Not Invented Here
I am constantly thinking about how to insure that I keep a diversified base of topics for my stories and not write too many posts about either Donald Trump and his insufferable politics and, for the moment, the Coronavirus. I think we are getting near overload on both those two topics. What I have learned is that everybody loves a good story and spinning a good story is what I like to do more than anything else. What I’m best at is synthesizing information. I was told that years ago by a very smart guy who was a cigar-chomping tough guy. His name was Ralph, which seemed very appropriate. His nickname was Rolo, which was even more appropriate.
Rolo and I shared a doctor who thought we both needed a reeducation in our lifestyle choices. So, we were sent to Pritikin in Santa Monica for two weeks of reprogramming and healthy living. I find these days that many do not remember Pritikin. Nathan Pritikin was an early pioneer in diet and exercise and there were three or four centers around the country which accepted inmates. This was less a spa than a clinic and they were very strict about what you ate and how you spent your time. When not in a nutrition workshop, you were supposed to be exercising in some manner.
While Rolo and I were respectful colleagues (he was much senior to me at the time), we were not really friends. We were cut from different bolts of cloth and liked different things. He was a man’s man who liked football, fishing and hunting, smoking and drinking. I was none of that. I liked skiing, motorcycling, movies and diet soda.. We were simply different, but neither of us paid much attention to our health, so we were sharing a connected sentence imposed by our common physician, who felt we were more likely to go stick it out if we were peer pressured into it.
At the time, Rolo was forty-seven and I was thirty-four. Rolo died last year at 79 and I am going strong at 66. Our common doctor died twenty-three years ago at age fifty-four. So much for healthy living.
The year we went off to Pritikin was 1988 and I was running the Emerging Markets Department, a business I had created out of the ashes of the Latin American debt crisis. We had built a good merchant banking business that centered around the trading of deeply-discounted sovereign debt. These were shitty loans to “developing” countries made by my predecessors on the backs of a banking world awash with liquidity from the Petrodollar boom of the 70’s. The problem was a combination of misuse and sometimes fraudulent diversion of these loans in countries that lacked the discipline to honor the sanctity of their obligations. In other words, they were defaulting on us and the value of the paper was falling daily. Choppy waters make for good trading opportunities, so we started the game of making a market in the scruffy stuff. It was actually a very technical capability where you had to understand the unique aspects of the loans, something us banks that had syndicated the shit could do better than the investment banking houses where trading activity like this usually took place. In Wall Street parlance, we had taken a pig and put some very attractive lipstick on it.
At that same time, there was a guy who had risen to great prominence on Wall Street by staying off Wall Street and moving to Rodeo Drive. Even the name Rodeo Drive told you this was a cowboy operations that was wild and wooly. That guy was Michael Milken and he was known as the Junk Bond King. The polite term for his product was High Yield Debt, but the reason it was high yield was that it was junk paper. I think it is fair to say that Milken ruled the world from his circular turret desk in the Drexel Burnham Lambert offices on Rodeo. He ran the leveraged buyout business and the junk bond trading business all together and held sway every year at the annual gathering he sponsored called The Predator’s Ball. Rolo, being an ex-REIT guy (the Real Estate Investment Trust game was a mid-70’s financial debacle that Rolo has been charged to sort out) was now one of the kings of leveraged buyouts, so he was a devotee of Milken’s and a regular attendee to the Ball.
I was doing for LDC (less developed country) debt what Rolo had done for REIT’s a decade earlier, except I, like Milken, was making it more of a trading business than a proprietary asset business. Recently, a Sunday New York Times cover story had highlighted that Milken had turned his interest to the burgeoning global market for LDC debt and that he planned to dominate it since it was fundamentally like Junk Bonds. I had had the bad grace to get quoted for that article saying that Drexel knew nothing about the debt the way we bankers did and that they would find it much harder to break into our game than he thought. Rolo thought it was idiotic for me to be quoted as going head-to-head with a powerhouse like Milken. I shrugged,
Rolo and I had to take mandated walks along the beach for exercise and on one walk, when Rolo needed to sit and rest, he told me Milken had learned he was on the coast and had invited him in to talk about Drexel’s new LDC debt trading ideas. He threatened to not take me with him since I was such an NIH (Not Invented Here) kind of guy. I made a deal (Rolo understood that I had a rental car and he did not) that I could go and listen, but not say a word. I agreed on the condition that I could unload my thoughts on him on the ride home. Deal.
Neither Rolo nor I had brought a suit, so we dressed in our best khakis and blazers and drove off to Beverley Hills. On arrival we were put into a conference room (no one gained access to Milken’s inner sanctum trading desk) while Rolo trundled off to the men’s room. Naturally, that’s exactly when Milken, his lieutenant Bill Ackerman and his new recruit from Citibank, Jerry Finnernan (someone I knew well from the Latin American debt circuit) walked in. There was that awkward moment when Milken realized that the senior guy he knew was not in the room. Ackerman, Finnernan and I made small talk while Milken worked the phone trying hard not to acknowledge my presence. I suspect it was less about the Times article and more because I was not worthy of his attention.
Rolo returned and the meeting began. It took all of three minutes (Milken was not a small talk guy) to get down to the nub of the “brilliant ideas” Finnernan had delivered to Milken. It took a smart guy like Rolo only two minutes to realize they were deeply flawed ideas and his natural directness caused him to unmask them for what they were, shitty ideas. Milken got the message very fast and excused himself. Ackerman took on his deputy role of cleaning up Finnernan’s mess. We said our goodbyes. Meeting over.
When we got to the car, Rolo turned to me preemptively and pointed his finger, saying, “Not a fucking word, Marin, you were right.” I smiled to myself and simply asked, “Where the hell were you at the start, Ralph, I was dying in there without you.” Rolo explained with no chagrin that he had accidentally peed on his khaki’s and could not return to meet with Milken until he could dry of pants off. Strangely enough, a few years later Finnernan made headlines for getting drunk on a flight back from Venezuela and pulling his pants down in first class to take a crap on the service table (wiping himself with the linen) in protest for his business class seat not being afforded access to the first class bathroom.
I may be an NIH guy as Rolo suggested, but I do know how to synthesize information and I do know how to avoid becoming a wicked bad punch line to a shitty joke.