that money you lost in your account?”

“Still working it out,” I said.