He proved that he had a sixth sense about making money and a rare ability to manage traders. His power began to grow. As he rose, he lost weight (about fifty pounds), quit smoking, and shaved his beard … Although he wasn’t physically prepossessing, tough-talking trader types were drawn to him. One partner described it as, “a little bit of the sun god phenomenon.” [Daily Intel]
I have to draw you
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal outed trader David Slaine as one of the cooperating sources in the Galleon case (although when reached at home and confronted about his role in the ring, Slaine told reporters “you’ve got the wrong guy”). Big D was first approached by the FBI in 2007, when authorities came to him with evidence he’d traded on inside info. Hoping to save himself, Slaine told prosecutors that his friend, Craig Drimal, was part of an “insider-trading conspiracy involving a wide ring of other hedge-fund managers and lawyers.” Obviously, throwing one’s colleague under the bus is no easy thing to do, especially when the guy also happens to be one of your close friends. Drimal and Slaine go way back– they were not just buds, but weight-lifting partners, too, which is probably the tightest bond of all (the two originally met during Slaine’s clubbing days, when Drimal was a bouncer at Vertical and “quickly formed a friendship based on a shared passion for weight lifting and their mutual ability to bench-press 400 pounds”). They were so close, in fact, that soon after taking a gig with Galleon, Big D convinced his bosses to give Drimal– then working as a bouncer at the Roxy– a job as an assistant at the firm. But along the way something must have happened. A confrontation. A blow-up. Something dark, at the gym, involving spotting, for Slaine to rat his special friend out like this. One thing I can tell you about Slaine is that he wouldn’t have done it unless provoked. Like the time at Morgan Stanley, in the nineties, with the French Fries.
In 1993, Slaine triggered a fist-fight with a colleague on the trading floor after needling him because he wouldn’t share his french fries. Others broke up the fight.
You just can’t do that, okay? You can’t not share your fries and expect the Slaine-ster to just sit back and take it, no you cannot. Similarly, you can’t expect to confront Slaine about his unsatisfactory performance and think you’re not going to get your teeth knocked out by a sweaty, glistening, stark-naked Big D.
As previously mentioned, Bernie Madoff’s life in prison is prettay prettay prettay good. Fellow inmates make him delicious wrap sandwiches, he’s in with “the homosexual posse,” and every now and then he gets stoned. The Jouranal checked in with the big man, and reports today that things are still going quite nicely. He plays bocce, chess and checkers. He “walks around the prison with his head held high.” And he’s got respect. “To every con artist, he is the godfather, the don,” says an inmate interviewed earlier this week. One thing that does chap his hide though? The cockbags he used to employ, who got off easy. I mean sure, the scam was his idea, and he did most of the heavy lifting, all of which they benefited from– and he didn’t hear any complaints at the time. Maybe, when he gets out of the joint, he’ll come down there and give them a crew cut.
Mr. Madoff chatted about the fraud’s aftermath, claiming he “carried” employees at Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC for more than two decades, yet wound up with an astronomical prison sentence. “I guess he felt they turned their back on him,” Mr. White says.
Despite this upset, Berns knows he’s got it going pretty good, and also that he’s hot shit. That’s why fellow inmates have tried to get his signature to sell on eBay, and make bank. That, Mades will not go along with but he will sit for any interested in sketching the man, the myth, the legend in all his regalness.
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