Beating Wall Street

The Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines insider as "one who is in on the secret." In the spring of 1986, Dennis Levine, an investment banker with Drexel Burnham Lambert, was arrested in New York, charged with taking more than $12,500,000 in illegal stock-trading profits. Weeks later, another group of young men was charged in the so-called Yuppie case, accused of profiting from inside information on impending corporate mergers.

Insider trading is as old as history. We all long to have the edge, to know what no one else knows, to get the word dropped from the horse's mouth. Carrier pigeons took the word from Waterloo to London that the Duke of Wellington had beaten Napoleon. Did the Rothschilds short the franc and go long the British pound? The carrier pigeons were owned by the Rothschilds, and the family was in the business of getting the edge. Would the SEC have sentenced Baron de Rothschild to Elba before Napoleon because of the Rothschilds' illegal profits? Or is the problem a matter of style?

One of the truths I've discovered is that no one really likes Levine and his friends. Everyone seems to wish them ill because of their style and because of their blatant greed.

"If nothing else, you know his handshake is going to be clammy," a woman entrepreneur who loves money said about Levine. A major villain in this scene seems to be New York itself. Here are two opinions, one from a New York investment banker, another from a Boston manager of institutional sales for one of the largest brokerage firms in America.

Banker: "Levine and his crew are secondary players, low lives in the big leagues. What they were looking for was for people to pay attention to them, to have the best tables at Le Cirque, the best seats at the Garden. The irony of it all was, if they bragged, they were bagged, and there's the futility of it. Any time you figure you've got it made in New York, the guy at the next table has got twice as much as you. You can never play catch-up in this town. I've got five mil and I'm a shit heel. But," he added, "at least I'm an honest shit heel."

Institutional broker: "We've seen it all before. In the Sixties on Wall Street, the young gunslingers were making six figures in their late 20s and thinking it wasn't an accident--thinking it was because they were so goddamn smart, riding electronic stocks with negative earnings up 20 points a week, getting 100,000-share orders from hedge funds at full commissions in crap that you couldn't find a bid for after 1969. These kids today, the insider scammers, have zero backbone, zero integrity. It's as if no one ever taught them anything. Part of it, I think, is that it's not only insider trading, it's an inside joke. These are smirkers at life, these kids, laughing up their sleeves at the old-timers who did it the old-fashioned way. They feel it's the new-boy network. They found a golden short cut, and I think part of it is what I call the bully theory."

"What's the bully theory?" I asked him.

"Remember when we were kids? There would be one bully who would not only do bad things, he would get most of the kids in the crowd to do bad things. Most of the crowd was either too scared not to participate or too eager to be part of the group. I had to shoplift a jackknife when I was ten so the bully would let me join his club. I don't know whether Dennis Levine was the bully in this group or just the front, but I'll bet there's a bully mentality here somewhere. Remember, these people are still children, still wet behind the ears. Now they deserve a trip to the woodshed or, in their case, to jail. It's not jackknives in the five-and-ten anymore. They're little smelly-pants mentalities in double-breasted suits."

•

Can you imagine being held down by three young bloods in minimum-security prison while the king of your cell block is about to penetrate your backside for the first time, and one of the young bloods says, "What you in for, bro?" and you scream out, "Insider trading!"?

"Right on," says the king of the cell block, with exquisite timing.

This doesn't go on in minimum-security prisons, you say. "The only thing prison cures is heterosexuality," my friend Serving Irving tells me, and he should know, having done a year for mail fraud at Danbury, Connecticut, at a time when supposedly only the best people were at Danbury: con men, ex-Cabinet members, bigamists, bank examiners, commissioners of public works. "A stiff prick has no conscience," Serving Irving also says with a shrug. It was a line I first heard in high school, but I thought it had to do with drive-ins, clam rolls, chocolate shakes and whom you took to drive-ins. Serving Irving laughs at Levine and the insider-trading scandals of 1986. "These are stupid bastards," he says, "even though they have killer black slick hair and suits from Paul Stuart; they are gonna sing like The Four Freshmen [Irving's favorite group], because this kind of person fears rear-end invasion a whole lot more than he fears nuclear Armageddon. I'm no gay," he told me, "but it got so it wasn't so bad, particularly when it could get you special treatment, like beef Wellington and a Barron's on Saturday so fresh the ink would get on your fatigues."

Serving Irving was the first person I ever knew who had been involved with insider trading. He worked with me at an investment firm long since defunct, a casualty of the paperwork glut of the early Seventies, when most of the well-known brokerage companies disappeared into shotgun merger and bankruptcy. He got his nickname from a gimmick he had used as a stock hustler: tennis. "If you can play a sport like tennis or golf or squash or ride a polo pony, you can always make a living. Play a sport, you can be a sport." Irving happened to be a fine club player, a natural who flattered his opponents, because he always made them look good and he always remembered their shots: "Remember that overhead you hit to close out the third game, second set? Classic shot." His opponents loved him, and that set them up for the clincher, which came during after-game drinks. "I wouldn't tell this to everyone," he would say, "but a client of mine has a cousin who's chairman of this company over the counter. I can't tell you all about it except that it's selling at 11 and it's going to be taken over at 18 to 20 in the next few months."

I have been in the securities business for more than 20 years. I have handled money for several thousand people all over the world, and I have never talked with anyone, male or female, honest or dishonest, who can resist this pitch: "I have a cousin who's chairman of this over-the-counter company...." They can't wait to buy. Greed oozes out of three-piece suits, cocktail dresses, overalls and uniforms at exactly the same rate. It should be a law of physics.

Serving Irving knew how to make people greedy, and it was simple: Do business with him and you were in with the "in" crowd. This secret was almost as important as actually making money. Indeed, to some people, it was more important. Irving's approach to prospective clients was simple. He would pick well-known companies, usually on The New York Stock Exchange, and make up a story that could be true under certain circumstances. In the mid-Seventies, with stock markets on their tails, he pushed Gillette. "Look," he would say. "Gillette selling in the mid-20s is a steal. I have the word that Unilever, the British giant, is going to acquire them for 50. Christ, it's still cheap at 50. You couldn't build a Gillette today for $100 a share. The patents on Blue Blades alone are worth more than the stock's selling for in the open market." Of course, this was pure fabrication, but the only resistance Irving ever encountered was due to the fact that, for most people in the market, happiness is 1000 shares of a three-dollar stock.

"Don't you have anything cheaper than 25?" people would ask.

"Hey," Irving would respond. "I'm giving you a sure thing. What the hell do you care what price it is?"

"What am I gonna do, buy 50 shares? Get me a two-, three-dollar stock and I'm yours."

It didn't take Serving Irving long to modify his insider stories to accommodate the swingers who longed to tell friends that they owned 5000 shares of Zayre at six or Morse Shoe at five and a half or Mammoth Mart at four.

Even if you're a con man, when you stray from a successful formula, you get your ass handed to you. "If I was wrong with Gillette," Irving mused to me, "I couldn't be wrong by much, a point, two points. No one could hang you. But with thousands of shares of cheap stocks, every point down would mean thousands of dollars lost. Zayre went under three, ditto Morse Shoe, and Mammoth Mart went rinso, bankrupt, 75 cents. I got margin calls and people would say, 'Irving, when's the deal?'

" 'The deal,' I'd tell them, 'is probably within three weeks. But in the meantime, you have to come up with $6500 to support the account.'

" 'I don't have $6500,' they would say."

Serving Irving was living high. His commissions were the envy of the office, but his stories from the inside didn't come true soon enough to satisfy the requirements of the Federal Reserve Board. His clients were sold out waiting for dreams to come true. He moved from brokerage firm to brokerage firm, a journeyman board-room hustler destroyed by the bear market of the Seventies. He went from power serves on the tennis court to twist serves to junk. But he still made a living singing of takeovers and inside info, until he made the (continued on page 184)Beating Wall Street(continued from page 150) classic mistake in the selling game: He took something personally. "One guy who wouldn't buy Gillette because it was too expensive," Irving told me, "insisted on a cheap stock, instead. If you're a salesman, you don't let someone off the hook; you give him something. So I gave him Zayre at five and seven eighths and he bought 5000 shares and he sold it at two and three quarters and he called me every name in the book."

"Where's the take-over?" the client screamed. "Where's the inside info? Clean me out and send me a check. You people who play sports don't know dick about money."

"That really hurt me," said Serving Irving. "But years later, I saw him in a locker room, heading for the steam. He didn't see me, so I shoved a note into his locker that said, 'I eventually sold Zayre at 60. I sold Gillette at 70. Do you want to make money or do you want to screw around? Call Irving.' And I left him my card. Well, the guy had no sense of humor. Next thing I know, the manager of our office calls me in and the SEC has me on the carpet for 'inflammatory salesmanship' and 'trading on inside information.' It did no good to tell them I had made it all up and that a bitter client did me in. Never rub your customers' noses in it ... especially after they lose money with you."

I didn't want to be around Irving too long when he got maudlin. He might try to sell me something. I asked him one last question. "What would you do if you really had inside information, right from the lawyers or the printer?"

Serving Irving paused and then smiled. "Christ," he said. "If I really knew what was happening, it wouldn't be any fun. Don't you know that the game is everything?"

•

It isn't enough in life to have personal success. Your friends and enemies must be told about it. They must be aware of your triumphs to make your triumphs complete. Why did the Brink's robbers get caught? They couldn't keep the biggest heist in history to themselves. Investment banker Levine wanted to build a network of insider traders, a ring of highly placed people at every major Wall Street firm to swap information for the ring's private enrichment. This concept is not new, either; pooling ideas for greedy purposes is timeless. Years ago, I had a client who put together such a ring for trading on special knowledge. Luckily, its activities were closed down before I met him. Because aren't we all tempted by the apple? Aren't we all a little greedy from time to time?

Al Leeson was in the shoe business. He was a stylist, the outside man for his company, which manufactured expensive women's shoes that sold in stores such as Neiman-Marcus and Henri Bendel. Leeson had a special talent for being remembered wherever he went. He was a great duker, a man who tipped big and knew how to do it so that he always got the best tables in restaurants, was always bumped up to first class for the price of tourist, to the suite for the price of a room. In the shoe trade, they called him Mr. Dewars, after his favorite beverage.

"One of my buddies at a shoe company," Mr. Dewars told me, "says to buy Garfinckel, Brooks Brothers, Miller & Rhoads [the parent of Brooks Brothers Stores] stock, says he heard it was a takeover at 50, and it sounded good to me, so I bought 1000 shares and told the guys in my foursome about it that weekend and they all nibbled. It was then around 30. Let me tell you, we got a saying in the shoe business, 'The smell of leather keeps us together,' and it's true. Even our enemies we'll give tips to, hope they make dough. You know why? Because it's an impossible business, and we're on the line every day--leather prices, imports, cheap labor abroad, style changes, slow-paying customers, fluctuations in the lira. Every day we die a little. So we tell each other what we have in the stock market. I score; we all score. I go for the collar; we all get stiffed. Anyway, what do you know? Two weeks after we all bought Brooks Brothers, bang, there's a deal over 50. We sell it and have a party."

Mr. Dewars told me that he had a golf foursome every Saturday, all shoe guys. There was Herbie, the best factory man in the business, who used to put number-five cans under the stitchers' machines so they didn't have to go to the ladies' room to pee. "Saved me a nickel a pair in production," he claimed. Herbie started almost every conversation with "Can I ask you a question?" He had bought 2000 shares of Brooks Brothers and made almost $40,000 on the stock.

Artie the Doctor was the third member of the group. He was 6'3" but weighed only 145 pounds and was the biggest manufacturer of nurses' shoes in America. The Doctor had also bought 2000 Brooks Brothers shares. Jerry the Ladies' Man was the last member of the foursome, the highest roller of the group, a balding fatso who loved to shoot craps in casinos and would rent hookers two at a time at shoe shows in Chicago, Paris and Milan. He had a famous art collection, which had begun when he was drunk in a gallery in Paris in 1956 and bought the entire show, which consisted of several dozen Picassos, Légers and Mirós. Jerry was just coming off his hottest fall in history, and he didn't care where he spent his money.

"Shoe dogs are like that," Mr. Dewars explained. "And in Jerry's case, dumb-ass luck didn't hurt, either. At the time, he couldn't even spell Picasso." Jerry the Ladies' Man bought 5000 shares of Brooks Brothers and cleared almost $100,000 before tax. It was the thought of taxes that hurt, and the Ladies' Man, being the biggest shooter, was also the biggest schemer.

"He made me look like a piker," Mr. Dewars said, "a schnorrer."

It has been my experience that so-called inside information is always shared. It is part of the camaraderie of the locker room: "We're buddies, we have a round of golf, a few pops, maybe a few hands of gin, and we swap stories. When we feel expansive, we love our fellow man and we're all seeking refuge from the women, so we'll take it a step further; we'll share some secrets that'll make us some bucks." This is exactly how most insider schemes begin.

The shoe foursome, sharing their network of stores, made more money over the next year. Their tips came from stockbrokers, relatives on various boards, customers whose bankers had loose tongues during business lunches. Everybody owes someone something, and what better way to pay off than a friendly bit of advice?

After a particularly good score for all of them, when General Cinema made a run at Heublein, the Ladies' Man made his friends a proposal. "We're men with connections," he said. "We get pretty good information and we're not afraid to put the dough on the line. But we declare all this and we give Uncle Sam 50 percent. I've got a customer in Panama knows how to treat the Ladies' Man. Gets me three women when I'm down there, one of 'em usually an albino Indian. We open an account at a Panamanian bank, cost us $1500 to open the account and one and a half percent of the total assets for a fee--plus, maybe, a couple grand to get a local attorney as one of our directors. We place all orders over the phone. None of our names appears on the account. Once a year, we take a deductible trip to Panama, grease a few locals, which is always good business, pick up some cash that we carry on our bodies and back home we slide. No customs people are going to check American shoe businessmen, I guarantee you, especially when we ask them what size their wives' feet are. Send 'em a few pair."

"Hey," said Mr. Dewars, "that's my line. That's how I get bumped up to first class."

"Who you kidding?" said the Ladies' Man. "That's as old as shoes."

"Then it's got to be my delivery," countered Mr. Dewars, refusing to be upstaged by a bald-headed whoremaster.

But they opened the account in Panama, more politically secure than the Bahamas, more convenient than Switzerland, more anonymous than the Isle of Guernsey. And they traded stocks. Each of the partners put up $50,000 as a stake, and they bought stocks through the stories they heard at shoe shows and hotel cocktail lounges and sporting events. All the stocks were rumored to be take-over candidates: Tampax, Lowenstein, Gerber Products, Collins & Aikman, Macmillan, Phillips Petroleum, Gulf Oil. Eventually, every one of the stocks became big winners. Some of them were taken over at premium prices. But the Panama partnership, dubbed Birdie Associates after the partners' golf-course connection, lost money on every single trade except for Tampax, where the account netted a $211.61 profit. The shoe dogs wanted action; they couldn't wait for the deals to come through. And they fought with one another, the way partners always fight over money. The insider deals turned to dust, the way insider deals almost always turn to dust. "You couldn't wait with Tampax, you schmuck," fumed the Doctor. "It doubled."

"How did I know I'd live long enough to see it?" countered the Ladies' Man.

"Let me ask you a question," said Herbie the production guy. "We're down to $145,000 and no hits. Do I need this?"

"Look, we've got good flow of information," said Mr. Dewars. "The directors' meetings in Panama are my kind of meetings. Give it a while more."

The situation got worse when they tried to make a big hit on a cheapie. They got the word to buy Baldwin-United after it had collapsed from a highflier to eight. "Victor Palmieri is on this case," they were told. "He's the genius who turned around Penn Central. All his options are at ten bucks. Buy it at eight and wait for the home run." Birdie Associates put their wad on Baldwin-United and saw it go from eight to two and a half. They bought 20,000 shares originally, partially on margin (borrowing from the broker with the stock as collateral). When the stock was five, they had a directors' meeting in Panama. Mr. Dewars described it to me.

"We had played golf at the club where the Ladies' Man's customer belonged. None of us broke 100--except the temperature, which was 105 and muggy, never a good climate for shoe dogs, who need the comfort of air conditioning. After the round, we're sitting in the clubhouse getting smashed on rum-dums when our local lawyer comes over and announces that we have to get our account back up to over $200,000 or it's not worth his time and, anyway, his fee is going up. The Ladies' Man's customer comes over and shuts off our rum-dums, and it gets quite heated, because he had also bought Baldwin-United even higher than eight and he's being squeezed. I must admit the Ladies' Man was cool, though. He says, 'I guess this means no more albino Indians?' "

Birdie Associates was shut down and each partner came away from Panama with about $8000 cash. "The final irony," Mr. Dewars told me, "was that a month later, the Ladies' Man's wife unloads on him for various crimes against her person and files for divorce. It wasn't enough that his net worth was considerably diminished by this; she also tipped off the SEC and the IRS, and the Ladies' Man was charged with securities fraud and tax evasion. We lose our asses trading like wise guys and we get bagged anyway. He sings against us, just like Dennis Levine is doing, which means that Birdie Associates was the right name after all, and there's no statute of limitations on fraud. If the IRS wants to open up Pandora's boxes on anybody, forget it; you can't buy enough lawyers and accountants to get you clear."

Mr. Dewars hesitated a second. "There's probably only one thing that could get me out of the hole." He looked hopeful.

"What's that?" I asked him.

"Some really righteous inside information. One good take-over story could bail me out."

•

An old friend of mine, a former big-hitting stockbroker, used to pride himself on getting advance word on mergers and acquisitions. He has since moved to California to produce movies after his doctors advised him that the movements of the ticker tape were ruining his inside parts. When he was in the investment business, he was known as the Boomer. I called him up to check on whether or not insider trading had had any influence on his leaving Wall Street.

"Christ, yes," he said. "It had everything to do with it. Inside information made me realize I was snake-bit. Don't you know that 99 out of 100 stories never come true? And when they do come true, it never happens when it's supposed to. Go through any brokerage-house board room in America and every stockbroker will tell you the same thing--which is that most people lose money on the word that's supposed to make them rich. If the average broker were given the word, he wouldn't share it with his dumb clients, he'd keep it himself. And since the average broker never buys stock for himself, much less goes and leverages himself even for a sure thing, when a deal does come true, he hits himself in the head and says, 'I had it. I shoulda borrowed the money.' Shoulda, coulda, woulda, didn't," said the Boomer.

"You're getting all excited," I said.

"That's why I left the street," he agreed.

"How can you not get excited in the movie business?" I asked.

"It's a different kind of aggravation," the Boomer said. "If you got friends out here, you'll always work, be a peon for 200 grand. I have ex-clients who let me coproduce here, executive produce there, no heavy lifting. And you know my sickness," he said.

"You like to get laid," I answered.

"That's really why I'm out here. You think the casting couch is dead, you're crazy. Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine may be goddesses to these kids coming to L.A., but these kids are gonna put out for a part till they get to be stars, and none of 'em is gonna get to that stage. Getting laid was my problem with inside info; pardon the pun. It's why I realized managing money was not the Boomer's forte."

"What happened?"

"Two incidents drove me from investments," he said. "The first time, I thought it was an accident; the second time, I knew the Lord was telling me something. The first time was in the days I chased tail at lunch. I was working a stock that I was given the word if I bought it at 11, it was a cinch to sell out at 18. I go to a motel in New Jersey with a female trust officer from Citibank, not caring about anything but my blood is up. While I'm spending lunchtime in bliss, with a Springsteen tape playing in tribute to noonies in the Garden State, the stock I'm working is going from 12 to 17-1/2 and they stop trading, pending news. [The stock exchange often suspends trading in a security temporarily until heavy volume can be explained.] I owned 150,000 shares for clients, and I swear I would have sold a ton on the way up. While I'm nuzzling a shoulder of the trust officer, the news comes out on the Dow Jones ticker. The president and the chairman of the company are selling all their stock to a private buyer for 18-1/2. Every other stockholder is shut out. Whack. The stock reopens at 12, just where it traded when I told my secretary that I was gone for a long lunch, trying to close a deal. I didn't sell a share; the stockholders were also screwed, and there wasn't even a class-action suit. If I could talk about it, that had to be one of the most expensive noonies in history."

"What was your next lesson?" I asked.

"OK," he said, sighing. "Remember that in every tip, there is some element of truth. I had it on very good authority that a discounter, Delta United, was being taken over at 14. It was then six. The wife of the chairman was clueing me in. The chairman was straight, a client of mine, but he never breathed a word. They lived out in Long Island," the Boomer told me. "I went down to sell them a tax shelter one summer, and I'm not wearing socks with my Cole-Haan loafers. We're eating vitello tonnato and I'm sitting opposite the hostess and she's suddenly got my right loafer off and is rubbing my big toe between her legs while my client is saying 'I adore vitello tonnato, darling.' Well, after that, we have it off a number of times in the city, with my big toe an integral part of the equation. Pillow talk is a heavy element in insider trading," the Boomer tells me, "kid yourself not. You know the Wall Street Journal reporter and his lovers? Not that I'm a cynic, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Levine and that Yuppie ring of traders weren't swapping spit somewhere along the line. Anyway, one day, the wife told me that her husband had been offered $14 a share for his company. 'He told me,' she said, on the way to brush her teeth and put petroleum jelly on her lips for chapping, which was a very annoying habit, 'that it was a problem, because if he sold his company, he'd lose all his perks, but if he did sell it, he'd be one rich discounter.'

"Well," continued the Boomer, "I decided to lay my kishkes on the line. You know kishkes? It's guts. I bought 300,000 shares of the stock between six and a quarter and seven and a half for clients, as well as a shitload for myself. That was my big payday."

He paused for a moment as if he were taking a long, thoughtful drag on a cigarette. "I remember the instant," he went on. "It was May, and the leaves were coming out on the trees along Park Avenue. The stock was eight and a half, and the chairman's wife told me that 14 was a lock, a sure thing. The head of our region was in the office that day, and he came over to my desk, looking worried.

" 'Why are you buying so much Delta United? Compliance department is inquiring about your heavy purchases. You don't want your ass in a sling, much less my ass. There's no hint of inside info here, is there?'

' "Christ, boss,' I told him. 'Delta just looks good on the charts. Good and solid, ready to break out. That's all I tell my clients, the chart is in breakout position.' "

The volume in Delta was unusually heavy that day, and the Boomer remembers taking his wife to '21' for dinner. "We had '21' burgers and a bottle of champagne and watched Richard Nixon at a nearby table and I thought, I've got something a former President doesn't have--a hot stock."

The next morning, the chairman's wife called the Boomer at the office. Her voice sounded as if she were being paid for her sins. "He's dead," she said. "Massive coronary opening a stuck salad-dressing bottle. He didn't even like creamy dressings. It was for the kids."

"Are you OK?" said the Boomer, madly punching up Delta United on his Quotron machine.

"He was going to be a rich discounter," she said. "I'm OK."

The Boomer sweated that entire day. But the stock was strong, moving over nine and a half on big volume. The next day was the funeral. There was a service at the dead chairman's temple, where the president of the local bank praised him in a eulogy extolling the virtues of small towns and civic-minded people. The Boomer checked his watch every 30 seconds. The market opened at ten o'clock, and he had no idea of prices. After the service, he spotted a pay phone in the lobby of the temple. He headed for it. "Are you crazy?" his wife said. "You can't make a business call in the temple."

They hugged the widow and her children. She asked if they could take two of her cousins to the cemetery, which was half an hour out of town. They couldn't say no.

"The rest of the day was hell," the Boomer said. "I couldn't leave the funeral procession, which was moving slowly, with all our headlights on. The parade of cars must've stretched for blocks. I kept saying, 'Move, move' and the cousins in the back seat are nudging each other and my wife is nudging me, but I don't give a shit anymore. All I care about is that Delta United may be going crazy and I can't get to a phone."

It was drizzling at the cemetery, and everyone was lost in thought about his own mortality--except the Boomer, who was thinking about his 300,000 shares. By the time he got back to the widow's house for corned-beef sandwiches, drinks and condolences, he was feeling cursed by God. He ran to a phone in an upstairs bedroom to call his office. The stock had gotten as high as ten and seven eighths, his secretary told him, and was then trading at nine and three fourths. "I wanted to sell stock above ten and a half to be early!" he yelled at her. "Did you sell any?"

"You told me not to do anything until you called," said his secretary.

"You didn't sell a share?" he screamed, just as the widow walked into the room.

"May I turn to stone if you ever touch me again," she said to the Boomer.

He hung up. "Will you please listen to me?"

She looked at him as if he were dead meat. "Take your wife and her corned-beef sandwich and go."

The Boomer waited in vain for the stock to get back over ten. He waited in vain for the deal that had been promised. "I was frozen at the switch," he told me. "Afraid to admit a mistake, I rode the son of a bitch to under a buck. And, before all my clients quit me, I quit the business. Now I don't have to promise inside information, just a table at Matteo's, which I can usually deliver without getting all emotionally involved."

We shall never be able to legislate human nature, and the lure of the inside word is eternal. But it is an old Wall Street maxim, as true today as in the times of swapping Government issues under the Buttonwood Tree in 1792. "He who looks back at the market dies of remorse." Ask Dennis Levine and his buddies if this is true.

"So-called inside information is always shared. It is part of the camaraderie of the locker room."