The Last Collection Read Online Free PDF

he had to deal. It wasn’t long before he was ready to make his first move.
    Some of the salesmen sounded him out the very first time they met him. They all had their own style. Some were subtle, and some were less subtle, but it didn’t take Morrie Hankleman long to know which men he could deal with. He took his first payoff one month after he had assumed his new job. He never looked back.
    By the end of the first year, he had put $50,000.00 in a Swiss bank.
    It was shortly after the end of that first lucrative year that Morrie Hankleman began thinking seriously about what he was going to do. He knew eventually the word would get around that he was on the take and he wanted to get out clean. If he was lucky, he could go on taking indefinitely; if he wasn’t, he might have another year or two.
    He began investing cautiously in the stock market and got to know some of the inside people. Then one day he got wind of a major promotion job. He was advised with absolute certainty that a mining stock on the Montreal exchange, then selling at $1.00 per share, would soon begin a steady rise to a minimum of around $10.00 a share. Hankleman thought about it for a full day. His source of information was a man well connected with the big promoters. Moreover, he and this individual had whored around together and for him to con Hankleman would be a dangerous thing on his part, given that Hankleman knew enough about his private life to completely destroy his marriage and his reputation.
    Hankleman decided to move. He took $20,000.00 and, using margin, purchased $40,000.00 worth of the stock. Then he waited. He waited under the most extreme pressure of his life. He slowly withdrew into a shell so that, by the third day, he was communicating with people in monosyllables. On the fourth day after he had bought the stock, it began to rise. At first it made its ascent slowly and Hankleman was having his doubts. He contemplated pulling out with a slight profit, but held on, withdrawing further into himself. On the tenth day, his wife took their child and left. Morrie Hankleman was too involved with his stock to give this more than a moment’s thought.
    Then suddenly at the end of the second week, the stock began to skyrocket, going up a dollar per day per share.
    By the end of the third week, it hit $5.00 a share. At that point, unable to stand the pressure and feeling as though he might have a nervous breakdown, Morrie Hankleman sold, and collected close to $200,000.00.
    The next day he gave his notice to the Blue Star chain and became a changed man. He felt magnanimous; he called his wife back and she came. Now he had money and he was a free man. But at the same time he realized what people meant when they spoke about the heavy responsibility of having money. He had to be careful. If he was cautious he could make his money grow; if he wasn’t he could piss it all away.
    He began to think about reasonable investments. He consulted with people whose expertise he respected, and finally he bought several small apartment buildings with good revenues.
    But he wasn’t satisfied. He couldn’t help but compare the return on any investment with the profit he had made on the one stock-market deal.
    He decided to go into the business of lending money. He would go into second mortgages for which there was a great demand by serious people. At the same time, he made up his mind to try his hand at pure short-term money-lending where he knew the profits were unbelievably high. He passed the word around that he had money available for any kind of loan.
    Now as he sat at his desk thinking about all this, Morrie Hankleman realized that he had made a few mistakes. Perhaps his first mistake had been to go into the business of shylocking without thoroughly understanding all of its intricacies. Perhaps his second mistake had been to place too much trust in credit reports. His third mistake had been to lend money to Artie Kerner.
    Morrie