The Gravy Train

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.

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.

Read a sample

Buy The Gravy Train: Buy US  Buy UK

Visit David Lender's Website

Bull Street - My White Collar Crime Thriller #1

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.

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.

Read a sample

Buy Bull Street: Buy US  Buy UK

Visit David Lender's Website

From Antigua to Morocco

My latest White Collar Crime Thriller, Spin Move, is about a guy named John Rudiger who’s a fugitive financier living under an alias in Antigua. How Rudiger wound up in that position is a long story, which I laid out in a series of short stories and novellas called Rudiger Stories.

Click cover to buy on Amazon

The 60-second summary is that Rudiger is basically a good guy who was a money manager in New York named Walter Conklin with a $1 billion hedge fund around the time of the Internet boom. He specialized in technology stocks, so as you might guess, he was considered a wunderkind there for a while. The guy puffed himself up, in more ways than one, along with the markets. He married a sassy, big-busted social climber from Long Island, developed a taste for high-priced wines, bought a Park Avenue coop, opened a Park Avenue office with a personal Cordon Bleu-trained French chef, and even got pretty puffed up physically—ballooning from his All-American college football weight to over 300 pounds.

When the Internet bubble popped and the NASDAQ crashed, things fell apart for Conklin. It turns out his wife, Angela, was screwing one of his best friends and his CFO and partner at his hedge fund was screwing him even worse: he cooked the books to pump up Conklin’s already phantasmagorical returns in order to suck in more investors, and then when the market tanked he panicked, turned state's evidence and blamed it all on Conklin. That's what put Conklin on the run to South America for plastic surgery, a gastric bypass, and his John Rudiger alias in the Caribbean.

So now you’re caught up with how Rudiger wound up in Antigua.

Enter Katie Dolan.

Katie, a petite strawberry blonde with a lithe body and washboard abs, was raised tough-as-nails in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and had worked her way up from the streets to become a lawyer, first for the Manhattan DA’s office and then for Assistant U.S. Attorney Charlie Holden in Manhattan. Holden was the guy who arrested Conklin's CFO, and the reason Conklin skipped the country when he realized Holden was hot on his trail.

Katie landed in Antigua at Holden’s behest to try and get the goods on Rudiger, prove he was really Conklin and extradite him back to the U.S. for trial and jail. Pheromones flew when she saw his 6’2’’ tanned and muscled body and ski-slope nose. His hormones responded in kind.

Rudiger did Holden one better and co-opted Katie to go with him back to New York to pose as his ex-wife Angela to help him recover $50 million in bearer bonds he’d stashed in a safe deposit box.

Katie did Rudiger still one better, screwing him out of $30 million of the bonds, and thus begins our story, Spin Move.

It’s a year after Rudiger and Katie’s tryst in New York, and now the Antiguan officials are demanding ever more exorbitant payouts to maintain his cover. He’s running out of money.  Katie is holed up with her ailing father in Cape Verde, an Island paradise off the coast of Africa that conveniently lacks an extradition treaty with the U.S., an idea she took right out of Rudiger’s playbook. Despite her double cross, Rudiger is still hot for Katie, and he knows just where to find her when he leaves Antigua. But U.S. Attorney Charlie Holden is still hovering in the background, dead set on catching them both. Even worse, Katie’s been sucked in by a dashing, disreputable Swiss banker and he’s conned her out of Rudiger’s $30 million. Can they get it back and escape before it’s too late?

I gave Spin Move the elements of a classic thriller, with pace and jump cuts from Antigua to Morocco to Geneva to the UK, some secondary characters I had a lot of fun with, ongoing fireworks between Rudiger and Katie, a sneaky villain in a murderous Swiss banker, and some action that will hopefully stand up the hairs on the back of your neck.

Readers seem to agree; the reviews have been very positive.

I hope you’ll give Spin Move a try.

Read a sample of Spin Move

Buy Spin Move: Buy US  Buy UK

Visit David Lender’s website

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was on a roll until earlier this month.  He’d successfully prosecuted 85 insider trading cases, including sending Raj Rajaratnam, head of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, to jail for 11 years.  This month, Bharara lost against Rajaratnam’s younger brother, Rengan.  He lost in part because the judge threw out two insider trading counts, and along with them much of the evidence.  Commentators suggest that evidence would've caused jurors to convict Rengan if they had been allowed to hear it.

Still, think about it: 85 to 1.  That’s an amazing batting average.  It’s also startling that Bharara had 85 cases for which he was able to amass enough evidence that he could prosecute them.

I can remember back to a time when, as a young investment banker in the 1980s, I thought I'd seen everything with insider trading cases.  That was during the era when Rudy Giuliani had Bharara’s job as top Wall Street prosecutor.  It was the era when Ivan Boesky paid a $100 million fine and went to jail for trading on inside information.  When Dennis Levine got sent up the river for trading on inside information on his investment banking firm‘s deals, and for cutting his friends in on the action.  When Marty Siegel, who had tipped Boesky on his firm's deals—and took a (big) briefcase containing $700,000 in cash from Boesky for it one night—went to jail and lost everything in fines.  When Mike Milken paid a $600 million fine as part of a plea bargain on securities and tax violations.

In those days I was naïve enough to think that after that era’s firestorm of public outrage, fines and the perp walks that Giuliani invented—dragging traders out of their offices in handcuffs, or from their apartments at 6 a.m. to the sound of press cameras snapping away—that anybody with a brain would know the rewards for stepping over the line weren’t worth the penalties if you got caught.

It didn't take me long to get slapped awake to the fact that it's all part of human nature.  The combination of old-fashioned greed and thinking you're smarter than anybody else is a powerful cocktail that can induce entranced walks to the dark side.  People can’t help themselves.

I was still working on Wall Street when I started writing novels.  I relied on my experiences for most of my material, but I made up a lot of it.  In one of my early novels, Bull Street, I had the Feds use wiretaps to catch insider traders, a technique until then reserved for trying to snare Mafia dons.  Recently, wiretaps were an essential weapon in Bharara 's arsenal in bringing down Rajaratnam and his co-conspirators.  Also in Bull Street, I had the SEC use a sophisticated MarketWatch computer program, run on Cray supercomputers, to analyze an insider trading ring’s stock trades.  That’s the equivalent of a hand-held calculator compared to what the Feds are using today against insider trading activity.

In my current novel, Spin Move, John Rudiger is a fugitive financier living in Antigua, who was tricked out of $30 million by an ex-girlfriend, Katie Dolan.  As he's running out of money and the local officials are insisting on ever more exorbitant bribes to keep his alias intact, does he decide it's time to go straight?  Does he go back to the States and turn himself in, do his time?  Nope.  He's still hot for Katie, so it's natural he'd look for her, but that $30 million is also on his mind.  And when he finds out a conman has swindled her out of it, he uses all his skills to come up with an elaborate scam to get it back.  He can't help it.

In my recent novel, Mickey Outside, Mickey Steinberg is getting out of a cushy white-collar federal prison camp after a slap-on-the-wrist sentence because he turned state's evidence.  His short sentence notwithstanding, he's been stripped of his securities licenses, banned from Wall Street for life, divorced by his wife and he's broke.  Has he learned his lesson?  He hatches a scam with another ex-con to sell a near-perfect forgery of a stolen van Gogh masterpiece in the shadowy underground market for stolen art.  Human nature.

I'm not going to spoil Mickey Outside for you, but there's a point where Mickey has to decide if he stays on the other side of the line or goes straight.  What does he do?

Somebody who's read my earlier Rudiger Stories with my John Rudiger character, called a book to my attention entitled How to Become a Professional Con Artist.  It’s an eye-opener.  I knew that Three Card Monte wasn't invented on the streets of New York in the 1980s, but I had no idea that scams like the Pigeon Drop, Change Raising, the Lotto Scam, the Oak Tree Game, or the Double-Play had been around for centuries.

So I guess I'm never going to run out of material as long as human beings are greedy enough to cheat, and suckers are equally greedy enough to allow themselves to get duped by con artists.  You can’t make this stuff up; you don’t have to.

The Theft of the Mona Lisa

In 1911, an Argentinian con man, the Marques Eduardo de Valifierno, came up with the idea for the signature scam of his life: the theft of the Mona Lisa.

But that was only half of it.  The other half was that, before the theft, he commissioned a famous French art forger named Yves Chaudron to paint six perfect copies of the Mona Lisa and had them shipped to different cities around the world.

Next, de Valifierno hired an Italian carpenter working in the Lourve Museum named Vincenzo Peruggia to steal the Mona Lisa.  On the day of the theft, Peruggia hid in a broom closet until closing, then stepped out of his closet and lifted the Mona Lisa off the wall.  He hid it under his smock and simply walked out of the museum.

After the sensational publicity about the theft, de Valifierno lined up six wealthy art buyers who fell all over themselves to buy his copies for millions, each thinking they’d bought the genuine article.

Peruggia hid the original in the false bottom of a chest in his spartan Paris apartment for two years until the Paris police dragnet ran its course.  Then he took it back to Italy with him.  Once there, he contacted a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, saying he had the Mona Lisa and wanted to sell it. Geri agreed to meet Peruggia, bringing the director of the Uffizi Gallery with him to authenticate the painting.  Once Geri knew he was looking at the real thing, he phoned the police and Peruggia was arrested.  By the time the world learned that the Mona Lisa had been recovered, de Valifierno had disappeared and it was too late for the buyers of his forgeries to do anything about it.

Some of that story is true, at least the part about Peruggia stealing the Mona Lisa in 1911, his means of accomplishing it, the fact he tried to resell it two years later and his arrest for it.  The stuff about de Valifierno, the forgeries and his wealthy art buyers are legend, and no one is sure whether or not any of that is real.  But it’s a story often retold, and probably embellished upon with each retelling.

That story inspired my new novel, Mickey Outside, about an art scam featuring Mickey Steinberg, one of the characters in my third novel, Bull Street.  And since novels are made-up stories, why shouldn't I use de Valifierno's apocryphal scam as the basis for Mickey Steinberg's story?

Click on Cover to Buy on Amazon

In Mickey Outside, Mickey Steinberg, the financier of his generation and the mastermind behind a $2 billion insider trading ring, is getting ready to get out of Yankton, the cushy minimum-security Federal Prison Camp where he's been serving a reduced three-year sentence for cooperating with the Feds.  He's broke, banned from the securities industry for life, divorced by his wife, and none of his old hoity-toity friends from the world of high society and finance in New York will take his calls.

So he needs to come up with a creative way to get back on top.  He's always been a behind-the-scenes genius, but he's not much of a face man, so he recruits another Yankton con, Paul Reece, a good-looking, smooth-talking car-salesman type to help him put together his new con.  He knocks off de Valifierno's idea, researches famous art thefts and settles on Vincent van Gogh's View of the Sea at Scheveningen, a stolen masterpiece that’s never been recovered.  He hires an expert forger to copy it and he's off to the races.

After his release from Yankton and his return to New York, he contacts wealthy buyers in the shadowy underground art market for stolen masterpieces and embarks upon an auction process to sell the painting to the highest bidder.

Then things begin to come unraveled, and the real story begins.

Mickey Outside is caper steeped in the art world, the glamor of New York, mega-rich luminaries, and some good fun.  I hope you'll give it a try.

Buy Mickey Outside: Buy US  Buy UK