“How do you spend your day?”
The question was well considered, brandishing
an implication that this is, after all, the full measure of a man. The kind of opening serve Bookes Cooker had
learned to expect from a fancy Wall Street mouthpiece. Rocking the opponent back on his heels,
eliciting information from him rather than you, and establishing dominant
presence. Hers was conversational tennis
at the highest level of the sport. Six
words into the obligatory small-talk, Getsem Alloff proved herself to be everything Bookes
Cooker had been fearing.
Cooker’s return was a little
ditzy. “I get charged out at …”, and Bookes
gave Alloff his hourly rate. What Bookes
Cooker’s hourly rate happened to be had nothing to do with how he spent his day. Why Cooker even offered it up, I can’t tell
you. Neither can Bookes. Anyway he did, and it was game, set, match
before Bookes Cooker ever got his generally effective two-handed ground stroke cranked up.
Understand that Bookes Cooker had
become quite the fancy professional himself, a Wall Street bean counter no
less, and fancy Wall Street bean counters, like fancy Wall Street mouthpieces, mostly
charge clients by the hour. A professional
firm gives its professional staff time sheets, and the professionals key in
what they do all morning, or all afternoon, depending on where they are in the
form, and also add in who they do it for and how long they take getting it done,
by minutes if need be. Software programs
factor all this out for the payroll and billing departments to ponder. Spending your day does go together with
hourly rates in that way, Bookes supposed, when he started wondering why he came
out with what he’d come out with just then.
Now, your fancy professional’s hourly rate
is a matter of considerable importance in the trenches, purported as it is to show
how one stacks up against one’s peers, and a fancy mouthpiece charged out at,
say, $3 godzillion an hour gets to flutter her feathers in the face of a fancy bean
counter only hitting clients up for $2 Godzillion per, and usually does, which is
where the Cooker v Alloff conversation would’ve normally gone had this been a
normal conversation, which it emphatically was not. Most conversations between consenting
professionals start with feather fluttering in all the professions.
Within the fancy pants professions,
those two we’re talking about here, bean counting and mouthing-off, everybody
knows what everybody’s hourly is anyway. If
it’s a lot, the stud across the conference table tells you. If it isn’t, someone in his/her office can’t
wait to. The process of natural
selection begins with hourly rates in the fancy pants professions, to be
continued later over coffee somewhere if the numbers work out for the two of
you. This is Darwinism in its purest
form. Where transmutation of the
species, otherwise known as networking to this crowd, begins. And survival of the fittest. The fittest bean counter and/or mouthpiece in
the room is a totally big deal in the fancy pants professions.
If Bookes had fingered Alloff as a
feather flutterer, offering his own hourly might’ve made at least some sense. But Getsem wasn’t a feather flutterer. Getsem Alloff was Top Dog. The Top Dog. Top Dog in the only branch of mouthing-off
that really mattered on Wall Street anymore:
Getsem Alloff was Top Dog defending too-big-to-jail
Wall Street bankers, Crime Lords so full of themselves they go out and charge by the year for their services. Alloff was Top Dog defending
criminal masterminds from the United States Securities and Excuses Commission
(SEC).
Top dog defending criminal masterminds doesn’t
tell her hourly. When you’ve got the
highest hourly rate in financial racketeering, nobody cares what the actual
number is. Just that you’re the man/woman. Once their conversation progressed a bit, Bookes
Cooker came to figure this out.
Raw
power has a kind of terror to it, an awful, almost dehumanizing ubiety of its
own that just seems to lurk around the persona wielding it. The bean counter could feel that awfulness all
but sucking the life out of him as he tried to grapple with his having a place in a Getsem Alloff scheme of things, waiting to see if Bookes Cooker was going to
live or die in this brand new world of whatever it was Top Dog needed him for.
Getsem had called the meeting. Bookes had wanted to phone in sick. He probably was by now anyway after gulping
every med in the medicine cabinet past the parched lump in his parched throat, as
he’d done earlier that AM.
Once the Wall Street Crime Families had
taken down the global economy back in ’07-’09, their AAA-rated worthless bundled
subprime paper derivatives squeezing the vitality, if not the very essence, out
of everything that was prosperous across the entire scorched Earth, their Dons
had come under heavy attack. Voices everywhere
(except in the media, of course, which they controlled) were calling for the jailing
of too-big-to-jail bankers, and even worse, scaling back their lavish
compensation packages. A Wall Street Crime
Lord’s deferred key employee stock option award is sacred ground. Nobody, and by that I mean nobody, goes
there. You can send the Presbyterian Mafia Kingpin to jail,
and he’ll accept that kind of punishment if he has to. But take that Kingpin’s deferred
key employee stock option award away? No,
sir. The Families would rather blow up
the scorched Earth first, and every wealth management account on it.
That’s where Getsem Alloff stepped
in. Former SEC hotshot placed a few
calls to Washington, took a couple more, and made what was now repackaged as some
silly little misunderstanding go away.
There is no power, nor has there ever been any power, like the almighty power
granted unto a regulatory hotshot/mob wise guy by that revolving door that spits
out wise guy hotshots headed to and fro Wall Street and the SEC.
On both sides, wise guy hotshots are legion.
In the here and now, Bookes Cooker was
all but quivering in the presence of that almighty power and its terrible,
dehumanizing ubiety.
“Take this back to the office,” Getsem
Alloff commanded, handing Cooker something rather attractively bound and not
all that thick really, “and sign it.” It
was quite a moment, that. A lot like some
Arc of the Covenant thing. If the Holy
Document Alloff had quested Cooker with suddenly started to burn a hole in Bookes’s
hand, it would not have surprised him at all. “STARS”, the title read. What in the world was that? Navigating his way home to the bean counting firm, Cooker remembered paying a taxi driver some
money on the leg across town. STARS? What was STARS? Somehow he’d become pretty much oblivious to
everything else as the bean counter all but flew back to his bean counting
counter. What? What?
What?
“Structured Trust Advantaged Repackaged
Securities” the title read inside. A few
pages later it hadn’t gotten any clearer than that. Holy Document wasn’t about accounting at
all. No number crunching Bookes had ever
heard of anyway. Opaque, complicated can
of worms is what it turned out being to him.
Bookes couldn’t decipher a thing.
By the time the bean counter got done perusing every last page, where to
sign was the only part Bookes understood.
So he did.
There was a Getsem Alloff legal opinion
in there somewhere. It said everything
would be all right. That was all Bookes Cooker
needed to know. Only he did give the
mouthpiece a shout first. Just to cover
his aft nethers.
“This legal opinion gonna stand?” the
bean counter wondered at the mouthpiece.
“Like a rock,” the mouthpiece
replied. “Don’t you worry about a
thing.”
Four years later, some too-big-to-jail Presbyterian Mafia Kingpin got Bookes on the phone. Pulled the bean counter clear out of this
great big client hoedown. Kingpin said Bookes’s
signature was all over some structured trust advantaged repackaged securities
deal his Crime Family had done, and the securities went bust, and now these regulatory
hotshots were coming after his deferred key employee stock option award over
it.
Bookes put the too-big-to-jail Presbyterian Mafia Kingpin on hold, and switched over to speed dial. Our bean counter had come a long way in those
four years. A real long way. Cooker’s call went straight through to the Chairman
of the United States Securities and Excuses Commission. Madame Chairman picked up on the first ring.
“Yo, Getsem,” Cooker greeted fondly.
“Hey, Sweetie,” Alloff matched in kind.
“Got something for you, Babe.” Dehumanizing ubiety has been known to follow
a powerful persona’s words across interexchange telecommunication lines from
time to time. An ever so slight mist of it
was puffing over Cooker’s bean counting counter now, but raw power didn’t
frighten him so much anymore. Bookes was
working both sides of The Street these days too.
Thing like that happens when you’ve got friends spitting out of a
revolving door.
”Lemme guess.” It was a game they liked to play. After she got the appointment, Getsem Alloff
turned out to be a regular girl. Former
mouthpiece wasn’t like a mouthpiece at all.
Servant, I suppose you could call her.
As in the public servant she’d become today behind the beveled Madame Chairman plate on her desk at the Securities and Excuses Commission.
“Okay.”
“STARS again.”
“Hahahaha.”
“Hahahaha.”
“Hahahaha.”
“I gotta call another investigation
off.”
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
“Guess that legal opinion stood.”
“Like a rock. See, you didn’t have to worry about a thing.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
They always had a good laugh over that
one.
************** THE END **************
Subscribers, that was fiction, but you’ll
find the following to be fact:
