The Post and the Daily News are in the midst of a protracted circulation war; sports coverage is the weapon of choice, and the battleground is slugger Gary Sheffield of the Florida Marlins. The two newspapers have been skirmishing over whether or not Mr. Sheffield will join the Mets for next season. The Post clearly wants Mr. Sheffield at Shea Stadium; the News seems content to live without him.

Throughout the Sheffield soap opera, the two tabloids have behaved like bickering brothers. They disagree by rote, taking different positions in their reporting apparently just for the sake of it.

The Post has pumped up the story, reporting at one point that a trade for the player was all but done. Then, 10 days later, after trade talks had fallen apart, they tried to deliver the story a little CPR. Their back-page headline on Nov. 25--“Sheffield’s Met Dream”--was basically a lengthy plaint by Mr. Sheffield that trade talks had been called off. The Post’s Mets beat writer, David Waldstein, somehow got Mr. Sheffield on the phone and started taking dictation. “I’ve always had it in my heart to play for the Mets,” Mr. Sheffield said. But the chances of that had all but disappeared two days before. So what was the Post doing by giving such prominent play to the yearnings of a ballplayer with a less-than-savory reputation?

Some beat writers have grumbled that the Post is getting its stories from someone connected to the Marlins who wants to create the impression that demand for Mr. Sheffield’s services is heavy. If the papers say the Mets really want him, maybe they will someday. It is almost as though the Post shares Mr. Sheffield’s Mets dream and believes it can will Mr. Sheffield, one of the best hitters in baseball, into a Met uniform.

The dream began when the Marlins, fresh from winning this year’s World Series, announced that they would gut their roster to trim the payroll. Mr. Sheffield, at $10 million a year, was the most expensive talent on the team and therefore very available. Most teams, however, were scared off by his mammoth contract. The remaining few, including the Mets, had to consider Mr. Sheffield’s stormy past. Fred Wilpon, co-owner of the Mets, conceded to The Observer that he wants no repeats of well-publicized incidents several seasons ago, when the Met locker room seemed to be filled with men behaving badly. “The writers knew that I was unhappy when we were, in my view, burned in the early 90’s by a lack of production and a lot of turmoil,” Mr. Wilpon said. “This is not what we wanted.” After underachieving outfielder Vince Coleman threw a large firecracker at fans in Los Angeles and pitcher Bret Saberhagen sprayed bleach on a group of reporters, Mr. Wilpon decided to purge his team of “bad citizens.”

No Hits, Several Errors

Mr. Sheffield does have something of a spotty reputation, one that his personal publicist insists is not deserved. Mr. Sheffield, who is pitcher Dwight Gooden’s nephew, has been investigated for substance abuse, for leaving two bullets and a threatening note on the doorstep of the mother of one of his three kids, and for a mysterious incident in which Mr. Sheffield himself was wounded by gunfire.

Nothing ever stuck; the consensus seems to be that he’s a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time, fall-in-with-a-bad-crowd kind of guy. But, by his own admission, he is no Joe DiMaggio: He has stated publicly that he committed fielding errors on purpose years ago in an effort to get himself traded from the Milwaukee Brewers.

But that’s so much history at the Post. Mr. Waldstein wrote: “Reports of Sheffield’s past seem greatly exaggerated, and even if they were true, he is trying hard to reverse them. Through the Sheffield Foundation, he is reported to have organized and funded many charities …. ” In other words he’s a swell guy, Mr. Wilpon. Whaddaya say?

Throughout it all, the Daily News has been forced to respond. Sports fans tend to reach for those big back pages. If the News isn’t going to run them, then the paper at least has to refute them. That’s how the tabloid game is played.

On Saturday, Sept. 15, the Post ran a story in its limited-run evening edition declaring that the Mets were about to acquire Mr. Sheffield, pending the approval of Mr. Wilpon. The next morning, the Post revisited the story on its front page: “Amazin’ Trade: Mets Set to Deal for World Series Slugging Star.”

When Daily News editors in New York saw the Saturday-evening Post story, they panicked. They had been scooped. So they called Bill Madden, their lead baseball writer who was in Arizona covering the expansion draft and the annual meeting of general managers, and they asked him to look into it.

At around 11 p.m., New York time, Mr. Madden reached Mr. Wilpon at home. Mr. Wilpon denied the reports, saying no deal was in the works. So on Sunday, Sept. 16, the News ran a story denying the Post’s contention that the deal was nearly done. (Both papers, it should be noted, are in a heated battle for Sunday readers.) It seemed as though the News was acting the part of party pooper, while fans hungry for a big-time hitter in the Mets lineup bought the Post--and the Post’s spin--instead.

“What we have here is what I call the new journalism, in which papers create their own story,” Mr. Madden complained.

A Character Issue?

Meanwhile, Mr. Madden’s conversation with Mr. Wilpon may have created a story of its own. On Thursday, Nov. 20, Lawrence Rocca, the Mets beat reporter for the New Jersey–based Star-Ledger, wrote a piece assessing the team’s chances of landing Mr. Sheffield. Mr. Rocca said that the player’s personality had “recently emerged” as a source of concern. Mr. Rocca then cited a conversation between Mr. Wilpon and “a longtime baseball writer at a New York newspaper.” According to Mr. Rocca’s piece, which cited sources within the Mets organization, the writer--whom he did not identify--told Mr. Wilpon that a trade for Mr. Sheffield “would guarantee a stream of negative publicity for the team,” because of the character issue.

Contacted by The Observer, Mr. Rocca stood by his story, but refused to identify the “longtime baseball writer.” “I don’t think the identity of the writer is relevant,” he said. Other sources, however, speculated that the writer in question was Mr. Madden, the dubious theory being that he was trying to prevent a trade from happening to render his reporting accurate--and the Post’s story inaccurate. “That’s total absolute bullshit,” Mr. Madden said.

For his part, Mr. Wilpon denied that his conversation with Mr. Madden included any advice about press reaction to Mr. Sheffield. “That’s nonsense,” he told The Observer. “It’s a total fabrication.” He said that he had talked to several baseball writers, including Mr. Madden, about Mr. Sheffield, but no writer warned him about a possible press campaign against the slugger.

Mr. Madden was livid that his name was injected into the dispute, but he could take solace in the fact that his skeptical take on the Met-Marlin talks had prevailed. By the time a week had passed, Mr. Wilpon had apparently decided he did not want Mr. Sheffield. Trade talks between the Marlins and the Mets ended on Nov. 23. The Mets cited differences over money.

But as of Nov. 25, the story lived on in the Post, albeit on life support. It is still possible, after all, that Mr. Sheffield’s price will come down. Very few teams can afford him. Perhaps Mr. Wilpon will have another chance to weigh the character issue, to worry whether Mr. Sheffield would be a step forward (pennant chases, a hot bat in the middle of the order) or a step back (remember Bobby Bonilla?).

And if, in January or June, the Mets do manage to get Mr. Sheffield, you can rest assured that the Post, on its back page, will crow, “We told you so!”

The team is the New Jersey Devils. They play ice hockey very well, better than any other team in the world. Since ice hockey is one of the Western world's greatest sports, and they're currently the best at it, you might think that people would care about them. But to most New Yorkers, the Devils are like an indoor lacrosse team or a state senator from Maine: remote, irrelevant, unfashionable, symbolic of nothing.

"People in Manhattan, they don't give a crap," said Phil Esposito, the former Ranger and Boston Bruin who nowadays reads innocuous bits of hockey analysis on Fox Sports Net. He was standing near a ramp leading from the visitors' dressing room to the ice just before Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals between the Devils and the Dallas Stars in the Continental Airlines Arena. A pair of Zambonis drove by, while the arena organist whirled through a melancholic rendition of "Rubber Ducky." Mr. Esposito continued his dissertation. "They care about the Rangers, they care about the Knickerbockers, they care about Giants and the Jets, the Yankees and the Mets, but they just don't care about these guys," Mr. Esposito said. "And I don't know why."

Here are some theories, Espo: Hockey in the New York area is merely a cult, the Devils have no big stars, they play in the swamps of New Jersey and they have a reputation for playing a boring, defensive style. Above all, they stand for nothing bigger, except for the polyglot nature of hockey and suburbia, which is not the kind of thing that the Frank Defords of the world get worked up about.

But, they are a great hockey club. The Devils have compiled the second best record in the National Hockey League over the last decade; the only other New York-area team that comes close to that kind of consistent winning is the Yankees. They have become, with a limited budget, one of the best-run organizations in professional sports: frugal, familial, victorious. They play with flair and moxie. They hit hard and dart about the ice like barn swallows. And on June 5, they swarmed the defending champion Stars 3-1, to take a 3-1 lead in the series-one win away from a parking-lot victory parade.

And now they are about to belong to George Steinbrenner and his new YankeeNets corporation, which combines the greatest franchise in sports with one of the most hapless. The Devils will presumably fill the vast gulf between them. Earlier this year, John McMullen, the Devils' 83-year-old owner, announced that he was selling the team for $175 million, after failing to persuade New Jersey to give him the rights to build a new arena in Hoboken, a slap shot away from the Garden. The transfer of ownership will take place in July, according to YankeeNets chief executive Harvey Schiller, at which point the last small-town team in the New York area will pass into the hands of a cable-content conglomerate with little ice in its veins.

Twenty years ago, the New York Islanders won the first of four consecutive straight Stanley Cups. They became one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the sport, but nobody in the city really cared. The Islanders were, well, islanders. For their fans on Long Island, the team was a rebuke to the big city, a claim to an identity of their own in the megalopolis. Long Island was riding high: Nassau County's own Alfonse D'Amato had won a U.S. Senate seat; Grumman was cranking out fighter jets.

The Rangers' moment came a decade later. Their Stanley Cup victory in 1994 marked an end to the longest championship drought in hockey. It is hard to imagine now that such a thing can be ascribed to hockey, but the Rangers' 1994 Stanley Cup run, coinciding with the early days of the Giuliani administration, went a long way toward helping the city rebuild its self-esteem. The Yanks may one day be remembered as this era's boomtown team, but the Rangers touched it off. The cup was suddenly winnable, much as the city would soon prove governable. Mark Messier, Brian Leetch and Mike Richter, the team's Manhattan bachelors, toted the silver cup around town, to Yorkville bars and the set of David Letterman's Late Show , goading the city into caring about this cult sport.

Underpaid and Unknown

But what about the Devils? In another era, in another place, they might have become symbols of something, in the manner of the 1970-73 Knicks or the 1969 Mets. But the Devils, born in Kansas City, raised in Colorado and transferred to New Jersey in 1982, cheered on by big-eared Bergen County kids in face paint and droopy red jerseys, have failed to transcend their bland status as the perfect hockey club.

The Devils are an anomaly in professional sports, especially in the New York area, in that almost all the members of the team are underpaid relative to their peers in the league. They have a raft of cheap and nifty rookies, including the best of the year, Scott Gomez, who is the first Hispanic player in the National Hockey League. Their two most dynamic forwards, a pair of Czechs named Patrik Elias and Petr Sykora, each make less than a million dollars a year. Their team captain and most valuable playoff performer, the bone-crushing defenseman Scott Stevens, last year signed a contract to stay with the team, accepting much less than he would have gotten on the open market, because he was comfortable with its system.

The system. That's what has defined the Devils for the last decade. The system has meant many things-a disciplined playing style, an organizational philosophy, an intolerance for contractual shenanigans-all of which have sprung from the team's fiscally conservative general manager, Lou Lamoriello.

Mr. Lamoriello is a hard man and a shrewd negotiator. Players who stick it out in contract disputes often find themselves banished to small-market Canadian teams. In the dressing room, the Devils call the team the Firm. It is difficult to leave on your own terms. Mr. Lamoriello has his employees turn out their lights when they leave the offices for the night. He doesn't want to go looking for them. He frowns upon family photographs in the office.

"Lou's imprint is everywhere," said Stan Fischler, a Devils commentator who has written nearly 100 books about hockey. "Lou is more closely identified with this team than any other executive in sports. Nothing happens that Lou doesn't know about."

The fate of the team under the YankeeNets depends entirely on its ability to retain Lou Lamoriello. As always, he is driving a hard bargain. Money he has (he made $7 million in the sale); control is what he needs. Fortunately for him-and for the YankeeNets-Mr. Steinbrenner is not much of a hockey man, so the control problem is not intractable. "Our goal is to keep Lou on board," Mr. Schiller said. "There's no need to talk about a plan B."

Mr. Lamoriello has never looked better. Until recently, the Devils were considered boring: faceless, plodding, relentless, even a little mean. Manhattan's hockey browsers preferred the less-than-mediocre Rangers, who had fragile stars with inscrutable psyches and inconsistent talents.

For a while, the Devils' disciplined system seemed to be their undoing. Since winning the cup in 1995, the Devils have had numbingly productive regular seasons, only to underachieve miserably in the playoffs. Each year, they seemed to suffer brain-lock. The system, imposed from above, stifled them.

But this spring, something blossomed. In March, late in the season, Mr. Lamoriello fired Robbie Ftorek, the Devils' humorless, at times paranoid head coach, with eight games left in the regular season, and with the team in first place! He replaced Mr. Ftorek with Larry Robinson, his easygoing assistant. The Devils started to have fun again. The team loosened up psychologically, and began to play with grit and joy.

Just Like the Yanks

In a way the Devils are like their new corporate cousins, the Yankees: no superstars, just a collection of level-headed professionals, a mix of hardened veterans and precocious kids. Mr. Robinson is their Joe Torre, a cool, wise, empathetic presence who provides an emotional ballast. Like Joe Torre, Mr. Robinson had a mediocre head coaching career prior to getting a starring role in the New York area. This spring, however, he has been perfect.

The team has a corps of great defensemen, most notably Mr. Stevens, the flashy speedster Scott Niedermayer and Ken Daneyko, the stay-at-homer who has been on the team since 1983. They are complemented by a paradigmatic entourage of Russians: Alexander Mogilny, a dashing stylist; Vladimir Malakhov, a hard-shooting head case; Sergei Nemchinov, a taciturn workaholic; and Sergei Brylin, a tough little imp with soft hands.

"There's no schmuck on this team," Mr. Fischler said. "When Lou drafts, his scouts know that they're looking for character guys."

Well, maybe one schmuck, if you're a fan of an opposing team. They have the league's least popular player, Claude Lemieux, a gruff teammate and a cheap-shot artist-hockey's Pete Rose, "the gum on your shoe," as Mr. Daneyko recently put it-who is about as proven a playoff performer as there is in hockey. If you need to hate this team, then Mr. Lemieux is your man.

Despite all of this, the Stanley Cup's final round has failed to rouse even the hockey purists, who seem to gripe about the state of the game almost as often as the masses who claim it's impossible to follow the puck. Both the Stars and the Devils are defensive specialists who can choke the pace out of a game by clogging up space on the ice.

After Game 2 at the Meadowlands, the reviews were not good. "A slumber-fest," said The New York Times . And in the days to come, there was more of the usual stuff about hockey's dismal TV ratings.

In a move that smelled a bit desperate, ABC brought in Al Michaels to add a little ceremony to its broadcasts of the Stanley Cup finals, to make them seem like a big deal. But even though Mr. Michaels made the most famous call in American hockey history (He ended his play-by-play of the U.S. win over the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics with the memorable phrase: "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!"), he has seemed out of place in the rabid air of a Stanley Cup arena.

But the old regulars fit in fine. After Game 2, in a corridor outside the Devils' locker room, ABC color man Bill Clement, a former player who looks a little like Ivan Lendl, ambled by in a double-breasted suit, carrying a worn brown leather valise. He had just gone off the air.

Asked what the Devils would need to do to make Manhattanites care, he said, "They need to develop some glamorous players. This is what New Yorkers respond to: glamour." As he said this, a button popped off his jacket and fell to the floor. "But the Devils are philosophically opposed to the type of system that generates someone of star caliber. Their system works against fan cultivation."

"But, gosh," he went on, "it's interesting that we're talking about a team catching on, when they've been here since 1982."

Welcome to the National Hockey League, Mr. Steinbrenner.

Mr. Spearman has tinkered with the swings of Nick Faldo and Greg Norman, Dan Quayle and Phil Knight. But so have dozens of swing doctors with names as well known in golf circles as those of their touring clients. What sets Mr. Spearman apart is his price.

He is only 37, though he has been a pro for 21 years. He winters in Orlando, Fla., at Tiger Woods' home course, but early each spring, just after the Masters tournament, he comes to New York to spend the summer mining the motherlode: the conspicuously wealthy, eternally frustrated, preternaturally competitive, occasionally gullible men of Wall Street, a good portion of who spend an appalling amount of time and money in their pursuit of a viable golf swing and a bankable handicap. Many of them make their pro a central figure in their lives. They fly him to Asia and Australia, to outings at Florida and Pebble Beach-passing along his name to clients and friends as they would a sure bet.

"When you figure out how to find me, then you're ready to be taught," Mr. Spearman said the other day. "It's a lot of money. But I'm setting my price for what the demand is. It's a market like anything else. The main advantage of charging so much is that people take what I say seriously. When I charge so much, I'm in charge."

It was a weekday afternoon, and Mr. Spearman was standing on the practice tee at Manhattan Woods Golf Club, a two-year-old club in West Nyack, just off the Palisades Parkway, half an hour north of the city. As a visitor tried to hit a few shots with a seven iron, Mr. Spearman maneuvered a video device around him, like a dentist taking X-rays. In a mild voice-British accent, with some Australian-sounding vowels-the instructor asked questions of his pupil, who was hacking hideous divots in the soft earth as the ball launched off in various directions.

Then Mr. Spearman began to teach: "You've just shown me a wide variety of shots. Obviously, consistency is a big issue for you. Your grip needs additional work. Your setup and posture need work. Your wrists don't really hinge in the manner I'd like to see, so that the raising up of your body is to compensate for the fact that you don't hinge your wrists …" Heenge yaw wreests.

For 10 minutes, he talked breathlessly about leverage and timing, posture and positioning. "Take a look at this," he said, standing over his video monitor. "Have a look at yourself."

Mr. Spearman is no Shivas Irons, the mystical Scottish pro in Golf in the Kingdom , Michael Murphy's 1972 rumination on the metaphysics of golf. Nor is he a Ty Webb, Chevy Chase's soul golfer in Caddyshack . ("It's American humor that I never quite got," he said of the film.) He is not mysterious or coy. He is a swing mechanic, a pure technician. Like Chauncy Gardner, his metaphors aren't metaphors, even though they occasionally sound like them. "Sometimes," he said, "I think about going to a driving range at night and just going up and down the line, giving tips." He dreams of golf, but they are mechanical dreams about certain swings. "You wake up having Hogan dreams," he said. "We all do."

As he talked he began to sweep the head of his sand wedge back and forth absent-mindedly across the same patch of grass. In his lifetime, he had done that probably a million times. Dressed in a slate Nike pullover, gray pleated pants, white shoes, wraparound cycling shades and a Manhattan Woods cap, he looked fine-boned and fit. His hands were hairless and small, like a child's.

He was interrupted by the bleat of one of his two cell phones a few yards away in the cart. He excused himself and took the call.

"Hello, Dick," he said softly. "How are you?"

"Unfortunately, I'm booked for Friday," he continued. "The next time I'm available is the 9th of June."

He listened. "Yes, I think I've heard of it, yes," he said. "Well, I wish I was able to help you before you went."

Mr. Spearman hung up. Dick, he explained, was the chief executive of a major Wall Street firm (that's all Mr. Spearman would say). Dick needed a lesson soon. He was headed to Pebble Beach for a tournament and needed to hone his game. This happens to Mr. Spearman a lot: Clients want him to fix their swings prior to competitions or company outings.

"They don't want to embarrass themselves," he said.

So on Memorial Day at 8 a.m., he juggled his schedule and made room for Dick, who was concerned that his 15-year-old son kept beating him, even though Dick had been playing for years and considered himself an athlete. The morning went well. For Dick-"a keen golfer with no consistency"-the results "were there right away."

Then Mr. Spearman drove back to his sublet near Lincoln Center. He changed and went to the big Knicks game as a guest of another client, a banker. They sat near the court. It was a great night.

Adopt-a-Pro

"My clients normally want to adopt me," he said. "They say they need me to come with them."

Powerful middle-aged men tend to form attachments to their coaches, to their fishing guides and tennis pros, as though they are training for the day when they will turn over their lives to doctors and nurses. Certain kinds of successful men like a bodyguard or a mistress. But others get a golf guru. They pay him well, take him along on trips and defer to him as they do to no one else. They envy a life saturated with the game and covet the talent. They cling to it. It rarely rubs off, but it is exhilarating to be around. Besides, the game is so perplexing, it helps for a typically self-confident man to have a companion and guide as he negotiates the deep waters of his own incompetence. It comes to the point where they can no longer go it alone.

Money can buy such men company, though it cannot always buy them a swing. In that way, the pro, despite the fact that he is essentially a hired hand, maintains a psychic hold over the client. You wind up with two men at opposite ends of a monetary transaction, each feeling, in his special way, superior to the other.

"I did a Morgan Stanley outing with Mitchell in Orlando," said Eden Foster, the head pro at the Maidstone Club in East Hampton. "As there usually is, there was a guy who didn't want to hear anything. But by the end, the guy thought Mitchell was God. No matter how much someone comes in acting like they know what they're talking about, the pro knows a lot more than they do. They don't know a tenth as much about the game as Mitchell does."

"You don't feel like hired help," Mr. Spearman said. "You feel special."

Some very rich men have made Mr. Spearman feel special. Kerry Packer, the Australian media magnate, once had Mr. Spearman flown in his jet to Australia for three weeks to help him prepare for the AT&T tournament at Pebble Beach. Mr. Packer wound up winning. "That was due to the three weeks we spent together," Mr. Spearman said.

One client, a shoe manufacturer, flew him to Indonesia to impress his friends in the government. Under armed guard at a driving range in Jakarta, Mr. Spearman conducted a clinic for the Indonesian prime minister and an army general at 4:30 in the morning. Okay now, general, heenge yaw wreests.

He has coached former Vice President Dan Quayle: "Excellent golfer. His swing was a little short. He didn't quite get back on his right side. I still get Christmas cards from him." He gave Nike chief Phil Knight a lesson last year at Manhattan Woods: "He had a poor setup, but he's got a tidy game." He has taught casino magnate Steve Wynn, Starwood chief Barry Sternlicht, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, among others.

But when it comes to his Wall Street clients he's mum. "Let's just say I work with top executives from all the big firms on Wall Street," he said. He does countless outings for the firms, ministering to pods of competitive men and women, careful not to diss them in front of their peers or flatter them too much.

"It's fascinating to see them chill out when they're here," he said. "I only see them in golf clothes. I don't see them in their jackets and ties. People say, 'God, so-and-so's a real ballbuster!' But I don't see that out here."

A Child Prodigy

When he was 7 years old, Mr. Spearman, born and raised in London, got turned on to the game by his aunt, Marley Spearman, a British amateur champion. By the time he was 16, he had given up school for his tour card and was giving lessons at the local club for £6 an hour.

At 18, he came to the United States and introduced himself to David Leadbetter, who was then an up-and-coming golf instructor. He spent six weeks at Mr. Leadbetter's school in Orlando, Fla., honed his swing and became an acolyte to Mr. Leadbetter, helping him set up Leadbetter clinics all over the world.

Mr. Spearman's connections to executives at International Management Group and its founder Mark McCormack-"They took a shine to me"-helped him make relationships in the golf world. Soon he was helping a newcomer named Ian Baker-Finch hone his game, guiding him to a British Open title in 1991. (Mr. Baker-Finch's game later imploded, and he quit the sport.) He took on other tour clients, most of them coming off some kind of a meltdown: Greg Norman, Curtis Strange, Jerry Pate, Laura Davies. He hung around the tour, giving swing tips, gaining credibility. His latest project is the resuscitation of Nick Faldo's game.

Two years ago, he set out on his own, and started coming to New York in the summers, making Manhattan Woods his summer base.

The clubhouse at Manhattan Woods is not yet finished. Until June 6, the club is operating out of a cluster of trailers. The course, designed by Gary Player, is owned by Ken Lee, a Korean businessman and "keen golfer who likes to gamble when he plays." There are 150 members, with room for more. The initiation fee is $150,000, the annual dues, $12,000.

It is a lovely course, but a far cry from the exclusive, rarefied clubs around New York-Shinnecock, Winged Foot, Maidstone-with all their baggage. It is the perfect place for a man to cultivate new clients with lots of money. They go away with new swing thoughts, and send their friends north.

The other day, on the lush practice range, after 45 minutes of instruction, his visitor began hitting practice balls straight and true toward the second of three greens, 140 yards out. He had a new swing, a new outlook on life. "That sounded good," Mr. Spearman said. "You can see and hear the difference."

But then, seeing the student's new swagger, he qualified his praise. "Of course, you don't own it yet. I'm not that good. And neither are you." He snickered. "That was a joke."

The bombing was regarded as a curiosity-another trading-floor practical joke, involving a man with a yellow toolbox, a lit fuse and postal workers running for cover. Kaboom! Only one person was injured, though windows on both sides of Wall Street shattered and the place soon teemed with police. Come daylight, the men and women in offices high above the crime scene had forgotten about it. The reaction, or lack of one, was symptomatic of an era: Nothing can faze this market, or those who trade in it.

"It was 70 yards from our office," said one day trader. "To get to work, I walked through a phalanx of cops. I walked through it and said, Whatever. I had no idea." He didn't ask, either. He got to work minutes before the opening, then traded like a banshee for three hours. On a dreadful day for the blue-chips he did very well, so just past noon he decided to leave and get an early start on the weekend. Walking back through the phalanx, he found out there'd been a little explosion. "I guess I'm glad it wasn't a real bomb," he conceded, but mostly he couldn't care less.

Indeed, investigators were so disdainful of the metal canister packed with black powder that they preferred not to call it a bomb. It was an "explosive device," a euphemism befitting a neighborhood where years of false alarms in the markets have taught the locals not to take trouble too seriously. An explosive device is a buying opportunity.

"We're inconvenienced," one analyst on his way to work told The New York Times , whose headline read, "Bomb Explodes Outside Wall Street Tower, Disrupting Morning Rush."

"It was probably just a disgruntled analyst or something," an investment banker snickered to The Financial Times , which devoted just 164 words to the story.

But still: A bomb went off on Wall Street. At the heart of the global marketplace, in a neighborhood swarming with security forces, both uniformed and plainclothed, some guy got away with lighting an actual fuse. A man was seen bent over the device, like Wile E. Coyote. Then he disappeared, in his Carhardt jacket, carrying his yellow toolbox. The authorities haven't caught him yet. (Chances are he ditched the toolbox.) They just know that he was probably disgruntled. Somehow, this did not seem to strike much fear into the hearts of the people who congregate down there for work every day.

Wall Street showed itself to be not only extremely vulnerable, but also dismissive of an apt little piece of symbolism. The bomb went off on the last day of one of worst-and weirdest-weeks in recent years. Despite the covers on those magazines on the newsstand, trumpeting the long-running bull market ("The Boom," crowed Business Week ; "The Hottest Market Ever," said Money ), it had been an ominous few days: Internet hackers, a trickster Treasury Department, an inverted yield curve, a plunging Dow. Now there was this little taste of anarchy-a pipe bomb before dawn. In a less complacent world, it might have signaled a shift in the spirit of the times, the onset of some new grimy collapse.

Bombings used to really mean something downtown. The worst came in 1920, at J.P. Morgan & Company's headquarters. The explosion killed 40 people. Investigators ultimately concluded that anarchists were responsible, but they never caught any.

In 1975, the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation, or F.A.L.N., blew up Fraunces Tavern, on Broad Street, and damaged the Anglers' Club upstairs, killing four. In 1982, the F.A.L.N. set off a series of bombs at Merrill Lynch & Company, the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange and Chase Manhattan Bank, but no one was killed.

On Feb. 11, the bombing was apparently as apolitical as it was inconsequential. Wall Street yawned. No blood, no foul. The players in this market have grown adept at dismissing bad and strange things as mere bumps on the way to more prosperity. They shrugged it off in 1997, when a similar bomb went off at 222 Broadway, at a building owned by Merrill Lynch. It happened just as the city was conducting a massive anti-terrorism drill up the street. That disquieting fact was not enough to prick the feeling of invincibility pervading the southern tip of Manhattan.

Nor was this latest little boom.

An anonymous stock broker offered this assessment outside a recent screening of the soon-to-be-released film Boiler Room . But before he could elaborate, he was whisked away by his friends, who feared that as a veteran of a sleazy brokerage like the one depicted in the film, he was risking his ill-gotten riches and his hard-won employment at a legitimate firm by sharing his thoughts.

The movie is premiering at the Sundance film festival on Jan. 28 and isn't due to open in Manhattan until Feb. 18. But already the goons on the trading desks on Wall Street are looking forward to it. They want it to be their movie. They haven't had one, not since Wall Street . They need some new lines.

The audience at the midtown screening was full of brokers and traders. But most of them had never worked at a place like J.T. Marlin, Boiler Room 's fictional brokerage. They worked for established firms like Paine Webber Group Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. J.T. Marlin is a bucket shop, a churn-and-burn operation just off the Long Island Expressway where 20-something brokers earn huge commissions by unloading crappy stock on gullible clients. They pump up the price, then dump their own shares, leaving customers with worthless stock. Think of the mob-run pump-and-dump outfit in The Sopranos . Think of A.R. Baron, D.H. Blair, Whale Securities or any number of obscure little firms that have run afoul of regulators in recent years. They are the bull market's underbelly, its raw, greedy essence. They are the real hustlers, without pretense.

Thirteen years have passed since Oliver Stone gave Wall Street its most memorable icon, Gordon Gekko, and all his Op-Ed-ready dictums about greed and lunch. Somehow, since then, a decade of stock mania has gone unnoticed by Hollywood. The culture at the center of the wealth creation machine has escaped the myth makers.

Boiler Room , written and directed by first-time filmmaker Ben Younger, tells the story of Seth Davis, a young college dropout from Queens who goes to work for J.T. Marlin and experiences firsthand the crude sales tactics and lavish life styles of its sales force. Mr. Younger spent a year researching this world, then wrote his picture. It isn't going to win too many awards; it is simplistic, slapdash and a little goofy. But it captures the swagger and the patter of the young obnoxious stock-hawkers perfectly.

There's a scene in the movie in which Seth, played by Saving Private Ryan medic Giovanni Ribisi, visits the house of one of his new colleagues. The house is immense but unfurnished (with the exception of a tanning bed in the dining room). The traders are gathered in a spare room off the kitchen, watching Wall Street on a giant TV set. It is the famous "Lunch is for wimps" scene in Gordon Gekko's office. One by one, the brokers watching the movie-among them Ben Affleck and Vin Diesel-begin to recite the lines along with Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen. Then they chant along with the movie like a Greek chorus.

But Boiler Room has some new dictums for their real-life counterparts: "Don't pitch the bitch" (meaning, Never sell stock to women); "Act as if" (meaning, "Act as if you've got a nine-inch cock"); and selling stock is "the white-boy way of slinging crack rock" (meaning, It will make you rich fast).

"A friend's firm that I visited was exactly like this one," a Paine Webber broker said after the screening. "It was on Long Island. The parking lot was full of Porsches, BMW's, Ferraris. There were a hundred guys in there. Every single one of them was under 25. Most of them were just high school graduates. They were all wearing Rolexes."

"I was similar to the kid in the movie," said a 30-year-old trader at a major firm who started out in a bucket shop. He was speaking from his trading floor, the day after seeing a working print of Boiler Room . "I was going to law school. There was a kid I knew from college who said, 'What are you doing in law school?' He was making half a million dollars, and he was out of college a year. I said, 'What the fuck, you kidding me?' I went to check it out.

"When I first got there, I didn't know anything. I was just intrigued by how much money these guys were making. I was looking at them and saying, 'They're idiots. I'm a lot more intelligent than they are. If these guys can make this kind of money, then I'm sure I can.' At first, it was fun, the thrill of closing someone, making sales on the phone. It was a rush. We had limousine trips. Our boss took us out to dinner, champagne, Dom Pérignon. A couple of them were fucking around with the other shit. It was a good life, for a 21-, 22-year-old kid. You think you're a superstar.

"But it wasn't long before I caught on to what the whole deal was, and what these guys were doing. And it wasn't something I wanted to be associated with. My morals were just like, No way."

He got out. A friend got him a job at a real firm. He was lucky. The boiler room firm got busted and went belly-up.

The papers are full of wire items detailing the penalties faced by such brokerages, but so far no one figure has emerged as a face for this generation.

Two years ago, a former broker named Scott Gilman approached a writer named Timothy Harper. Mr. Gilman wanted Mr. Harper to help him write a book about his experiences as a bucket-shop broker. They got a contract from Harper Collins. Then, just before the book was to be published, Mr. Gilman pulled out. When the book, License to Steal: The Secret World of Wall Street and the Systematic Plundering of the American Investor , came out in November, the co-author's name had been changed to "Anonymous," and details in the book had been altered, even though Mr. Gilman's name had been printed six months earlier in a Publishers Weekly item about the book. Forbes and 60 Minutes were told that he was no longer available for interviews. "He wanted to be famous, but then for whatever reason he changed his mind," Mr. Harper said. (He would not confirm that Mr. Gilman was Anonymous.) "But I don't really know why he came to me in the first place or why he backed out." Mr. Gilman could not be reached.

The biggest legend of the bucket-shop world may be Al Palagonia, the top salesman at now-defunct D.H. Blair. "Al would run the morning meeting, kind of like Ben Affleck in the movie," recalled one former Blair broker. "He'd play the Rocky theme, just trying to get everyone all pumped up to get on the phones." In 1997, his hard-sell tactics got him sanctioned and fined by securities regulators. He was banned from the industry. (His basketball team was also banned from a West Side night league, after they started a brawl.) But Spike Lee, who sat next to Mr. Palagonia at Knicks games in Madison Square Garden, cast him as the sleazy agent in He Got Game and as one of the thugs in Summer of Sam . Al Palagonia may have made it to the big screen, but the legend of Al Palagonia did not.

Boiler Room wants to give its audience some real Al Palagonias. But instead of Al Palagonia it has Ben Affleck. And Ben Affleck is no Al Palagonia.

But three days later, on Jan. 13, at another merger announcement between an old-economy company and new-economy buyer, there was a better fashion statement. H. Marshall Schwarz, the chief executive of U.S. Trust Corporation and great-grandson of toy seller F.A.O. Schwarz, appeared before the press to announce the sale of the venerable trust company to Charles Schwab Corporation, and he was wearing an old-school, Ivy League- style crimson tie.

You don't see that kind of tie anymore–especially in shareholder moments like these.

Yet there he was, the blue-blood boss of a blue-blood bank, sporting his pedigree in the face of the new economy's increasing indifference to it. The tie was an act of defiance, a little vestige of 19th-century thinking in a very 21st-century deal, between an 147-year-old private bank and a new-era on-line brokerage.

The tie reflected the U.S. Trust image: longtime bastion of old money and, more recently, of big money both old and new. In New York, U.S. Trust is thought of as a club, patronized by the very wealthy and their trustafarian offspring. The average U.S. Trust customer has a $7 million account. The minimum is $2 million. On Wall Street, among those making their first millions, the name is passed along discreetly as a safe, smart place to salt away the money. "They're good to young professionals," as one client put it.

In fact, this is how Schwab came around to courting U.S. Trust. Schwab co-chief executive David Pottruck, flush with cash (last year he sold about $100 million in Schwab stock), became a U.S. Trust client two years ago. So pleased was he that, to paraphrase Victor Kiam, he tried to buy the company.

Mr. Schwarz at first rebuffed him, protesting that U.S. Trust was not for sale. But eight months later, he gave in, to the tune of $2.73 billion. The Internet (and Schwab's Internet valuation) was impossible to ignore, and Schwab, for all its blue-plate beginnings as a discount brokerage, had become the on-line king, with a richly valued stock and $725 billion under management (making it the fourth largest financial institution in the United States, if the measure is value of clients' assets). U.S. Trust has $86 billion in assets.

As incongruous as these two companies are, they actually complement each other perfectly. Schwab now has a high-net-worth operation, so it can hold onto the hands, and therefore the assets, of its richest clients; and U.S. Trust gets Schwab's technological and financial resources– "high-touch" meets "high-tech," as Mr. Schwarz put it in a CNBC interview the day the deal was announced.

But in some ways it was a sale that was not a sale. The old bank serving the let-them-eat-cake class now gets to have its cake and eat it, too. San Francisco-based Schwab is paying a whopping 64 percent premium for the company, yet U.S. Trust is retaining its name, its work force, its board of directors and its New York headquarters. Mr. Schwarz and his lieutenant, president Jeff Maurer, were paid a ton to stay put. He has not been taken out. So he didn't really have to play along.

Founded in 1853, U.S. Trust is America's oldest trust company. It managed the fortunes of Astors, Whitneys and Rockefellers. But in the past two decades, it has sought to shed its stodgy image, while simultaneously reaping its benefits. Beneath the veneer, there's a new-age shrewdness. It has, in those 20 years, learned to sell itself. It knows that assets make the vorld go 'round. Having money under management is both reliable and lucrative, a rare pairing in the world of finance.

When Mr. Schwarz took the helm in 1990, he got U.S. Trust out of the corporate lending business and emphasized its traditional strengths–asset management and back-office securities processing. Once they're in the door, customers then are sold other fee-based services–private banking, estate planning and so forth.

U.S. Trust began aggressively pursuing new customers; dissipate heirs and little old ladies in tennis dresses were no longer enough. U.S. Trust lowered its minimum account limit, and found itself in the sweet spot of one of the greatest periods of wealth creation in American history.

Its business grew, and it became a good target. "We were too small to be big and too big to be small," said Mr. Maurer, U.S. Trust's president. Which means, as the investment bankers like to say, They were big enough to eat, yet small enough to be eaten.

Getting Schwabbed

On Wall Street on the day of the announcement, the Schwab-U.S. Trust deal summoned up memories and precipitated comparisons.

When Eric Gleacher sold his boutique investment bank to National Westminster Bank P.L.C. in 1995 for $135 million, his peers on Wall Street were in awe. One hundred thirty-five million was a hell of a lot of money for what was essentially a few guys and their clients. People on the Street came up with a new term: Gleachers. As in, Nat West got taken for 135 Gleachers.

Well, $2.7 billion is a lot of Gleachers. You might even say that Mr. Schwarz has created a new denomination: the Schwarz (not to be confused with the Schwartz, the metaphysical force of Spaceballs origin). As in, Mr. Schwab paid nearly three whole Schwarzes for U.S. Trust (there being 1,000 Gleachers to a Schwarz).

The deal summoned up another eponym from days gone by. Back in 1981, Charles Schwab sold his discount brokerage to Bank of America for $53 million. He was paid in Bank of America stock. Soon after the deal closed, the price of Bank of America's shares collapsed, and the deal didn't look so good anymore. Thereafter, many chief executives looking to sell their companies would tell their investment bankers that they wanted the buyer to pay cash. They didn't want the risk of owning the acquirer's stock. They didn't want to "get Schwabbed."

Eventually, in 1987, Mr. Schwab bought his company back and turned it into an on-line powerhouse, a brokerage for the 21st century. It was Schwab's turn to do the Schwabbing. Now Mr. Schwarz is getting Schwabbed by Mr. Schwab himself.

But this time, the results should be different. Schwab is a growing business, one whose stock has actually already taken a hit in recent months. Mr. Schwarz and his colleagues have been compensated handsomely. And, in any case, Mr. Schwarz is fairly well insulated against a declining share price.

His great-grandfather founded F.A.O. Schwarz, the famed toy store (the family sold the business in the 60's). His father F.A.O. Schwarz was a senior partner at Davis, Polk & Wardwell, the white-shoe law firm. His brother Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., a litigator at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, served as corporation counsel under Mayor Ed Koch.

Born and raised on the Upper East Side, Mr. Schwarz, 62, went to Milton Academy, a prep school outside Boston (he's now president of the board of trustees there), then got his undergraduate and business degrees from Harvard, before settling down, as so many Harvard Business School boys do, for a seven-year stint at Morgan Stanley. In 1967, he joined U.S. Trust, where his father was a trustee. In short, he is the very embodiment of an old-world banker: the relationship man with the college ties. As a friend who runs an investment bank put it, "Marshall? He's a real prince."

The day after the merger was announced, every U.S. Trust customer received an overnighted "dear client" letter from Mr. Schwarz explaining the deal and promising no lag in services. "I apologize for sacrificing a more personal salutation in the interest of speed," he wrote. Then near the end of the letter, he summed up the deal's ramifications: "Our partnership with Schwab is about growth and enhanced opportunities for our clients and employees."

Indeed.

The Observer had invited them there to discuss the art of being wrong. As perhaps the most visible, articulate and persistent pessimists during the long bull market of the 90's, they have refined the act of simultaneously holding fast and eating crow.

It was 8 A.M. Morgan Stanley was serving breakfast. Hours before, the transit workers strike had been averted, and Mr. Grant had closed the latest edition of his biweekly newsletter. He was so bushed, he ordered iced tea for breakfast. As the host, Mr. Biggs sat at the head of the table with Mr. Grant on his right and Mr. Abelson on his left.

Soon they were joined by a fourth, Henry Blodget, Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch & Company. As the guy who triumphantly predicted the huge spike in the stock price of Amazon.com Inc. one year ago, he has become the face of the Internet stock boom. He is in many ways the embodiment of the weird new science that has so flummoxed Messrs. Biggs, Grant and Abelson: that of ascribing huge valuations to companies that don't make money. Essentially, Mr. Blodget is an Internet bull. The Observer had invited him as a foil.

Mr. Abelson: Hello, Henry. Do you feel like a foil?

Mr. Grant: He just feels rich.

Mr. Blodget (sitting down) : I've been able to take advantage of my lucky advice.

Mr. Grant: There's a piece of news.

Mr. Biggs: Are we going to talk about the stock market or the Internet or what?

Mr. Abelson: Do you know anything about the stock market, Jim?

Mr. Grant: No. This reminds me of a fellow who was a compulsive gambler. He was so compulsive and so unlucky that his bookie began to take pity on him. He was betting on basketball games. He bet on the N.C.A.A.'s and lost every single round of the tournament. Finally he was down to his last five bucks, and he lost that. The guy went to his bookie and said, "I can't pay you." The bookie said, "Well, basketball doesn't seem to be working. Why don't you take a shot on hockey?" And the guy said, "Hockey? What do I know about hockey?"

So, the stock market.

The Observer : Does it matter whether one is right or wrong?

Mr. Abelson: It's better to be right. There's no question. But we all can in one way or another justify our existence, because somebody has to be wrong, or else how would you know who's right? One of these years we're going to be right. Basically, our function is to piss in the wind. Somebody should be standing here pointing out that maybe things are getting out of hand, maybe things are not as rosy as they seem. But I certainly would rather have been right. In other words, I wish the Dow was at 500.

Mr. Grant: Somebody once asked me, "If you had to do it over again, would you have been bullish?" And the only thing I could say was, Yes!

[laughter]

Mr. Biggs: I'm a little different from them. Like a lot of people my age, I'm bearish and cautious, but I'm running a money management firm. The trick really is to survive through this period where we have been too cautious on the markets, but to remain flexible enough so you don't take such extreme positions with real money that you get wiped out.

Mr. Abelson: There's a difference between emphasizing risk and forecasting the market. I mean, I think both Jim and I have written continually about bullish things. It tends to get lost, but we do. It isn't as if we think people should head off for the South Seas and forget about investing.

Mr. Grant: It's not as if people with a skeptical cast of mind can't get through the day. It's not about being bearish as much as it is about being contrary, about having a sort of creative dyslexia about the world and about not accepting it, you know, when J.P. Morgan comes out and says, "Buy Amazon," you say, "Huh? Is that right?"

Mr. Blodget: The question I'd ask is, over the past few years, in retrospect, is there something you missed in the analysis that now makes you feel like you made the wrong call? Not necessarily because of what the market has done.

Mr. Abelson: It's the wrong call, though, Henry, because of what the market has done.

Mr. Blodget: But you have to go back to the decision point. I have in mind something that Bob Rubin said when he was Treasury Secretary: "Just because the outcome is different from what you predict doesn't mean that the decision was wrong, based on the information you had at the time."

Mr. Biggs: I made the wrong call, but a lot of the bears in general, the people who are cautious, the wrong call they've made is about the Internet and the dimensions and the speed of the Internet. Basically, these people have been right about the 80 percent of the market that is the old-economy stocks, which have been going down for a year and a half now. But I think we way underestimated the impact of the Internet.

Mr. Abelson: I think what we all underestimated was how valuable losses are. We didn't realize that losing money was a way to get rich.

Mr. Grant: It's the irrelevance of valuation in general. It's not just that no known model of valuation seems relevant to the Internet. It's that the old-economy stocks are also immune to valuation. There are increasing numbers of stocks with decent balance sheets and fine prospects for profitability that are selling for just four, five, six times earnings.

Mr. Biggs: But the question is, do they really have fine prospects of profitability? I think the Internet is changing the world and that its impact on the profitability of industrial America is going to be staggering. I don't think anyone has any idea what the Internet is going to do, but you know that it's very deflationary, and that it is crushing the profits in a lot of sectors in the economy.

Mr. Grant: It's crushing profits particularly in the Internet sector, don't you think?

[laughter]

Mr. Biggs: Yeah, it's crushing profits in both sectors. Ford announced they're going to take $3 billion out of their costs by buying parts through the Internet and that the entire automobile industry is gonna take out some incredible number, like $60 billion or $80 billion. That's coming out of someone's else's profits, out of businesses that already exist. And that's why an auto parts supplier like Federal Mogul that looks incredibly cheap, a really good company selling at a discount to book value–that's why valuing it is irrelevant, because you have no idea what Federal Mogul's profitability is going to be.

Mr. Grant: So how can you invest not knowing anything about valuation?

Mr. Biggs: It's hard.

Mr. Grant: You just described the perfect case for Treasury bills.

Mr. Biggs: Mmm …

Mr. Abelson: If we extrapolate from what Barton said, there's not going to be an economy, and that isn't going to work very well.

Mr. Biggs: Of course there's going to be an economy. How is there not going to be an economy?

Mr. Abelson: If you kill profit margins through all production, I don't see how you're going to sustain an economy.

Mr. Biggs: You may not kill Ford and General Motors

Mr. Abelson: Just the people that supply them, yes.

Mr. Biggs: It's creative destruction. You're just taking out an inefficient layer of infrastructure.

Mr. Abelson: Inefficiency is in the eye of the beholder.

Asking Henry

Mr. Grant: In the case of an Amazon, Henry, how do you know how high is too high? Given the uncharted waters of valuation, what is the right price for Amazon?

Mr. Blodget: I don't know. I think in valuing these stocks, you can only come to very vague, fuzzy conclusions. You have to go out several years and ask yourself what is the real opportunity here? Usually the mistake is in being too conservative.

Mr. Abelson: You want a recent analogy for this market? Go to Japan in the late 80's. The same arguments were made then as are made now: that it's different .

Mr. Blodget: I don't necessarily think this is different. But I do think it's always important to ask whether it might be different. If you're paid to manage large sums of money, if you decide that right now it is no different and we are five days away from becoming another Japan–

Mr. Abelson: I'd say three days.

Mr. Blodget: Well, if we are in fact three years away from that, in those three years it won't matter, because if you're on the sidelines when the market triples, you will have lost your job before you are proven right.

Mr. Grant: It's always different. If it weren't, the historians would have all the money, whereas in fact they have so little of it. And yet there are aspects to every market that are eternal because markets are all about people in crowds, and people in crowds tend to repeat patterns of behavior.

Mr. Blodget: And they tend to go too far both ways.

Mr. Abelson: If you manage money, you have to take a different attitude. If someone calls a plumber in, the plumber may not like the architecture, but he has to fix the leak. People pay Barton and Henry to manage their money. Jim and I aren't restrained by having someone else's pot of money.

The Observer : Then do you feel restrained, Barton?

Mr. Biggs: No, not really. But look at Warren Buffett. Buffett's just as bearish as we are, so he tries to be amusing about it.

Mr. Abelson: It's the last refuge of scoundrels.

Mr. Biggs: It's a defense mechanism.

The End Is Where

Mr. Biggs: So, Alan, is it going to be secular [i.e., very long] or cyclical?

Mr. Abelson: No question, we've had a secular bull market, so we'll have a secular bear market. Of course. Symmetry is everything.

Mr. Biggs: That is an important comment.

Mr. Abelson: Just witness the interconnectedness of it all. We've never had so much exposure to the stock market. The 401(k) revolutionized an awful lot of things. We haven't been through a bear market with this particular phenomenon. It'll be interesting to see. We may not be having breakfast here. And, Henry, I doubt your office will still exist.

Mr. Biggs: If Alan's right and the crash is secular rather than cyclical, the intellectual bears are gonna get crushed too.

Mr. Abelson: They're the first to be crucified.

Mr. Biggs: To look at Japan is instructive. The Bank of Japan people I talk to say that Greenspan six or eight months ago sent over a couple people and really did an intensive study on the Bank of Japan's actions. They looked at what happened in the late 80's and early 90's, and that poor old Governor [Yasushi] Mieno [former governor of the Bank of Japan] who finally pricked the bubble ended up being indicted as an economic criminal by the Diet.

Mr. Abelson: And well he should have been.

Mr. Biggs: But he was the hero, really.

Mr. Abelson: And I remember you wrote that. Mr. Greenspan is conscious of this.

Mr. Biggs: He is conscious of this.

Mr. Abelson: And don't be surprised if he [Mr. Greenspan] gets indicted.

Mr. Biggs: He won't get indicted because he's never going to take the courageous stand.

Mr. Abelson: He'll get indicted for not taking the courageous stand. I don't think it's even a possibility that he's gonna win in this thing.

Mr. Biggs: Really? You don't think so?

Mr. Abelson: No, I don't. I've thought from the start that the best he can hope for is a footnote as to why the crash took place. And Greenspan will deserve a footnote. I think he had a chance in 1996 to do something. But why he didn't raise margin requirements is beyond me. Just because it hadn't been done since 1974 is hardly a good reason.

The Observer : How do you think the boom will end?

Mr. Abelson: It won't end well. I hope I don't shock you.

Mr. Grant: It's gonna end in 1986. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Mr. Abelson: '86 was actually a very nice bear market.

Mr. Grant: Hey, Barton, can you buy me another iced tea?

Mr. Biggs: Absolutely. Press that little button right there.

Mr. Grant: This is a bull market. Press the button and a guy comes in.

(I Can't Get No) Vindication

The Observer : How would a crash affect your lives?

Mr. Abelson: Not much. I would probably turn bullish too early, like I did in '74.

Mr. Grant: Nothing wrong with that.

Mr. Blodget: Business would slow down quite a lot.

Mr. Abelson: Henry would become a money manager.

Mr. Blodget: After a few years' hiatus.

Mr. Abelson: Or a consultant.

Mr. Grant: I don't know whether it would be good or not for my business. It would certainly be good for the journalism.

The Observer : Is a crash something you wish for?

Mr. Biggs: Both of these guys should definitely wish for it. They'd be vindicated, and it's not gonna make a lot of difference to them financially. But for Henry and me it would be an incredibly painful and expensive disaster. We work for financial service companies.

Mr. Abelson: Vindication would be nice. Everybody wants vindication in some sense. But it isn't going to change the fact that we're still going to be skeptical.

Mr. Grant: For me, the point is not being personally vindicated. It is no longer being tormented by the sense that two and two don't make four but rather 5 7/8, and tomorrow they'll make 6 1/4. People tell me this new truth with all the certainty of accumulated wealth behind them. That's what's exasperating. It's the sense that not only valuation but the laws of nature and of compound interest have all changed, and nobody mentioned it. Everybody else found out, but nobody told me. No matter how sure you are of the ancient cycles of boom and bust, no matter how sure you are of the tendency of people in crowds to do the same things at roughly the same moment, no matter how sure you are of those truths, you can't help but wonder if things changed and nobody had the courtesy to say so.

Mr. Biggs: The real truth, if it's a secular bear market, not cyclical, is that it's gonna take 10 years to get through it. It may even take longer than that.

Mr. Abelson: It could be longer. What was it, 25 years for the market to come back after 1929?

Mr. Biggs: The best that you can hope for is that we have a nice 20 to 25 percent decline, then the market goes dead for three or four years. That's the best outcome.

Mr. Abelson: The best of the worst.

Mr. Grant: I always say that we'll know when the bottom is here when CNBC starts showing test patterns. As it is, the world has come to accept that they have to know about the market at every minute. Well, they don't have to know. And, furthermore, when the time comes when one actually has to be interested again, they won't want to hear it. A.J. Liebling, who is the greatest of all, wrote about the Daily News ' Inquiring Photographer in 1933 who went around asking people in the streets whether they'd read the agate stocks quotes, and they gave the Inquiring Photographer a piece of their minds. They didn't want to hear about it. The market is now ubiquitous.

Mr. Blodget: And that is the reason why valuations are where they are. It's supply and demand. There's just a greater percentage of global assets in the stock market. And the question is, if we do get a 25 percent correction or a two-year bear market, does that asset allocation shift back? Because if it does, then your scenario of a 7-to-10-year bear market seems totally plausible.

Mr. Biggs: We also have to consider the possibility that we really are having a deflationary boom.

Mr. Abelson: That sounds like joyless sex to me.

Mr. Biggs: Just the opposite. It's perpetual sex.

Generally speaking, Jim Grant, the biweekly newsletter's editor, has been wrong for years, but he wears wrongness better than anybody. He is the most eloquent of the eloquent bears. Surveying the nation's roaring financial markets, he has predicted trouble for years-then made light fun of himself when the trouble hasn't come. "I suppose it's better to deprecate oneself than to wait for others to do it," he said. "If one has been bearish in this environment, one has had plenty of cause for self-deprecation."

But the self-effacement is not entirely sincere, because Mr. Grant and the investment professionals who are skeptical or curmudgeonly enough to shake their heads over the various excesses in the world's capital markets believe fiercely that this supposed New Age, in which the S.&P. index only goes up and rates stay low, is not a new age at all. The sky will fall. The bubble will pop. It has to.

As Mr. Grant said on a recent morning, quoting the economist Herbert Stein: "If something can't last forever, it won't."

He was speaking at a fall investment conference hosted by Grant's . About 150 investment professionals had gathered at the St. Regis hotel in midtown on Nov. 10 to talk gloom and doom with their favorite purveyor of it. They sat behind long tables in rows of cane chairs, dipping into tins of Pastilline hard candies as they listened to each speaker at the podium try to reconcile troubling signals in the economy with the seemingly unstoppable boom.

It was an older crowd-people who have been through more than one business cycle, who know this one will end. They almost want it to, for vindication's sake. "I joke in a hyperbolic way about doomsday and calamity," Mr. Grant said a few days later, "but what most people in that room are disappointed in not seeing is a reversion to the mean. A return to something like normal valuations, for example."

One hedge fund manager at the conference said, "It's a different generation. Everybody here, including myself, feels somewhat insignificant. I consider myself a good fundamental analyst. Yet no matter how detailed and capable my work is, I feel like it doesn't matter. This market is so psychology-driven right now. It's in the throes of manic gold fever. The mood overwhelms the subtleties and the need to pay attention to them. It's discouraging."

The conference room was full of the kinds of guys you see all the time walking down Madison Avenue: slightly tan, hair a little wild, great shoes, strong eyes, a bad knee, a European newspaper. You see them and you know: These men manage a shitload of money.

There were a few legends there, too: Michael Steinhardt, the hedge fund wizard who got out of the game in 1995. Leon Cooperman, the chairman of Omega Advisors, one of the world's largest hedge funds. And Jim Chanos, the renowned short-seller.

Mr. Cooperman, a short fat man with an ear-to-ear combover and white shirt cuffs, sat in the back row, jacket off, sprawled in his chair looking a little bored but a little amused, too. (He was one of the very few who conspicuously called in trades to their offices during breakfast, before the speeches began.)

There were eight speakers. Jim Grant kicked it off with a speech entitled, "What have they done with our interest rates?" Then came a presentation called "Dow 3600."

Mr. Steinhardt was the last one to take the podium. His job was to ask questions of Barrie Wigmore, a retired partner of Goldman, Sachs & Company and author of The Crash and Its Aftermath , who had just delivered a speech about the circumstances surrounding the 1929 crash. "If we are at the precipice, at that moment we have sought and not found," Mr. Steinhardt asked him, growling into the microphone, "what is the bullet that will push us over?"

Mr. Wigmore stepped up to the mike. "I'm a historian!" he said, by way of poor-mouthing his prediction. But then he said that in his opinion, we were not at the precipice. He turned the question back on Mr. Steinhardt.

"I don't do it anymore," Mr. Steinhardt said. "I don't really follow things closely enough." Then he made a few general observations: stocks are overvalued, the trade deficit is a serious issue, and wage growth is coming in the next few months.

Mr. Cooperman spoke up from the back row. He wanted specifics. "Michael, you say you don't do it anymore, but surely you've been dabbling here and there."

Mr. Steinhardt confessed. He was a dilettante now. "If you insist, Lee, I continue to have a predilection toward the short side. I was born with it. I think that there were four days during my career that I was long."

He was in good company.

The Madison Pub, the venerable Upper East Side gin joint renowned for its jukebox, its hamburgers and its patrons (both real and imagined), has passed away. Madison Avenue's only dive, its most redeeming anachronism, is gone for good.

"It's closing? Oh, damn," said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "It was a beautiful place. It had the best hamburgers and the best jukebox in New York. You have to be my age to say it was the best jukebox, but if 'Just a Gigolo' is your idea of what a record should be, they had it. And Jimmy Durante!"

During its 75 years, the Madison Pub served as a neighborhood joint for the likes of Rex Harrison, George Steinbrenner, Woody Allen, Clausvon Bülow, Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis and John F. Kennedy Jr. The art crowd came in from Sotheby's (back when its headquarters was down the street) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and made deals, legitimate or otherwise, over the pub's celebrated burgers. Mourners on their way to or from the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home toasted their loved ones with a nip or three. And, at night, the dusty regulars presided over a shifting cast of neighborhood residents and out-of-towners who wanted a place more anonymous than Elaine's, more rugged than J.G. Melon's, less seedy than McSherry's and less ruinously famous than the White Horse Tavern or McSorley's. Just up Madison Avenue from the Hotel Carlyle and the Bemelmans' silver bowls of cashew nuts, the Madison Pub was the anti-Bemelmans: a dark, tight, smoky room half-underground, its oak floors, oak walls and oak bar nicked and worn.

For now the Madison Pub is lying in state, closed but intact. In the dim subterranean light you can still make out lists of names, both famous and obscure, painted in gold on the oak-paneled walls. A row of ceramic mugs, each inscribed with the name of a regular customer, still hangs over the bar. People stop, try the door, then peer inside, lingering at the street-level window to look at the menu: "Sandwiches: Ham $4.50, Salami $4.85, Sardines $5.65 …"

"I have a Madison Pub story," said Bobby Torre, the longtime manager of Melon's, the burger joint on Third Avenue. "I can't verify it. But, one night, a long time ago, a couple walked in. The place was basically empty. Just three people sitting at the bar. 'There's nobody here,' the guy said. 'Let's go.' So they left. You know who the three people were? Ari Onassis, Jackie Kennedy and Peter Lawford."

Robert Liebrich, an architect who has been a Madison Pub regular since 1972, passed on another old tale: "One time, Woody Allen came in wearing his hat. One of the waiters who didn't know who he was requested that he remove it. And I believe that ended that. Woody didn't come in anymore."

Another legend: A few years back, a patron thought he saw George Steinbrenner sitting in back with a woman. After the couple left, the patron asked the bartender, "How often does Mr. Steinbrenner come in here?"

The bartender looked the patron in the eye and said simply, "That wasn't Mr. Steinbrenner."

There are ghosts in the old place, for sure.

The Last Clean-Up

On the last Saturday in August, George Bassett, the pub's 66-year-old owner, made the commute from his third-floor apartment above the pub down a set of stairs to the barroom. He supervised an end-of-summer cleaning, then locked up for the last time. It was time to retire and get out of New York. "I'm here all my life," he said. "Enough already."

And so he sold the pub and the five-story brownstone above it. Mr. Bassett plans to vacate the building in early December and move to Arizona. The buyer plans to convert the pub into-yes-an antiques shop. But that's all Mr. Bassett would say.

The Observer dropped by to see Mr. Bassett on a recent afternoon. His wife, Elizabeth, answered the door. Her husband, wearing an undershirt, lay sprawled on a recliner in the living room, watching Judge Mills Lane on TV. His hair and mustache were shoe-polish black, but he looked chalky and gaunt. He had a horrible cough. He did not want to talk about the pub. "Not today, my friend," he said, without lifting his head. "I'm not feeling too good."

But two days later, he allowed The Observer to have a look around, though he opted to stay upstairs. In his place he sent his 40-year-old son Cliff and called in intermittently to a telephone behind the bar to offer answers to questions.

(Asked whether he was sick, he said, "You mean am I gonna die today? No.")

The bar still was stocked, the jukebox still plugged in, the light still miserable. Tavern art cluttered the walls: a print of George Washington crossing the Delaware, some old signed boxing photos (Joey Archer, Joe Frazier) and a collection of cartoons by Irwin Hasen, pub regular and creator of Dondi , the old comic strip. And of course everywhere you looked there were those names on the walls.

The names, more than anything else, distinguished the Madison Pub. The panels flanking the fireplace featured Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Dean Stockwell, Rex Harrison, Mimi Benzell, Damon Runyon. To the right of the mantel was a long list of names under the calligraphic heading of "Ivy League Knights & Ivy League Ladies," which Mr. Bassett attributed to the fact that the old Finch College for Women used to be nearby, on East 78th Street.

The phone behind the bar rang. It was Mr. Bassett calling from upstairs.

"Did you look by the fireplace? You see those names?" he asked. "As I understand it, in the 40's, the owner of this place would put your name on the wall if you could drink three drinks of a drink called the Third Rail and still walk out of here standing up." Mr. Bassett didn't know the Third Rail's ingredients. He said his uncle had told him the story.

Marge Champion, the Hollywood and Broadway song-and-dance star, is on the wall with her late husband Gower Champion-right there by the fireplace, with the big hitters. For a brief period in the 1960's, they owned an apartment at 79th Street and Fifth Avenue. But Ms. Champion, now 80 years old, hasn't the faintest idea why her name is on the wall. "I don't remember going to a pub in the neighborhood," she said. "I don't remember a Madison Pub. I hardly remember being in any kind of a pub situation-maybe in London for a lark or something. And I have good long-term recall."

As for the Third Rail, she said, "That's wild. Gower couldn't drink at all. He had a stomach prone to ulcers. And I always had at most one drink. I really don't think we were ever in there."

Mr. Liebrich, the architect, whose name went up on the wall eight or nine years ago, said, "There are a couple of stories about the names … I personally had the impression those names, the famous ones by the fireplace, were just put on there. I don't know if those people came in."

"That's all bullshit," Mr. Bassett said. He explained that he has seen people come in and identify their names on the wall, or those of their grandparents. Conversations with numerous old patrons, who cite the late Freddy Reyes, a pub bartender for 30-odd years, seem to indicate that the names started going up in the 1940's, when the bar was popular with college kids.

Edward Sedlis has his name on the wall behind the bar. Now 82 years old, he's retired in Pompano, Fla., but back in the 1960's and 70's he used to drink there every day while he waited for his wife to get off work at the consignment shop next door. "It was a wonderful place full of some terrible characters," he said. "I have in mind a couple of guys who used to live off rich older women. They'd come in and tell us what they were doing to these rich ladies." He got his name on the wall when the calligrapher came in one day to put up some new names. Mr. Sedlis said, "Can you put me up there?" The calligrapher said, "Sure."

Mr. Bassett said he has no plans to do anything with the panels on the wall. "You want 'em?" he said. "I'm just gonna leave it all there." It's not the names he'll miss. It's the people themselves. "I had the best clients in the city," he said. And he began to name names: "George Steinbrenner, Ed Harris, Timothy Hutton, Christopher Penn, Joan Collins. What the hell is the name of that guy who plays Gomer Pyle-Jim Nabors. Ben Gazzara, Peter O'Toole. When Peter O'Toole was coming in, he was drinking milk. Chili and milk. I couldn't believe it. Let's see, Tuesday Weld, Mia Farrow …

"John Kennedy was in here a lot. And his sister, when she worked at the Met. Joseph Cotton, Sterling Hayden, Rex Harrison. Philip Johnson. Moynihan was a regular at one point, very nice man. And … Claus von Bülow. He used to come in with his daughter. Very quiet, very reserved. A class act."

A Prohibition Survivor

The place opened in 1925, according to Mr. Bassett. It was called Elizabeth Norman, a combination of the first names of the wife and husband who owned it. (No one seems to know anything about them.) During Prohibition, it was a speak-easy, with a dentist's office out front. In 1956, Joseph Feder, Mr. Bassett's uncle, took over the place. By then it was called the Madison Pub.

Mr. Bassett, who was raised on East 14th Street, began managing the pub in 1980, moving his family into the building in 1982. Previously, he'd owned a business finishing furniture and restoring antiques. After his aunt and uncle died-he in 1993, she in 1995-Mr. Bassett took over. And slowly, as luncheonettes popped up around the neighborhood, and Sotheby's left, and most of the galleries moved downtown, the crowds thinned.

He had to get rid of the old jukebox. In 1990, Mr. Bassett replaced the Wurlitzer with a rental that plays compact disks. "I used to go out every weekend with a customer who was a friend of mine to the flea markets to hunt for the old 45's," Mr. Bassett said. In the new box, much of the music was the same: Frank Sinatra, Larry Adler, Patsy Cline. But still, "The new jukebox was not as good as the old jukebox," Mr. Moynihan said.

Now he's letting go of it all, much to the dismay of its patrons and neighbors.

"Oh, my God, the pub's closed?" said Gene Schultz, president of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home. "The neighborhood will never be the same."

Peter Spinella, a former pub bartender who now lives in Sherman Oaks, Calif., was similarly distraught when he heard the news. "This has just ruined my life," he said. "That's the mecca of the East Side. New York will never be the same. That is death to Manhattan. That's like taking the Yankees out of New York."

The unkindest cut may have come in June: "Up until three months ago, you could smoke in the place," Mr. Bassett said. (He's partial to Carlton 100's.) "But then someone from the city walked in, and I don't know why he did it, but he told us we couldn't smoke anymore."

At that point, its days were numbered.

The Daily Deal is an American Lawyer Media publication, shepherded by the company's publishers, editors and strategic planners, but it is Bruce Wasserstein's beast. Two years ago, a fund controlled by Wasserstein Perella Group Inc., his investment banking firm, bought American Lawyer Media, then added The National Law Journal and the New York Law Journal . This collection of legal publications (21 in all) gave Mr. Wasserstein a launching pad for his media mogul fantasies, whatever they were. (Mr. Wasserstein did not return calls for comment.)

As it turns out, the rumpled 51-year-old investment banker wanted to do a daily newspaper, a rigorous record of deals as procedure. Ideally, the paper would describe his world and simultaneously help him rise above it. As the spirit presiding over a must-read, he would become the spirit presiding over its readers. And as a Wall Street personality and product of the 80's who had both benefited from and been buffeted by press coverage, he would satisfy that yearning so many news subjects seem to have to control the media, be the media.

Mr. Wasserstein is a deal geek who nevertheless aspires to some measure of cultural greatness. But his thing is transactions. Mr. Wasserstein seems to be on a campaign to cast himself as the avatar of the deal, as though in anticipation of some distant era when economic historians will reduce the last quarter of the 20th century, the I-Banker Period, down to one or two memorable, well-documented legends. He wants to be that guy. First, last summer, there was his book, Big Deal , a kind of textbook. There it was, on beaches and in bookshop windows, aligning the author with the craft of the deal. And what a nifty juxtaposition, right there on the cover in silver and blue and in all capital letters: "Bruce Wasserstein Big Deal."

Then, also last summer, Mr. Wasserstein, a fan of Daily Variety , convinced executives at American Lawyer Media to start developing a daily trade paper that would serve his peers, the people who get a thrill, or at least a living, out of the buying and selling of companies. The executives were hesitant. A daily paper for a narrow audience, in a competitive category, sounded like a real money pit. But Mr. Wasserstein pulled rank.

"Bruce had a number of people working for him whose first and second reactions were, 'This can't work. It's too expensive and the market's not big enough,'" said one executive familiar with The Daily Deal 's inception. "But Bruce kept saying, 'Stop telling me how it won't work, because we're gonna do it. Tell me how we're gonna make it work.' He persisted in the face of the people who were crunching the numbers."

"I wouldn't say it's his baby," said Jack Berkowitz, the vice president for strategic planning at American Lawyer Media. "It came out of his idea. He was absolutely the motivator. He said, 'Here's the concept, go do it.' There was no opposition, though there was definitely skepticism. Nobody thought it was stupid. His first idea actually was to do something for the corporate lawyer and the deal lawyer, with some tangential readership in the banking community. But at some point we realized it was a publication for the deal-making community."

This is their newly minted demographic, a superset of corporate lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, venture capitalists, chief executives-anyone, basically, who makes a living feeding off corporate America's endless reshuffling of capital and debt. As a group these people don't have a trade paper, as the entertainment community does with Variety . Mr. Wasserstein believed that these constituents would share his appetite for the arcana of the deal, the nuts-and-bolts tactics and the smaller transactions that don't make it into The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times . A heady mix of gossip and regulatory ramifications! As a recent promotional mailing from the publisher puts it: "From antitrust to tax matters, dead hand pill provisions to cross-border deals, regulatory rulings to corporate governance questions, delayed-redemption provisions to changing securities laws, deal-making today is as complex as it is fascinating."

American Lawyer Media believes that there are approximately 125,000 who might share that fascination. That's the deal community: 125,000. But out of the gate, The Daily Deal 's publishers are aiming for a circulation of 25,000. Of that, about 10,000 will receive the paper free. The others will have to pay $750 a year, or $3.50 per issue (in theory at least). The paper will come out five times a week. The Web site, for which subscribers will have a password, will be updated three times a day. The paper will be hand-delivered to subscribers, and only in selected cities on the two coasts (plus Chicago).

Last December, they hired an editor, Robert Teitelman, from Institutional Investor , who began assembling a staff comprised mostly of reporters and editors from other financial trades. By August, an editorial staff of about 40 was cranking out semidaily prototypes.

"The big papers have a business audience, and they cover transactions from a shareholder perspective," Mr. Teitelman said. "At the other pole are lots of smaller publications, like Investment Dealers Digest and Institutional Investor that sort of cater to the Wall Street crowd. What we've done is define this community that comes together in deals, a collection of different groups. I don't think anyone has taken them all and put them under one tent."

In a prototype dated Sept. 31, this is what you might find in The Daily Deal : Theodore Forstmann's "biggest equity investment in his fabled buyout career," China Airlines on the block, the ramifications of the demise of the pooling of interests (that old accounting tactic), an arb spread scoreboard and a ranking of the Top 20 advisers to U.S. target companies (Wasserstein Perella comes in 20th). All of it is presented crisply, in a design that oddly recalls Rolling Stone .

American Lawyer Media is plowing millions of dollars into the new paper. Mr. Berkowitz estimated that by year's end the company will have spent $4 to 5 million. The budget, as it stands now, is in the "low double-digit millions," he said. No matter, that's a lot of money for 25,000, whether or not they're the right 25,000. It's an expensive startup, with not much of an apparent upside. It's not like the ranks of these deal makers are expanding exponentially, or even expanding at all.

"To me, The Daily Deal is the daily disaster," said Porter Bibb, an investment banker and former journalist. "Despite the fact that there are more and bigger deals in history, the bloom is off the M&A deal making rose. There's no room for personalities anymore. Even with something like CBS-Viacom, the biggest media deal in history, its not about Sumner Redstone and Mel Karmazin. It's about a hundred anonymous specialists in tax law, [Securities and Exchange Commission] regulations and other technical skills who made this happen. It's all banalities."

Those people are The Daily Deal 's ideal readers, but they are also its necessary subjects, which will make for a much less arresting paper. It is a paper for deal geeks. Even if it sells, it will hardly delight, entertain or even instruct, since the arcana of these deals tend not to be applicable to other deals.

On the Street, much of the target audience from Mr. Wasserstein's line of work is skeptical-of its prospects, and therefore of Mr. Wasserstein's motives. "It's Bruce hubris," said one investment banker. "It's an ego trip," said another. "It's an indulgence," said a third. They scoffed at this antique-news on paper, delivered by hand-and cited the countless streams of information made available to them each day on their various screens.

But others are preparing to make room for it. "Everyone is gonna have to read it," said one arbitrageur, whose job it is to gauge the likelihood of deals being completed. "If other guys have it, I have to have it. I hate to admit it, but I think that this thing is gonna be a success." In other words, it will have to be indispensable, so that even the legions who breezily declare that they don't have the time will be forced to find a way to make some.

The editors know their readers are busy. "Our window in the morning is about 10 minutes long," Mr Teitelman said. He and a few other staffers have been making the rounds for months, meeting with potential readers, subjects and sources, trolling for input and leaks. "When we talked to bankers and lawyers and deal makers about patterns of reading, they don't have a helluva lot of time."

That may not matter, as long as they subscribe. As someone who was considering taking a job at The Daily Deal was told by one investment banker: "That thing will make money even if nobody reads it."

Mr. Teitelman laughed when he heard that one. "Hey, no problem," he said. "That means we get fewer letters. If it makes money, that's what we're here for, but we'd like it to be read."

So, presumably, would Mr. Wasserstein. There are easier ways to make money than by starting a daily newspaper.

Over the course of his career as one of Wall Street's most successful deal makers, Mr. Wasserstein has been both the media's darling and its whipping boy. During the 80's, when he and Joseph Perella made First Boston one of the top firms on the Street, the press helped him build a reputation as the father of modern M&A. But as many of the deals he put together foundered early this decade, he got labeled with the nickname "Bid-'em-up Bruce," referring to his penchant for urging clients to spend lavishly to get deals done (and thereby secure his fees). Through it all, he became known for leaking information strategically to the press. He understood the media, and used it to make himself one of the legends of the 80's. He also had an enduring interest in journalism, dating back to his days as a reporter at the Michigan Daily , the college paper at the University of Michigan. (He spent the summer of 1969 as a reporter-researcher at Forbes .)

"I remember Bruce showing me how to write editorials," said Jim Gaines, editor of Travel & Leisure Golf and a former managing editor at Time , Life and People , who spent a semester working on the Michigan Daily with Mr. Wasserstein. (They went to high school together, too, at McBurney School on the Upper West Side.) After Michigan, Mr. Gaines didn't run into Mr. Wasserstein until 1989, when Mr. Gaines was managing editor of Life and Mr. Wasserstein was advising Time Inc. in its $13.4 billion bid for Warner Communications. "I said, 'You're doing well,' and he said, 'We try.' I remember [Time Warner chief executive] Jerry Levin telling me: 'Bruce would rather have your job than his.' So I guess it was a bug that never left him."