When I was 9 years old and living in the middle of Midwestern America, taking a weekly bath and eating Swanson TV dinners while my mother toiled away in graduate school, the blockbuster movie of the year was It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. This 1963 American comedy was produced and directed by Stanley Kramer and starred Spencer Tracy and the best known comedians of that era including Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Dorothy Provine, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers and Jonathan Winters. It was all about a madcap pursuit of a suitcase of stolen cash. The amount of $350,000 seems like a modest sum by today’s standards, but is closer in value to $4 million in today’s dollars. These four carloads of random motorists that happen on an accident and get propelled into a frenzy of greed is a bit of a harbinger of what has evolved over the past 60 years and seems to be accelerating.
I want to carefully tell a similar and recent tale of a group of people that are clambering all over each other in their efforts to get a piece of a similar proverbial suitcase of ill-gotten gains. It needs to be laid out carefully because this is a real-time situation that is getting stirred up as I write this. In fact, for the last three days I have received calls at this time in the morning from someone who has his hand squarely on the wooden spoon that is doing most of the stirring. The good news for me is that I am the like person on the sidewalk watching the craziness unfold rather than one of the crazies involved in the chase, but people on the sidewalk of life sometimes get muddied by fast traffic that goes through the dirty streets. The story begins on an airplane about thirty years ago. I sat next to a guy and being more of a talker than not, I ended up in a conversation with him that resulted in us finding that we had acquaintances and business connections in common. He was in the game of finding talented people and as a business builder at the time, I was always looking for talented people. Over the ensuing decade, he and I did a good deal of mutually successful business together and we became good friends. Unlike many business friendships that end at the office or restaurant door, he and I got into motorcycling trips and other social engagements together. He tended to like the high life much more than I did, so there were whole aspects of his lifestyle that I did not connect well with, but we spoke regularly and found things to do to help one another all the time.
He had been living a very active bachelor’s life with no shortage of female companions. Then he met a woman of substance who was well-connected (something that was an important part of the existence he had created for himself), wealthy (something he related to and seemed forever on the verge of), and very much a fast-lane sort of person. They were perfect together despite the complications of her ex-husband (who was a Wall Street superstar), who’s divorce settlement funds were always in the picture and apparently on the edge of legal attachment or dissolution. That all seemed only a tiny bit marginal because marital monies are forever in a grey zone it seems. Over the years of my movement out of and then back into and eventually finally out of the Wall Street world, this friend was always of counsel to me. His stock and trade was his rolladex and his ideas of how to deploy and maximize one’s human capital value. I was one of his stable of horses though hardly his most well-bred or highest-earning horse. He had a plethora of ideas at all times about opportunities that I should pursue. And he always had a stake in any placement that came about. Without enumerating them, I would argue that he put me into two or three situations for which he received a commission. I was fine with that because I was always free to pursue them or not at my own will. What was quite noticeable over the years is that the quality of the referrals was generally not getting better, and at one point dropped below a threshold of quality that was acceptable. What is always hard to tell about that sort of situation is whether that was an issue of his declining access, my declining market value or a general downward drift in the marketplace overall. I now suspect it was a blend of the three. I also feel that there is a certain amount of inevitability of that as a normal life progression issue. Old actors don’t usually get the same roles young actors get.
What also became noticeable to me (usually mostly in hindsight) was that the players became less and less reputable. And that leads me to the last episode which generated these calls to me in the past few days. He introduced me to a guy who was and is yet the most smarmy character I have ever encountered in my business career (and I have encountered some pretty smarmy characters). My radar went off on meeting him and I chose not to get involved. He then had me meet some other highly reputable and renowned people who swore by the importance of the technology being pursued by this character. It caused me to get involved, but with the proper and necessary safeguards that insulated me from Mr. Smarmy. I will tell another story some day about how no amount of insulation can prevent smarminess from leaking out and soiling your hem…but that’s a life lesson for another day. The point is that my discovery of the smarminess went from concern to suspicion to investigation to correction to damage control to exit. Whatever losses were incurred were mostly by people who could afford to lose and were very much too greedy to better manage their risk despite the warning signs. I thought that was the end of the situation and that what remains is some minor clean-up of minor financial import, mostly to ex-employees like myself. Then I got these calls.
The calls laid out a narrative of a next generation of investment in new entities which I was aware of and had declined involvement in while I sorted out the details of the last debacle. The narrative was that this same group of people (including my old and pretty much hence disassociated human capital friend) were engaged in systematic fraudulent activity. He has sent court records and financial evidence to highlight his version of reality and says that he is doing all this to reclaim his investment but also to stop what he considers to be a chain of fraudulent bad behavior that continues to hurt people. Clearly, he is trying to rabble rouse those of us who have come in contact with this group of bad, bad people to both scare them to the negotiating table, but also to assuage some sense of pride he has about his association with them. He is openly telling the world that these “scavengers” are all chasing ill-gotten suitcases of money in some sort of dramatic play that dips in and out of the darkest corners of our imagination. There are mob bosses, convicted felons, covert operatives, NSA spooks and even celebrity figures from the political, sports, entertainment and business worlds in play. It is a Neflix series that could stretch out for at least five seasons.
Knowing these characters quite well, I am less entertained than disgusted, but like the proverbial train wreck, it is hard to look away. Mostly it is depressing to see how easy it is for what might otherwise be good people when the lucre is waved beneath their noses and they rise to the bait and go on their mad dash to get their hands on it. There are moments like this week when if does, indeed, feel like a bad, bad, bad, bad world.