Money to Burn Read Online Free PDF Page A

corruption that we barely noticed we were all sinking together. The media have covered the fallout from every angle. Almost. When it comes to financial crimes, secrets, violence, and even murder, my Wall Street tale proves that sometimes you can clean up toxic waste, and other times it goes up in flames.
    Intense, hot, uncontrollable flames.
    It started on a fairly typical weekday, and I was on my way to yet another black-tie dinner—yes, that was “fairly typical.” This one, in the Grand Ballroom of the Pierre Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, was the annual Securities Industry News awards ceremony. A colleague at Saxton Silvers was up for Collateralized Debt Obligation of the Year. The CDO—a financial tool that repackaged debts supported by collateral (like mortgages) for sale to investors—had once been the twenty-first-century darling of Wall Street. The subprime crisis in late 2006 had changed all that, eerily enough right around Halloween. I nearly skipped this year’s award ceremony, embarrassed for my firm, unable to fathom how anyone could walk on stage to accept an award for an investment instrument that had nearly destroyed the global financial system. For Saxton Silvers, however, a win was a win, and you were nothing if not a team player. So there I was, answering the call of duty.
    Work had been my solace after Ivy’s disappearance—years ago. No one knew for certain what had happened to her that night in the Bahamas. Suspicion surrounded me at first—the husband was always the first suspect—but I passed a polygraph exam with flying colors. My undying hope was that Ivy would somehow return unharmed—a high-powered career woman who had jumped into marriage while on vacation, freaked out, and escaped to some far corner of the earth to sort out what the hell she’d just done. But there was never the slightest indication that she was alive. No sightings of her anywhere in the world. No cell phone calls. No record of any travel or credit card purchases in her name. Her newly opened, half-million-dollar account at Saxton Silvers—the money she had entrusted me to manage—went untouched. Eventually, the Bahamian investigators likened Ivy’s disappearance to the accidental death of Natalie Wood in the early 1980s. The only difference was that we had anchored our sailboat near “the wall,” as it is known to scuba divers—part of the continental shelf where shallow turquoise seas less than a mile from shore suddenly turned into a dark, shark-infested ocean. For two weeks search parties combed the beaches. But on day fifteen the official mourning period began. A fisherman reeled in a thirteen-foot tiger shark. The contents of its belly looked suspiciously human, and authorities determined that it was part of a woman’s shoulder and upper arm. A hair follicle taken from Ivy’s hairbrush provided a DNA match. Since shark attacks are rare, I took solace in believing that Ivy had drowned before meeting up with nature’s most efficient predator.
    The alternative still gave me nightmares.
    “Excuse me, Mr. Cantella. You want the Fifth Avenue entrance?”
    “Cruise the block, Nick. Drop me off on Sixty-first.”
    The limo and driver were a bit ostentatious, but I had passed the point in my career when I could spend a third or more of my eighteen-hour day working from the backseat of a cab. Maybe I’d lost a little of my drive. After Ivy was gone, the relentless pursuit of money had seemed a little pointless—not a good mind-set for Saxton Silvers’ youngest-ever investment advisor of the year. I was looking for real purpose, and I was about to ditch Wall Street altogether to join the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
    Well, not exactly.
    But I had given more than just passing thought to getting out, which told me that I probably needed a change. So I called in a few favors and went to the Assessment Center, which sounded like something out of an old Woody Allen movie, but it was actually a boot camp for Saxton