JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home by Peter Spiegelman Read Free Book Online Page B

called Biscayne management’s projection of earnings “cautious to the point of wimpy” and predicted that the company’s share price would triple in six months, reaction ranged from incredulity to ridicule. In fact, it took five months and Biscayne’s shares quadrupled. It was the first in a string of home-run calls.
    Danes was the right guy in the right place and time. He saw the coming commercialization of the Internet and understood its implications, both for the tech companies that were making it possible and for companies that could sell their goods and services there. And he had the courage of his convictions. He followed Biscayne Bay with similarly astonishing— and accurate— predictions on Ambient Reasoning, Surfside Search, ColdKarma.com, and a half-dozen other companies. By the late nineties, Danes had made his bones many times over. He was The Man in the tech sector, and his word was enough to move share prices. More importantly, it was enough to ensure a successful IPO.
    Danes logged a lot of miles in the late nineties on road trip after road trip with Pace-Loyette investment bankers, pitching the prospects of one tech company after another that Pace was about to take public. A few of those firms would grow into real businesses, with actual products and profits, but most would not, and many were no more than cocktail-napkin doodles, tarted up with PowerPoint. But the Danes imprimatur pulled a lot of weight with investors who, if they didn’t always buy his hype, at least understood the buoyant effect it could have on a newly issued stock.
    When the new millennium came, the market, like so much else, turned to lead. And though he had predicted the boom, Danes hadn’t foreseen the bust— or maybe he’d believed that his say-so alone would be enough to prevent it. While share prices plummeted, Danes and a handful of other analysts maintained their crazed enthusiasms, until many of their favorites became penny stocks or vanished altogether.
    If the collapse of the market was a surprise to Danes, its aftermath was a whack in the head with a two-by-four. The hopeless tangle of quid pro quos and conflicting interests that bound together investment banks, their corporate clients, and the people who ran those corporations were open secrets on Wall Street. But when the particulars of these arrangements— the bartering of favorable stock ratings, personal loans, and shares of hot IPOs for lucrative investment banking engagements— were dragged out for the public-at-large to see, the public-at-large got sorely pissed off. While analysts hadn’t built the trough or gorged themselves at it as deeply as some, they were wide and obvious targets— and so often painted with convenient bull’s-eyes. The brightest one on Danes’s backside was Piedmont Science and its affable chairman, Denton Ainsley.
    Piedmont Science was a software company, a supplier of billing systems to medical and dental practices. It was an undistinguished firm in its early years, with a share price that barely supported its NASDAQ listing and no coverage at all from stock analysts. When its president died in his sleep, it seemed as if the company might soon follow suit. Enter Denton Ainsley.
    Ainsley was the star of a dozen infomercials that hawked the wares of Dentco, the consumer products company he had founded. Ainsley was lean and handsome, in a silver-haired, leathery sort of way, and his rugged wrangler persona was immensely popular with TV viewers in search of laundry soap and floor wax. They liked his cowboy hat and easy humor and imagined they heard something genuine in his broad Texas twang. No one seemed to question how a man raised in Connecticut had come by such an accent.
    Friends on the Piedmont board had opened the door for Ainsley, and his disarming personality— and the sizable chunk of Piedmont shares that he purchased— secured his position as CEO. But Ainsley had more than just charm and money to recommend him; he