Clawback by Mike Cooper Read Free Book Online Page A

and blogosphere rants across his desk. “You were right—it was a great tip. And some fuckwad figured it out before me.”
    “No way. Someone out there’s smarter than
you
?”
    “Hard to believe, isn’t it? And early yesterday morning, several million richer, too.”
    “I was thinking maybe you’d kick me back a finder’s fee.”
    “Hah.” He looked up. “Marlett was on spec, huh?”
    “Never mind.”
    Johnny and I go way back. High school, believe it or not. He was baseball, I was football, we sat in the same AP classes—though that wasn’t saying much in small-town New Hampshire. His ticket out was UVM and a Wharton MBA. While I was learning how to jump out of airplanes and field-strip a .50-cal, Johnny was clawing hisway from entry-level i-banking to, eventually, running his own hedge fund.
    Who made the better choice is a topic for another day.
    I’d come down to his Beaver Street offices, where he oversaw a floor-to-ceiling panorama of the East River skyline, a roomful of twentysomething traders, and three billion dollars of alternative-asset allocations. The traders all seemed to have ADHD. Johnny’s style was incremental: he could go in and out of positions in less than thirty seconds. Breakfast and lunch were catered every day, but the food mostly sat around getting cold, and the only consistent nourishment seemed to be cans of Red Bull and Jolt.
    In these days of algorithmic technical strategies, it was all quaintly retro.
    “I thought you said Marlett was down to fumes.” I tried to get comfortable in the cheap plastic chair Johnny provided his guests.
    “He had one last deal going, it turns out—the York Hydro acquisition.” Johnny looked almost in pain. “I can’t believe I forgot about it.”
    “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
    “Canadian electric generation. The Conservatives went on a privatization binge a few years ago. Carlyle and those guys snapped up the good ones, but some of the smaller utilities went straight to market—just in time for the world economy to collapse. No more liquidity, so they need a new buyer, bad. Marlett was actually on to something.”
    Johnny couldn’t have known any more than I did about North American power plants, but utilities are capital-spending pigs, so the financial picture was clear enough. York must have had cashflow problems, and with credit markets barely thawed, they couldn’t borrow. That meant one option—a distress sale.
    “York’s stock went up thirty-four percent on the announcement of Marlett’s interest last week,” Johnny said. “But with Marlett dead, it fell right back down again. Someone was on the other side of that trade this morning. They probably needed a forklift to handle the bales of cash they earned.”
    “That was the motive.” My kind of story. “Someone killed Marlett to win the trade.”
    “Could be. Not provable, of course.”
    “Who was it?”
    “Nobody knows.” He frowned. “It was all small-lot, anonymous transactions.”
    “Wait a minute.” I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, especially when it’s about someone cheating the markets, but this didn’t seem like a proven case. “If they were all small trades, how do you know one person was behind them all?”
    “They were too even. A hundred shares here, fifty there, ten or fifteen trades a minute. I dunno. It just felt staged.”
    Well, Johnny was worth a hundred million and I wasn’t. I probably ought to respect his instincts.
    Out on the floor one of the traders must have hit the jackpot. He jumped out of his chair, pumping his hands in the air, yelling. The other guys threw wadded paper and staplers at him. I could see why Johnny had walled off his office with heavy glass.
    “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Three names. Tell me what you think.”
    Johnny raised an eyebrow. “Shoot.”
    “Free association, now…Jeremy Akelman, Betsy Sills, Tom Marlett.”
    He looked blank.
    “Here’s a hint,” I said. “All three