In 1984, when he was a junior at Horace Greeley High School, in affluent Chappaqua, New York, he wagered his father $2,000 that he would score a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the S.A.T. The gamble was everything Ackman had saved up from his Bar Mitzvah gift money and his allowance for doing household chores. “I was a little bit of a cocky kid,” he admits, with uncharacteristic understatement. Tall, athletic, handsome with cerulean eyes, he was the kind of hyper-ambitious kid other kids loved to hate and just the type to make a big wager with no margin for error. But on the night before the S.A.T., his father took pity on him and canceled the bet. “I would’ve lost it,” Ackman concedes. He got a 780 on the verbal and a 750 on the math. “One wrong on the verbal, three wrong on the math,” he muses. “I’m still convinced some of the questions were wrong.” [Vanity Fair]
tough breaks
Bill Ackman Is Still Thinking About Filing An Appeal Against The SAT Board For Those 4 Questions He Got “Wrong” In 1984
By Bess Levin
For the last year or so, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has sent a simple message to employees grumbling about compensation: STFU or GTFO. Now, according to Charles Gasparino, the bank may be telling a few employees to GTFO regardless of whether or not they’ve been bitching about pay. Read more »
Cuts are said to have gone down at the other DB. Read more »
Former Madoff Employee Pleads Guilty To *A* Madoff Securities Scam Just Not *The* Madoff Securities Scam
By Bess Levin
You know what has got to suck? When you decide to start charging stuff that doesn’t fall under “business expenses” to your corporate card and engage in a few other amateur hours scams that probably would have gone unnoticed (or, if discovered, not taken to the authorities because the boss had high tolerance for fraud) but then they are because the CEO of your firm had to go and engage in the largest Ponzi scheme on record, which shone an uncomfortable light on company personnel and all of the cheese, popcorn, and salsa of the month clubs you joined (for example). Craig Kugel knows what we’re talking about. Read more »
Apparently, yes. We’re told the “majority if not everyone” from the Houston energy office, headed by Stephen Trauber and said to be considered “the best division at UBS,” walked out last night and is headed for Citi. Read more »
Goldman Sachs Loses Opportunity To Take Over Site Of Tiger Woods’ Apology For Turkey Club Tryst
By Bess Levin
Goldman Sachs Mortgage Co., the lender to the owners of Florida’s Sawgrass Marriott Resort, failed to win bankruptcy court permission to take over and sell the company’s assets. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Paul M. Glenn in Jacksonville, Florida, today denied Goldman’s request to lift the automatic stay, a part of the bankruptcy code that shields a company from creditors’ efforts to collect on its assets. Tiger Woods made his Feb. 19 apology for his marital infidelity at the TPC Sawgrass golf club.
[BW]
The men, women and vampire squids at Goldman Sachs posses a lotta talent among them. Many of them can tie a maraschino cherry stem into a knot in under ten seconds. They pioneered the buddy system between the prime brokerage and prop desk so as to maximize front-running of clients. A not insignificant number of them are quite skilled at charades. Sportsmen, however, they are not. This has been evident at many an impromptu stick ball game among the banks (don’t feel bad about that Viniar, it could have happened to anyone) and continued to be clear last night at the JPMorgan Corporate Challenge, where Goldman failed to place any employees in the top 5. Putting a fine point on it was one JPMorgan staffer who it should be noted snapped the photo above, and the ones later on of Team GS circle JO&C’ing in the bathroom of the bar everyone congregated at. But hey, look! Moragan Stanley won something! Read more »
I’m not saying extortion is the easiest thing to pull off but you’d think, what with the industry’s skittishness about insider trading these days, that if you went to any given fund and threatened to expose them for trading on material non-public info unless they did exactly as they were told, i.e. shoved a bunch of unmarked hundos in a few trash bags and sent them your way, you could probably make out pretty well, no muss no fuss. Bonus points if you could say you were like a priest or rabbi or some other type of “spiritual adviser.” That’s what Rabbi Milton Balkany thought anyway, and it would’ve turned out great had his target, an unnamed Connecticut hedge fund not felt the need to get the authorities involved, according to a complaint filed yesterday, effectively ruining everything.
In a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan, prosecutors said that Mr. Balkany, 63, had recently been serving as a “spiritual adviser” to a federal inmate who told him that a Connecticut hedge fund had used inside information to profit from a number of stock trades.
The hedge fund was not named in the complaint, but prosecutors said that Mr. Balkany went to lawyers for the fund and told them that unless they handed over $4 million — $2 million of which would go to Bais Yaakov — he would instruct the inmate to tell the authorities about the insider trades.
- Use the Bloomberg command
NH BLG_DEALBREAKER <GO>
to access Dealbreaker
