Serpent on the Rock Read Online Free PDF

Du Pont-Walston until that firm went under. Henry was given the job of finding and examining tax shelters that Bache could sell. At about the same time, Blank offered a full-time marketing job to David Hayes, a broker in Bache’s Washington office who had worked with the department on a part-time basis for years.
    With Henry and Hayes as his anchor, Blank aggressively expanded around the country. He hired James Ashworth in San Francisco to market the shelters to Bache brokers in that region of the country. He also brought on John D’Elisa in Smithtown, New York, to perform the close examination, or due diligence, to make sure the deals were good for investors. Legally, Bache had an obligation to its clients to ensure it sold only shelters with the highest potential to succeed. The department had to resist the temptation to sell easily available, lousy deals that could bring huge commissions to the firm but saddle clients with disastrous investments.
    By 1978, Blank’s temporary assignment had lasted five years. His department now housed twenty professionals and about ten administrative staffers working in the firm’s cramped offices at 100 Gold Street in lower Manhattan.
    Even with the constant expansion, the department had trouble keeping up with business. Demand for shelters exploded—with high inflation, clients wanted investments like real estate that would likely increase in value at least as fast as consumer prices rose. As more deals were sold, brokers realized the juicy fees available to anyone who could land the lucrative job of general partner.
    Suddenly every Bache broker seemed to have a cousin or a friend or a neighbor who wanted to be a general partner in a tax shelter. Their proposals arrived in New York almost every day, some little more than handwritten scrawls on scraps of paper. The department uniformly tossed out those shaky deals, but brokers simply appealed to more senior executives in the firm. Even though the effort was rarely successful, the folks in tax shelters joked that Vince Lombardi, the famed football coach of the Green Bay Packers, didn’t invent the power sweep—the end run had come out of Bache.
    The biggest political battle over the sale of a shelter began that same year, 1978. One afternoon, Blank received a telephone call from Bob Sherman in San Francisco. Sherman, a hard-driving former stockbroker with an aggressive hunger for profits, ran Bache’s retail business in the West and was calling with a pitch: The Robert A. McNeil Corporation was putting together a new partnership investing in California apartment buildings. A buddy of Sherman’s who worked for McNeil told him of the deal, and Sherman had promised his friend that Bache would sell it. Now he wanted Blank and his team to give the deal the once-over and get it ready for marketing.
    But the proposal left Blank uncomfortable. A number of similar tax shelters were already in the pipeline, and he did not want to offer the same kind of investment over and over. Deals needed sizzle to maintain brokers’ attention, and nothing bored the sales force more than repetition. Beyond that, Blank had other concerns about the McNeil Corporation. The company was a polarizing force in the business—some thought it was the greatest, others thought it was the worst—and Blank did not want that kind of headache. As head of the department, he was responsible for accepting each deal, and he always wanted to be untroubled when he did.
    He checked with his regional marketers and heard the same negative reaction: Curtis Henry had worked with McNeil after the Du Pont collapse and told Blank he was uneasy about the company. He was also concerned about loans it arranged from the partnerships to other McNeil entities. The loans may have been legal, Henry said, but they sure would be fodder for future lawsuits if the investment went south. Blank’s position hardened, and he rejected the proposed