In for a Ruble

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Everything about Sebastian Leitz was big. The man himself was six foot four and weighed two-eighty easy. A tractor tire wrapped his midsection, he wore size fourteen shoes, and nobody made gloves to fit his hands. The outsize head, with its fat pear nose, kidney-pool blue eyes and inflated inner-tube lips, made him seem larger still. The head was topped by a bushy, orange Afro that had last seen the barber when Brezhnev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A circus clown on steroids. His voice—a foghorn bass—could’ve filled a big top.

Leitz needed the big head to hold the brain. He’d earned two doctorates, mathematics and economics, from Harvard and MIT. He’d written countless papers and a half dozen books. He was a full professor at Columbia by twenty-six. People were talking Nobel Prize by thirty. That was before he quit academics and went to Wall Street to make big money.

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