preparation for a career on Wall Street.
As I grew up, I realized I was different than the other children. My house and Joey Zito’s were the only ones on the block with a Christmas tree. Italian Catholic was something my Jewish neighborhood could understand. But we were something else—practically freaks. I remember the first time a group of boys asked me, “Why do you have a Christmas tree?” I replied, “I’m a Christian Scientist.” From then on, I became the brunt of every joke. Brooklyn is a place where kids look for some form of weakness until they find it. I was 100% Jewish by ancestry. My family names from one generation ago were Eisenberg and Blumenthal. No one understood a Jew who did not want to be a Jew—least of all me.
Christian Science was a strange religion for a kid on King’s Highway. It made me feel like an outcast. As a young boy I remember the elders praying over me when I was ill. Oddly enough, their prayers comforted me and I felt better. The religion taught me you could use your mind to change things. I met my friend Richie at church. He was one of my earliest teachers and introduced me to cigarettes and marijuana. We would stand behind the church while the congregation prayed, smoking up a storm. My mother never noticed; my father never cared. At age twelve the elders required you to make a choice to commit yourself to the religion. Christian Science forbids smoking, drinking, drugging and sex—all the things I looked forward to the most. I quit without a moment’s hesitation and immediately went to the dark side. It would take me the next fourteen years to find my way out.
By fifteen I learned to fight. I began lifting weights to add some heft to my skinny frame. Silky, the neighborhood bully, had spent years kicking the shit out of me. He was several years older; despite the abuse, I played basketball and stickball with him. One day, I had on my best shirt, an orange button down with light blue stripes. Silky was in the mood for violence and grabbed my shirt ripping the pocket. Suddenly, I saw red and hit him hard. The sight of blood spurting from his nose and the look of shock on his face fueled my rage. I had finally stopped the beatings. The knowledge that I could control my destiny by creating fear in my adversaries was a turning point in my youth. I perfected my stare and made an art of intimidating people. Suddenly, Silky and his friends walked on the other side of the street when I came by. I had found the secret to male power. When I landed on Wall Street, I met many others who had learned this secret too.
I was in Kingsborough Community College when I saw the movie “The Paper Chase,” which depicted the life of a Harvard Law student. A world of possibility opened up before me. I admired the protagonist’s ambition inside this incredibly intense experience, which seemed like a direct way out of the hell I lived in. But things like that did not happen to people like me, my mother said. Her words rang in my ears: That’s for rich people, not us. Don’t dream so big, my son. You will only disappoint yourself. Yet I knew there was something else that my life held.
My father was a postal worker and sorted mail in the main post office on West 33rd Street. Every day he came home and complained about the job. He would lock himself in his room and listen to opera rather than speak to my brother or me. On paycheck days he would not come home right away. No one knew where he went, but when he returned, he had spent half of our food budget. A man was supposed to take care of his family; but my father failed at this. Fortunately, my grandfather took care of us. I did not respect my father for abdicating his responsibility. His apathy for making money was my incentive to make more and helped pave the way for a future in finance.
My first job was at age twelve, delivering oil to the neighborhood. The harder the job, the more I loved it. As a kid I loved climbing onto the giant truck before school on snowy days. It felt like a bigger world. The job was rugged, and I loved the smell of the oil and getting dirty picking up the hose. I could buy my own food and not feel hungry anymore. It was worth getting up so much earlier than my classmates. These would be the tools I cultivated years later when I landed on Wall Street and began working eighty hours a week. Getting to work early and staying long after my colleagues went home gave me an advantage that catapulted my career.
To me, poverty was a choice my father had made, and I was determined not to do the same. His brother, my favorite uncle, had gone into the Marines and come out confident and ambitious. Tall and muscular, he trained the Fort Lee, New Jersey police force in martial arts. He worked in the Garment Center, later opening his own coat company like so many New York Jews in the 1960s. He drove a Cadillac, had a beautiful wife, a four bedroom home and lived in an opulent suburb with a swimming pool in the backyard. That is what I wanted—a life where I called the shots and was not trapped by circumstance.
In my family, only my grandfather had gone to college. Everyone called him “Doc” because he held a PhD in Chemistry. I had gone to Kingsborough because I promised Doc I would. But once I got there, it was so different than my high school, and I absolutely loved it. Here was a place where you did not have to worry about being jumped on your way in—no one would think you were a “pussy” for doing well. The lectures opened my mind to things I had never known. Perhaps, best of all, for me, you could smoke in class. I got a 4.0 average and suddenly the thought of going to Cornell University popped into my mind. When I told my family and friends, everyone doubled over in laughter. They all said that it was the funniest thing they ever heard. You are out of your mind—that will never happen, I heard this line over and over. But it only motivated me more. Only Doc did not laugh. He said, “Give it your best shot. If you get in, we will find a way to pay for it.” My business professor did not laugh either. I told him I wanted to go to Cornell. After he confirmed that I was serious, he arranged a meeting with the Director of Admissions, Dr. Wendell Earle, who happened to be his personal friend.
My first memory of Cornell was orientation week. Away from home and city life for the first time, it was like being reborn. The first week of school, however, the workload overwhelmed me. I wondered how the professors expected anyone to read that much in one day. Sheer excitement kept me going. I loved walking through the rural campus 240 miles from Flatbush. I could eat as much as I wanted in the cafeteria. Never had I seen so much food in one place before. I would go back for two or three helpings every meal. I was like a fish out of water with my heavy Brooklyn accent and very Brooklyn ways. I stood out in a crowd in my leather bomber jacket amid the Ivy League blazers. Somehow the “On the Waterfront” look helped with the girls. I spent my evenings after studying winding down at the Thirsty Bear Tavern. Drinking had become my best method for relieving stress.
Graduation Day came all too soon. I was not looking forward to going back to the old neighborhood. But the winters had been hard in upstate New York. It literally snowed from mid-October to May. February and March were depressing, with five feet of snow, no sun. I do not know if the weather has anything to do with it, but Cornell has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. The Gorge is a cliff where desperate students jump off when they can no longer take the pressure. It was both a beautiful spot and a place of death at the same time. No one made it out alive. I never thought about jumping. I was thrilled to be there in the same way I would feel on the trading floor a few years later. The intensity was part of the fun. No one in the old neighborhood expected me to graduate. I wanted to prove to them—and myself—that I could. Only Doc would be disappointed if I didn’t make it. On days when it felt too tough to bear, I thought of Doc and knew I couldn’t let him down.
The Street
I had no idea what to do after college. I thought about working on Wall Street, but I was not sure what I could do since I never felt too comfortable with the complexities of bond math. All I knew was I could sell just about anything. A friend told me about executive search, saying, “You sell jobs to people. You’re good with people.” I interviewed for a big recruiting firm, AJ Consulting, located in midtown Manhattan. It specialized in banking and I was hired on the spot. The president’s name was “Joel” and we hit it off immediately. “Headhunting,” it was called in those days. The cannibalistic nature of it was confirmed when Joel advised: “Visualize every potential candidate with a dollar sign across his face.”
Joel
