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and managers from his work in the training program. Until a permanent replacement could be found, Bache turned the business over to Blank. He was twenty-seven years old.
    The selection of such a young and relatively inexperienced manager to run a division of a major brokerage firm was met mostly with shrugs. At the time, the tax shelter business was something of an unwanted stepchild on Wall Street. The shelters, also known as limited partnerships or direct investments, raised pools of capital from individuals to invest in business favored by the tax code. Many of those preferences were built in by Congress to encourage investments in certain industries, such as construction and oil exploration. Over years of backroom deals, Congress also granted favorable tax treatment to an array of businesses of less economic value, such as horse breeding, movie production, and even Bible publishing. Any of those businesses could be used in a tax shelter.
    The risks of tax shelters were large, since investors sank huge amounts of cash into a single asset. If a big tenant pulled out of an office building owned by a shelter, for example, investors in that deal could well lose their money. But with high risk came the potential for high returns. The shelters usually allowed investors to defer paying or even reduce their taxes. But the shelters also provided income—such as the rents from an apartment building—and the potential of earning a profit when the asset was eventually sold.
    The high risks and tax-based rewards attracted only a small cadre of the wealthiest and most sophisticated clients—the people in a high income-tax bracket. With such a specialized and limited clientele, interest among stockbrokers in tax shelters remained fairly low in the early 1970s.
    Besides, the obscure real estate and oil deals left Wall Street’s stock and bond brokers uneasy. Except to the experts, different pieces of real estate, or different oil wells, all looked pretty much alike. So investors had to trust Wall Street to sift through the available deals and offer the tax shelters with the highest likelihood of eventually producing a capital gain. That meant both the best properties and, equally as important, the most competent and reliable general partner to manage the shelter.
    But too often, these general partners, mostly real estate developers and oil wildcatters, impressed stockbrokers as a little too slick, maybe even sleazy. Some general partners sold shelters without knowing much about the business they were promoting—their fortunes were tied to the fat management fees they could charge, not to the growth of their deals. And the deals were complex, with few brokers having the knowledge to explain them properly to their clients. So tax shelters existed largely as a Wall Street footnote, a business that most firms had but did not particularly want.
    Then came May 1, 1975. On that day, known ever since on Wall Street as May Day, the securities industry bowed to congressional pressure and abandoned fixed commissions on the sale of stocks and bonds. The competition so often championed by brokerage firms for other industries suddenly romped down Wall Street, setting off a major rate war. Commissions plummeted. No longer could brokerage firms subsidize bloated operations through fat commissions on securities trades. Firms unable to adjust collapsed by the dozens. The industry had to either dramatically cut back expenses or find new products with higher commissions that could be pumped through the sales force. Suddenly tax shelters, which could be sold for higher commissions than stocks and bonds, didn’t look so unappealing.
    Across Wall Street, firms like E. F. Hutton and Merrill Lynch rapidly built up financial firepower for the tax shelter business. At Bache, Blank had already started expanding slowly. In 1974, he hired Curtis Henry, a tough-talking Texan with a blunt style who had worked as a regional tax shelter marketer at