My novel, The Gravy Train, is the story of a novice banker
who tries to help an aging chairman buy his company back before the Wall Street
sharks who drove it into bankruptcy can carve it up for themselves.
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| Click on cover to buy on Amazon |
Finn
Keane is a starry-eyed, freshly-minted MBA who lands a job at Abercrombie,
Wirth & Co., the hottest firm on Wall Street in a red-hot market. He’s
assigned to work on his first deal under the firm’s biggest producer, Jack
Shane. Finn is thrilled. The deal is an ambitious acquisition by northeast
regional department store chain Kristos & Co. of the high-end retailer,
Milstein Brothers Stores, that will create a nationwide retail department store
juggernaut. Finn immediately bonds with Nick Christanapoulas, the chairman of Kristos
& Co., who has handed the day-to-day reins of the 160-store chain he built
to his idiot son-in-law, Stanley, who Shane talked into the ill-conceived deal.
Shortly after the deal closes, the economy tanks and the
markets crash. The merged company defaults on the junk bonds that Shane
orchestrated to finance the deal even before it makes its first interest
payment.
It’s at that point that Finn learns that Shane isn’t only
ABC’s biggest producer; he’s also its biggest SOB.
Immediately after the company is forced to file for
bankruptcy, the Wall Street sharks close in, led by Shane, and things move
quickly after that. Finn gets fired by Shane and he aligns himself with Nick.
Finn and Nick team up with a streetwise old bankruptcy lawyer in an effort to help
Nick buy the company back out of bankruptcy.
Finn and his rag-tag group face off against Shane, the
creditors and their battery of numbers crunchers, led by one of the most
sophisticated and brazen bankruptcy lawyers on Wall Street, who knows all the
dirty tricks of the trade and then some.
As in all minnow-versus-whale stories, you wonder how the
good guys can possibly win because the odds are so stacked against them. But
even if they can’t, half the fun is seeing if they can at least land a few
solid punches against the bad guys before they go down swinging.
The book is based in part on the first bankruptcy deal I
worked on early in my career, and it has some colorful characters based on a number
of the oddballs and SOBs I encountered in the course of it.
And the title of the book is taken from real life as well: it’s
the nickname of the Amtrak train from New York to Wilmington, Delaware, the
site of the court where many of the main bankruptcy cases are decided. It’s on the
cars of The Gravy Train on the way to court where the lawyers, bankers and
creditors committees who populate the bankruptcy world huddle together. They posture,
haggle and yell at each other to cut the deals they present to the judges.
I hope you’ll give The Gravy Train a try. It’s a fast-paced
read that will give you some insight into how the bankruptcy game works, and
hopefully entertain you.
