Wall Street Noir

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All books are collaborative efforts, but none more so than anthologies, and so I owe many thanks to many people: first and foremost, to all of the contributors, for their talents, time, good humor, and professionalism; to Johnny Temple, for seeing the possibilities; and to Reed Coleman, for a good eye and sound advice.

Wall Street is long on tradition. The opening bell, the floor traders’ vivid jackets, black Town Cars at curbside, long nights spent hunched over spreadsheets, helicopters to the Hamptons, lap-dance tabs that run to five figures — these shared rituals and experiences bind generations of money folk one to the other, and so preserve and propagate the culture. But there’s one link in that chain more tarnished than the rest, and less fondly regarded: crime.

Financial crime has a history much longer than Wall Street’s — by several thousand years at least. Conflicted interests, insider trading, and outright fraud are as old as the first marketplaces — as old as the first swap of flint chips for bearskins, no doubt — and they’ve been part and parcel of Wall Street since the days of the old Dutch barricade. Just as Wall Street has raised finance to high art (or at least, to expensive spectacle), so has it done crime bigger and flashier than its Old World antecedents. Sure, there was the South Sea scam, and that business with the Vatican Bank, but Wall Street has given us Robert Vesco, Ivan Boesky, and the Hunt brothers, not to mention playing midwife to Enron, Adelphia, and Qwest. And unlike some traditions (floor traders are an endangered species at the NYSE, and the bean counters are ever more skeptical about receipts that come dotted with glitter), crime on Wall Street actually has a future.

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