SCREWED. SHAFTED. BURNED. BETRAYED.
Scum and Villainy on Wall
Act I.
by Oliver Wright
PROLOGUE: The war is over. Unrepentant Axis soldier Jimmy Money surveys the battlefield on his way home from his new job as an advisor to the industry he once ruled from the inside. The wind-swept gash where Manhattan’s mighty towers once stood recalls to him the collapse of his spectacular career. As a banking analyst during the heady boom years, he occupied the catbird’s seat, at Boston Surety Bank, the pinnacle of the investment world. Back then he moved the markets at both ends: from the retail buyers who hung on his every inflated price target and Buy rating touted on CNBC, the siren of the bull market, to Boston Surety’s true clients: the corporate issuers and their highest executives.
His reputation tattered, Jimmy Money now labors down Liberty Avenue, pausing at Broadway, where the New York Stock Exchange looms like a reproach, before he veers off toward Wall. He’s been banished from banking for life. No matter. He still has his plush $10 million pad on the Upper East Side and a good chunk of his fortune—or at least as much of it as those vultures of the plaintiffs’ bar haven’t devoured since his immunity deal. For $15 million he’d bought himself immunity from criminal prosecution—a commodity that used car salesman of a State Law Man offered him years ago at what Jimmy admits in retrospect was a bargain basement price.
But Lemmy Wise, Johnny Bigg and others seeking jackpot justice still circle menacingly, with their relentless sorties of civil suits. How unjust! Through the veil of self-pity and self-rationalization, there lurks a particle of truth. The System made him do it, Jimmy whines, with some justification. Why should he be the Fall Guy? What about the crooked companies themselves, and their high-flying, eager-to-deal CEOs? And the other B.S. Bank honchos and bankers who egged him on, what about them? The sophisticated mutual and pension fund managers and investors who’d eagerly drunk the toxic, CMO-laced Kool-Aid; weren’t they complicit too? Why should he shoulder all the blame? What, Jimmy wonders in his heart of hearts, about the blood on their hands? A plaintive murmur betrays his lips as he veers north on Greenwich, and In-City US Financial headquarters comes into view: “I am more sinned against than sinner.”
