Bull Street is the first of my White Collar Crime Thrillers. It's the story of Richard Blum, a freshly-minted MBA who goes to Wall Street as a naive, novice investment banker and soon discovers he’s landed smack in the middle of an insider-trading ring. As Richard peels away the layers of the skulduggery he's uncovered, he finds out that all the insider trading surrounds the deals of his firm’s largest client, Harold Milner. Milner is the takeover maven of his generation who Richard has idolized for years. In fact, on Richard’s first big deal on the Street, Milner has taken him under his wing. So Richard can’t believe Milner is involved in the insider trading, but stops short when he thinks of telling Milner what he’s discovered.
What if Milner is part of the ring? What if he isn’t but if Richard’s disclosure to Milner leaks
to the traders and triggers them to come after him because he knows too much?
And then what about the Feds he finds out are sniffing around? Will the footprints
he’s left with his own digging cause the Feds to think he’s a participant in
the ring and put him in their crosshairs?
Not only does Bull Street have those thriller elements, it's
a coming of age story about Wall Street told from an insider's perspective.
That's because I wrote the first draft of it when I was a freshly-minted MBA
who landed on Wall Street as a naive, novice investment banker. As such, the
novel includes many of my jarring learning experiences as I cut
my teeth in Wall Street's sharp-elbowed world. I started my career there in an
era that saw major insider trading and securities fraud scandals: the likes of
Ivan Boesky, Marty Siegel, Dennis Levine and Mike Milken paid huge fines and
went to jail in those days.
And so among the usual outsized personalities, misfits and oddballs I encountered in my early days on Wall Street, I also met a number of crooks from that era, a few of them high-profile. Bull Street is fiction, but the grandiose egos, the bare-knuckles negotiating tactics and the questionable ethics of many of the men and women of Wall Street portrayed in the book are true to life.
And so among the usual outsized personalities, misfits and oddballs I encountered in my early days on Wall Street, I also met a number of crooks from that era, a few of them high-profile. Bull Street is fiction, but the grandiose egos, the bare-knuckles negotiating tactics and the questionable ethics of many of the men and women of Wall Street portrayed in the book are true to life.
I hope you’ll give Bull Street a try. It's the first of
my White Collar Crime Thrillers, and like all of the books in the series, it
offers a window into the world of Wall Street’s financial gamesmanship from the
perspective of one who’s been there.
