From engineering financial instruments to building the world's biggest Ferris wheel, climb aboard with Matt Chaban for former Bear Stearns Asset Management CEO Richard Marin's wild ride.

Former Wells Fargo Chairman Dick Kovacevich will not abide arguments that the U.S. government bailed out his bank, especially not in his country club's men's dining room.

Large firms such as BlackRock are best positioned to take advantage of JOBS Act provisions that would lift the ban on advertising by private investment firms, Bloomberg reports. One reason: bigger money managers already have marketers on staff to work on products such as mutual funds.

Best Buy founder Richard Schulze is pressing ahead with plans to take the firm private, Reuters says.

The developing world needs Wall Street, but Chelsea Clinton doesn't, the former first daughter told Bloomberg. “It was incredibly, fiercely meritocratic, and I loved that,” said Ms. Clinton, who worked at Avenue Capital from 2006 to 2009 before leaving to pursue degrees in public health. “That wasn’t the metric I wanted to judge my life by in a professional sense.”

The children of billionaire Charlie Munger—Warren Buffett's business partner—are dogging California Governor Jerry Brown's re-election campaign.

Politicians are stretching the truth to paint their opponents with the Wall Street brush.

About 2,400 "jobless millionaires" are collecting unemployment checks, according to The New York Post.

Thinning hair = weak; bald pate = powerful, according to a Wharton prof.

(Victor Juhasz)

Rich Marin is big. For more than three decades, he dominated Wall Street, creating some of the industry’s most exotic investments, making billions for his clients, and millions for himself. One of his minions blew a hole in the side of Bankers Trust, a firm Mr. Marin helped transform into a derivatives powerhouse, and still he held on for the ride, becoming the youngest managing director ever at the bank. It all came crashing down five years ago, when the hedge funds he oversaw at Bear Stearns imploded. The rest of the world followed within the year. But there was Mr. Marin, standing amid the wreckage, helping rescue an overzealous Israeli diamond magnate who had plowed $3 billion into prime U.S. real estate just as the frothing market froze over. He rescued the firm, only to be unceremoniously fired two years to the day after he joined.

Now Rich Marin wants to build the world’s largest ferris wheel—in Staten Island, naturally—and the mayor just gave him his blessing.

Did we mention he is big? At the announcement of the project last Thursday, Mr. Marin absolutely dwarfed Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Schumer, along with the other dignitaries gathered at the ferry terminal. But despite his imposing size—he stands 6-foot-5 and is built like an offensive lineman—Mr. Marin is probably one of the gentlest people on the Street. Were he a real bear, rather than having worked for one, Mr. Marin would be not a grizzly but a teddy. This may help explain his turbulent career.

It is said that no one of any import on Wall Street goes by their given name. Nobody calls Ace Greenberg “Allen.” Nobody calls Dick Fuld “Richard.” Nobody calls Jimmy Cayne “James.” On the trading floors and in the boardrooms, it was never Richard Marin. It was always Big Rich.

"There were a lot of characters on the street," said one former rival who now teaches alongside Mr. Marin at Cornell's Johnson School of Management. "Very few were as big as Big Rich."

And yet nobody outside of Wall Street would probably have ever heard of him if it were not for a June 28, 2007, story on the front page of the Times’s business section. In his personal time—what little of it remained after long days at Bear Stearns—Mr. Marin ran a blog called Whim of Iron (subtitled: "impulsive ramblings from a motorcycling alpha dog"). It was a mix of notes to friends, ruminations on life in banking, travel writing and a catalogue of Mr. Marin’s weight-loss efforts. But most of all, it was home to his movie reviews. Cinema had been a passion since Mr. Marin was a high schooler in Rome.

As The Times recounted it, on June 17 of that year, Bear was scrambling to bail out two hedge funds that two of Mr. Marin’s traders ran, one of the key plot twists in the demise of the firm. “In the midst of the turmoil,” wrote Julie Creswell, “Richard Marin, the head of the Bear unit that ran the troubled funds, ‘stole away’ from the ‘crisis-hedge-fund-salvation-workaholic weekend’ to see the new Kevin Costner thriller Mr. Brooks. His advice on the film? Take a ‘pass,’ Mr. Marin wrote in a review he posted that day on his blog."

He was out of a job two days after the story ran.

Big Rich Marin has the personality to match his outsized name and reputation, though little of the ego one often associates with bankers and other Wall Street types. “If the worst thing I ever do in my life is go to the movies, I think I’m O.K. with that,” he said over lunch Saturday at Battery Gardens.

He lives in the same 1,600-square-foot penthouse in the South Street Seaport that he bought for $1.35 million in January 2004, seven months after he joined Bear Stearns as CEO of its asset management division. A motorcycle fanatic (a habit also picked up in Italy), he recently “broke down” as he put it, and bought a Vespa. Used. “It makes getting around town so great, it’s easier than the subway,” he said. If you see a stout guy in a navy blazer wedged onto a silver scooter zip by on the streets of Lower Manhattan, it is probably Rich Marin. At a lunch, he jokingly asked that we not mention it if he dribbled any of the bolognese he had ordered on his nice pink-and-purple tattersall shirt. (So we won’t.)

His plan, then, to build a 625-foot ferris wheel next to the Staten Island Ferry is not some Spruce Goose, Master of the Universe complex acting itself out in New York Harbor. It’s just business. He got a call, many calls, actually, within days of again being fired, on December 10, 2010, from Africa Israel USA, the real estate firm he had helped rescue after the bubble burst. One was from a small investment outfit that had tried repeatedly to get a giant observation wheel built in New York, most recently on Governors Island or in the Seaport. “They wanted someone with experience, and I had been a CEO in numerous capacities, I knew real estate, I knew finance, they thought I could get the job done,” Mr. Marin said.

And so he has. In less than two years, Mr. Marin lined up financial backers to realize the $250 million project while convincing the city to embrace the idea—not much of a challenge, really, given the Bloomberg administration’s flamboyant streak, along with its anxious rivalry with London, where the first modern observation wheel opened in 1999. If it opens on New Year’s Eve 2015, as is currently the plan, the New York Wheel could help cement tourism downtown and usher in a new era for sleepy Staten Island.

It will also be the latest triumph for Big Rich, whose career has seen a number of breathtaking ups and downs of its own in recent years. The big question is not whether he can get this thing done, as he almost certainly can, but whether he can stay on top long enough to enjoy his success.

Rich Marin in his office at 17 State Street. (Matt Chaban)

"I chose this place for two reasons,” Mr. Marin said, sitting at a patio table at Battery Gardens,  one of those overwrought banquet halls scattered about the city (cf. Tavern on the Green, Water Cafe) with killer views (in this case, of the harbor) but terrible food. “The first reason is you can see the site. The second is you can see all the tourists. Right now, we have 50 to 55 million tourists a year. Only 10 million of them are coming downtown, but that is a lot, and we expect it to grow as the World Trade Center reaches completion. It is a natural, captive audience.”

Fishermen gathered in clumps along the shore. The esplanade was thick with joggers and sightseers posing for photos in front of the sweeping panorama of the harbor. Just before our lunch began, a wedding was taking place on the patio, Lady Liberty serving as witness, along with many of the tourists who snapped away. Throughout the meal, the heavy bass of a dance party could be heard thumping from the second floor of the restaurant. Where the rivers converged beyond, hundreds of boats passed by, water taxis and pleasure cruises, behemoth container ships moored off the Port of Elizabeth, Circle Line tourist boats, tugs galore, and of course the giant orange Staten Island ferries.

Mr. Marin, who was wearing a navy blazer, light blue jeans and brown leather loafers, explained that the Statue of Liberty alone draws some 4 million tourists a year while another 2 million ride the Staten Island Ferry. The city has always struggled with how it might get tourists, and their wallets, off the free boat ride and beyond the St. George Terminal. The Staten Island Yankees have a stadium here, but aside from a few historic buildings, the borough's 9/11 memorial and a nice view of Manhattan, that’s about it.

“The New York Wheel will be an attraction unlike any other in New York City—even unlike any other on the planet,” Mayor Bloomberg said at last week's press conference. The new attractions "will put Staten Island right in the center of travel plans for millions of visitors to our city."

Mr. Marin believes the appeal of his wheel will be impossible to resist, even at $20 a pop. “Do you have kids?” he asked (not yet, but in three years, who knows?). “So you’re on the ferry, and the wheel is getting bigger and bigger. Your 5-year-old, he’s barely tall enough to reach past the railing, but he sure can see this wheel, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. He starts asking, he’s begging, ‘Can we go? Can we go? I wanna go on the ferris wheel!’ I think daddy is going to have a harder and harder time not going on that wheel.” (On second thought, why rush parenthood?)

And if the wheel isn’t enough of an attraction, the Bloomberg administration has fallen back on that most reliable of tourist activities: shopping. The city encouraged the New York Wheel team to partner with BFC Partners, a developer that has made a habit of getting in on the ground floor of most of the city’s development waves of the past few decades: the East Village, East Harlem, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn. Now, the firm has plans to bring New York City its very own outlet mall.

The idea for building the wheel in the “forgotten borough” started with the city. According to Mr. Marin, he approached the Bloomberg administration in March 2011, wanting to give a giant ferris wheel another go on behalf of his investors. It was NYC & Co. tourism czar George Fertitta who told him, “Go to Staten Island, young man.”

From then on, that was the plan. “What’s the old saying about the 800-pound gorilla? Where does it sit? Wherever it wants,” Mr. Marin noted. “Well, when the city wants you to build a 600-foot ferris wheel somewhere, that is where you build it.”

The wheel is being designed by Starneth, a boutique Danish firm responsible for the London Eye, as well as the Singapore Flyer and one of two competing wheels in Vegas.

But Mr. Marin said the Staten Island wheel is just the beginning—a flashy beacon meant to draw people to his real attraction, a sustainability museum, located in an 11,000-square-foot lot on his half of the 14-acre site. Indeed, Mr. Marin conceives of the entire project as a giant lesson in building a cleaner planet. And not just through green roofs and solar arrays. In summer, the observationpods—which operate on proprietary gyroscopes to remain level—will collect condensation as they make their 38-minute circuit, depositing two gallons each into the grey water system that runs the site’s toilets.

“This will be a world-class exhibition,” Mr. Marin said intently. “This is more than just the wheel. I think of this as a world heritage site in the making.”

Big Rich's big wheel. (NY Wheel)

Mr. Marin knows a thing or two about world heritage. He grew up in Latin America, traveling around with his mother, who did development work for the United Nations. He did not know his father much growing up, a man his mother met in Venezuela who left when little Rich was eight to became a real estate developer in California. Mr. Marin said not to read into his father’s profession and his own. “I know it makes for a good soundbite, but that has nothing to do with what I’m doing,” he said of his more recent forays into development. When Mr. Marin was a teenager, the family moved from Maine to Rome, where he fell in love with movies as well as motorcycles.

Mr. Marin later wound up at Cornell, his mother's alma mater (as well as that of Mr. Marin's three kids). He spent a year studying engineering—all those years spent fixing up cheap Ducatis and Lambrettas in Italy were among his inspirations—before switching over to economics and government, which he deemed “less antithetical” to the countercultural times of the early 1970s. After undergrad, Mr. Marin finished his MBA in a year, a rare feat. He left Ithaca at 22 for the job at Bankers Trust.

The year was 1975, and Wall Street was about to transform itself from a sleepy but prestigious workaday industry into the fabulous global wealth engine it has come to resemble today. Junk bonds, LBOS, million-dollar bonuses—all of that was still on the horizon, along with the canonical works that would come to define Wall Street for Main Street: Barbarians at the Gate, Liar’s Poker, a movie or two by Oliver Stone.

To some, Rich Marin might resemble one of Mr. Stone’s villains. After all, he helped create the derivatives that laid the foundation for the alphabet soup of financial instruments that many critics argue have corrupted finance. Mr. Marin does not see it this way. “I liked the creative aspect going through the industry at the time,” he said. “And these products, they have to be used responsibly.”

In 1981, Mr. Marin moved from the corporate finance division, where he’d spent a very successful if unexciting few years, to commodities. There, he got his first taste of the futures business—the buying and selling of contracts on the predicted outcomes of various markets. Futures are typically used as a hedge against losses, bought in a short position. Mr. Marin identified demand for more long-term insurance—inflation was a serious concern at the time. He took a strip of Euro-dollar futures contracts across a range of prices, bundled together about $10 million worth to create his very first derivative and then encouraged the sales team to offer it up. Mr. Marin said he did not expect to hear back, but within the hour, the sales guys had returned, wondering how many more of these deals he could put together. He quickly created a $100 million swap and sold that, too.

Mr. Marin spent a few more years coming up with new financial products until he was called to help out in Latin America in 1985. The firm had $4 billion being sucked into the vacuum of the region’s debt crisis. “When I told my mother that, she was horrified,” Mr. Marin said. “She said, ‘I spent my career putting money into these countries and now you are going to spend yours taking it out of them?’”

In 1989, Mr. Marin was put back in charge of derivatives, now a fully formed global operation, as well as the newly created emerging markets desk that had grown out of the Latin American crisis (mom was right, this was good business). The following year, his career almost ended, and not for the last time. The commodities desk had issued futures contracts on more than $100 million in cotton from a company run by a Tennessee wildcat named Julien Hohenberg. The cotton had never been picked, never even really existed. To pull off the scheme, Mr. Hohenberg had partnered with a bonded warehouse to vouch for the phantom fibers. The fraud was eventually uncovered, but not before costing Bankers Trust 45 percent of 1989’s fourth-quarter profits. “I loved Julian’s quote in Forbes,” Mr. Marin recalled, his voice growing gruffer. “I can recall it verbatim. ‘I treated Bankers Trust like I treated my wives. I told them what they wanted to hear and then I did what I wanted to do.’”

That is not how Rich Marin sees himself. He prepared his resignation within days of the bad deal being exposed. It wasn’t accepted. Instead, he was sent to run the Canadian business out of the Toronto office—American Banker referred to the posting as “Siberia”—but he returned to New York after only two years to take over the retirement services division, the bedrock of Bankers Trust’s business, where he oversaw some 4,000 employees handling pension funds, 401(k)s and the like.

Michael Walsh, a managing director at Deutsche Bank whom Mr. Marin hired from Chemical Bank in London to head up the Latin American desk in 1985, said his old boss had more courage and acumen than anyone else he had met in the business. “Most people would run from the situations he has found himself in,” Mr. Walsh said, a Welsh accent still poking through after two decades in the states. “Rich stuck with you, he stuck with the company, and sometimes he paid the price, but just as often he was rewarded for his loyalty.”

When the firm merged with Alex Brown in 1997, he ran the combined private banking operation, his first foray into asset management. When Bankers Trust was bought by Deutsche Bank, Mr. Marin was kept on to ease the integration. His reputation recovered, he decided instead to strike out for new territory, golden parachute in hand.

“I’ve never seen a guy like Rich land on his feet so many times,” one former Bankers Trust executive said. Indeed, this was only the beginning.

The mall is on the south side, the ferris wheel on the north. (NYC EDC)

It was a new millennium, so Mr. Marin and a few colleagues decided to start Beehive Ventures, a venture capital firm—everybody with a bronze nameplate was doing it, as Mr. Marin jokes. It was nearly another loss for Mr. Marin when the tech bubble blew, but after more than a decade of churning, Beehive anticipates a 6-10-fold return thanks to a good bet on eMarketer.

In the meantime, he got the call to run Bear Stearns Asset Management, the bare-knuckled firm’s mutual and hedge fund business. “We wanted him there,” said Alan Schwartz, the executive chairman of Guggenheim Partners, who at the time was co-president and COO of Bear Stearns. “He had a lot of knowledge of the industry and he was very creative.”

Creative indeed. During the first meeting of the executive committee that Mr. Marin attended, as an ice breaker he asked the 20 or so other power brokers in the room if anyone had a tattoo, according to one person who was present. After going around the room, no one answered in the affirmative. Except for Mr. Marin. When asked about the incident, he said he did not remember it, but he did not deny the existence of the ink. "That's personal," he said when asked what and where his tattoo is. "But hey, when you ride motorcycles for 46 years, what do you expect."

It was in his first sit-down with Warren Spector, the other co-president who ran Bear along with baronial CEO Jimmy Cayne, that Mr. Marin hatched the plan for 10 in 10. The idea was to ramp up BSAM’s share of the company business tenfold by 2010, a nearly impossible task, yet one he almost achieved. “We had a great 47 months,” Mr. Marin said. “We were actually ahead, at about 6 percent, when all was said and done.”

When all was said and done, there would be no more Bear Stearns.

A pair of BSAM’s most successful hedge funds were run by Ralph Cioffi, one of the firm’s top traders, and Matthew Tannin. The funds traded in the kinds of exotic assets Mr. Marin and Bear Stearns were experts in, collateralized debt obligations. When the housing market on which these bundles of mortgages were based seized up, the funds tanked and Bear Stearns had to spend $3.2 billion bailing them out, the second-largest intervention in Wall Street history (though it would pale in comparison to what was coming).

When asked about these events, and how Mr. Marin comported himself, Mr. Schwartz was insistent. "I do not want to talk about that," he said from his car Tuesday morning, on the way to a meeting. "If you want to talk about the ferris wheel and Rich, great. Every article doesn't have to be dredging up what happened at Bear Stearns. Rich is a good guy, a creative guy, a good business man. I don't want to reminisce about what happened at that time. It's frankly a disservice to drag it back up."

Two years before the BSAM crisis, Mr. Marin began keeping his Whim of Iron blog. It is unlikely its revelation, three months after his division began to unravel in April, led directly to Mr. Marin’s downfall at Bear—that was inevitable—but it didn’t help. “Nothing mattered to Bear more than its image,” Mr. Marin said, “and there was no hesitation to throw someone under the bus if they thought it might slow things down.” Mr. Marin agreed to stay on with Bear Stearns for six more months after stepping down as the head of BSAM. He found an empty office on the lower floor. “I put myself in the corner,” Mr. Marin said.

He said those six months were the low point of his life. “I take my fiduciary duty very seriously,” he said. “To me, it is a sacred trust. To watch my clients, my colleagues and my firm go under was devastating.”

Messrs. Cioffi and Tannin were eventually prosecuted by the government, the largest case so far brought against any bankers following the financial collapse. They were exonerated, an effort in which Mr. Marin played a small role, testifying on their behalf. "I would have testified for the government if they would have called me, but they didn't," he said. "You know why, because these guys didn't do anything wrong, they were just doing their job, and that is what I said on the stand." He has since served as an expert witness in numerous such cases, something he sees as his way of giving back and healing the system. He is also extremely proud of the fact, even occasionally bragging to others when the subject comes up, that he has never once been implicated in any wrongdoing throughout his career.

"There were two small things after everything happened on my record, and they were immediately expunged by FINRA," he said with a beaming smile (FINRA is the big independent securities regulator). "They even gave me a letter saying I had done nothing wrong, and my attorney, he said, 'Rich, that's a very special thing you've got in your hands there.'"

After everything that happened, guys like Ralph Cioffi and Alan Schwartz (as well as numerous colleagues who did not wish to go on the record) still cannot speak highly enough of Mr. Marin. “Rich Marin is how do you say a Mensch,” Mr. Cioffi wrote in an email. “He was one of the nicest warmest individuals I ever worked with. Smart business man had big visions, a quick wit and quick mind. Just a wonderful man.”

Mr. Marin spent the next year trying to keep a low profile, doing some consulting work and riding his motorcycles. He was invited to come teach at the Johnson School at Cornell in the fall of 2007, which he continues to do, driving up to Ithaca once a week while class is in session. Mr. Marin points to the invitation as proof that even at his lowest point, he was still valued by a lot of people. He also increased his involvement in CARE, the global anti-poverty non-profit to which he has long donated time and money. "It is my way of giving back since I never followed directly in my mother's footsteps," Mr. Marin said.

By the fall of 2008, the economy was following Bear into oblivion. “Maybe we built our bungalow too close to the beach, and we were the first to get hit,” Mr. Marin said, “but even if we had built it halfway up the mountain, we would have gotten slammed. This was a tsunami and there was no escaping it.” Though it cannot be ignored that Mr. Marin and Bear caught a lot of fish before the wave hit, and it wasn't just the bungalows on Wall Street but also homes and businesses around the world that got wiped out.

That November, Mr. Marin got a call from Izzy Cohen, the chairman of Africa Israel. The two had worked together on a joint venture in Israel, where Mr. Cohen oversaw the global real estate investments for the diamond magnate Lev Leviev. In 2007, at the height of the market, Africa Israel went on a madcap buying spree, picking up 22 marquee properties throughout New York, Vegas, Miami and L.A. for about $3 billion.

Among the projects here were the old Times Building, the MetLife clock tower and the Apthorp, where Africa Israel had initiated probably the most contentious condo conversion in a decade full of them. When Mr. Marin got to the portfolio, it was worth around $2 billion. By the time he had finished refinancing everything one, two, three times over, the debt load had reached a manageable $1.2 billion. “We never went into bankruptcy, we never lost a single building,” said Laurie Golub, Africa Israel USA’s former chief counsel. “Rich was always really proud of that.”

One of the outside attorneys who worked with Mr. Marin on the project was equally impressed. "None of us, none of us thought Rich could do it," the lawyer said of the rigorous restructurings. "And he did it, every single one." Among the things powering Mr. Marin through the long nights was junk food. He has a soft spot for Pirate Booty and Riesen Chocolate Chews. Ms. Golub said she even kept a spare piece of the German candy in her back in case of emergencies. "During those long nights, he would throw them at me and say, 'Keep working. This will help.'" Another coworker describes him as a "Diet Coke addict."

For all his hard work, Mr. Marin was fired on December 10, 2010, with none of his $1.25 million bonus. The explanation most often given is that Mr. Marin wanted to start growing the business, but Africa Israel had given up on America. Mr. Marin said he was not surprised, given what he sees as Africa Israel’s track record of mistreating its employees. “Maybe I should have been more careful about who I went to work for,” Mr. Marin said. “I went to work for Izzy, because I liked Izzy. I also welcomed the challenge. I didn’t do this for anybody else.”

“He took this huge steaming pile of shit,” said one colleague who worked with him at the time, “and got it down to a nice manageable size so it could be pooper-scoopered away. And how do they repay him? By tossing him into the pile.”

The mayor can't wait to take a ride. (Irving Silverstein/SIA)

One of the things that rankles Mr. Marin so much about the incident in the Times is that among the blog posts the paper quoted was one from June 23, in which he jokingly suggested he and his team were “trying to defend Sparta against the Persian hordes of Wall Street. Nothing like a good dog fight 24X7 for a few weeks to remind you why you chose the life you chose,” he wrote. What the paper failed to mention or pick up on was that he was riffing on the recently released 300, in which the Greeks are routed in a hail of arrows.

“I would get all these comments on my blog, people were outraged I had compared myself to some Greek warrior, but, as is the average IQ of the typical blog commenter, they totally missed the point,” Mr. Marin said. “If you know the Battle of Thermopylae, you know the Greeks lose. We were fighting a war you cannot win, but you fight it anyway, because that is the right thing to do.”

Ms. Golub thought the whole thing was absurd. "Rich doesn't drink, Rich doesn't smoke, he goes to the movies, that's his release," she said. If he had gone to the club, bought some bottle service to unwind after back-to-back 16-hour weekend work days, as the caricature of a banker might have done, it probably never would have drawn any notice. Instead, he wrote a blog post. Mr. Marin is not shrinking from the whole affair, though, even invoking it in his bio on his new movie review website, PickingYourSeat.com (yep, he's at it again, relaunching Sept. 16 2011). "When the crash hit in 2007 he got 'deuced' by the NY Times for going to see Evan Almighty and Mr. Brooks 'while Rome burned,'" the bio proudly declares. Among his new reviews, he liked HBO's To Big to Fail but wrote of Arbitrage that he found "the finance, well…. purely simplistic."

The blogging imbroglio was not the first time The Times has written about Mr. Marin's flare for film, either. Before there was blogging, there was screenwriting. In 1996, Mr. Marin submitted a script to an HBO competition called Subway Stories. It was a project produced by Rosie Perez. Out of the thousands of submissions, only 10 were selected for production, and Mr. Marin's was one of them. "It was the most highly reviewed by both The Times and the Daily News," he said. He did not mention which of the 10 shorts was his, but it is almost certainly 5:24, which is about a banker's reckoning with a wise old man as they ride the Lex downtown before dawn. The Times called it "the most successful example" of "eerie psychological confrontation" that suffuses many of the shorts, a "succinct study of the traps of financial ambition" starring Steve Zahn as the banker and Jerry Stiller as the wise guy.

Next year marks the 120th anniversary of the Ferris Wheel, the work of a Pittsburgh builder of the same name. His work opened to great acclaim at the Chicago's World Columbian Exhibition, a rival to the Eiffel Tower. But the ride turned out to be a commercial disaster, as people began to copy it without compensating George Ferris. He became obsessed and died a penniless man.

The same hallmarks seem to haunt Rich Marin: the vision, the drive, the downfall. The difference is, more than anything, Mr. Marin has an uncanny ability to move on from his failures, no matter how grand.

Of course Mr. Marin, as he so often does, would reference a movie to make his case: “It’s like Alfred says in Batman Begins. Why do we fall? So we can just pick ourselves back up again.”

Charlotte, N.C., would show the financial industry more love, said Mr. Bove.

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a civil lawsuit against JPMorgan yesterday, charging the firm with widespread fraud committed by the mortgage securitization unit of Bear Stearns, which JPMorgan acquired in 2008. Not everyone was impressed.

JPMorgan spokesman Joe Evangelisti said the bank was "disappointed" that Mr. Schneiderman filed his lawsuit without giving the firm a chance to rebut claims, in a statement emailed to press outlets. The complaint contains no new revelations and is marred by a sloppy error, wrote Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weill.

Perhaps the strongest reaction came from Rochdale Securities analyst Richard Bove, who said New York's role as a financial capital is "an anachronism," according to Net Net, in a note distributed today.

"I am constantly struck by the fact that Michigan does not sue the auto industry; Texas is not suing the oil industry; California is not suing the entertainment industry; and Florida is not suing the tourism industry," Bove wrote. "They do not sue farmers in Iowa. New York never stops suing the financial industry. Why? What do these other states understand that New York does not?"

"The financial industry that is left remains committed to New York because it has sunk cost there and because of proximity among firms," he said. "However, if financial companies are going to continually be sued for billions and even tens of billions of dollars, the legal costs of remaining in New York exceeds the sunk cost in buildings and equipment."

If you can't make it here ...

James D. Owen, 48, had worked on mergers and acquisitions and mid-market financing for the telecommunications industry at The Bank Street Group, according to investigative reporter Teri Buhl, who first reported on Mr. Owens' Wall Street connections. Mr. Owen had also worked for Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Banc of America Securities, according to Business Insider. The latter firm was an investment banking subsidiary to Bank of America.

Update (Sept. 25): According to Ms. Buhl, The Bank Street Group says that Mr. Owen was still employed at the firm at the time of his death. The Observer previously reported that Mr. Owen left the firm earlier this year.

New Canaan police responded to gunshots at Mr. Owen's Park Street condominium at around 2:40 p.m. Friday, according to the New Canaan Advertiser, and found Mr. Owen and his wife, Billie Faigout-Owen dead. Police suspect that Mr. Owen shot his wife, then shot himself, according to the paper.

Niall Ferguson compared the game of chicken playing out between Athens and Greece to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If the story of Spanish banks sounds familiar, perhaps you remember Ireland?

Moody's downgraded five Dutch banks.

Blame game: Facebook is preparing to file a motion in U.S. District Court that would consolidate all lawsuits arising from the company's disappointing initial public offering, The New York Times reports. The motion, which could be filed as soon as today, is expected to lay some blame on Nasdaq for the lost shareholder value in the days after the IPO.

Quants gain: May was a good month for black-box hedge funds, Reuters reports. The BarclayHedge index of commodity trading advisers, or CTAs, as the funds are sometimes called, gained 2.6 percent last month. The BarclayHedge hedge fund index fell 2.8 percent.

Bank bears: Investors increased their bets that bank stocks would fall by 9 percent in the second half of may against the previous two weeks, the largest increase over a two-week period since 2009. Short interest in Bank of America and Citigroup jumped 75 percent and 61 percent respectively, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Repaid: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said it has been paid in full—$53.12 billion for loans plus interest—the funds used to support government bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns.

Dalio's world: Want to know your favorite trader's batting average on tech stocks? Baseball cards are in at Bridgewater Associates.

Bank sues Schilling: Citizens Bank is suing to recover $2.4 million in loans made to former Red Sox star Curt Schilling, whose video game company 38 Studios filed Chapter 7 this week.

Richard Marin was not responsible for any of these purchases; in fact he was hired three years ago to fix many of them--following his dismissal as chief of Bear Stearns Asset Management, the division behind the two funds that ultimately destroyed the storied bank. Yet Marin is once again out of a job, according to The Journal, due to disagreements with his bosses:

Mr. Marin, who was hired to help resolve the company's problem projects, made progress during his tenure and received a bonus of about $1.25 million earlier this year, according to people familiar with the matter. But he clashed with senior management over strategy and his departure occurred suddenly, these people said.

[...]

It's unclear what the disagreements between Mr. Marin and senior management were about. But big decisions still need to be made about such major issues as financing, construction time tables and marketing.

The Journal also notes that Africa Israel USA has invested heavily in such imploded markets as Vegas, Miami and Phoenix. Taking over all these projects will be Tamir Kazaz, the firm's CFO. Looks like he's got his work cut out for him.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

According to Bloomberg, "Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. were among the biggest borrowers from one program, the Term Auction Facility, with as much as $45 billion apiece." Not bad, but from the same item we also learn of programs that saved Bear Stearns and AIG from the brink of collapse and $16 billion worth of support for General Electric, the diversified symbol of American capitalism.

So American institutions pulled down a fair amount of funding from the Fed. But what might really chap the lips of U.S. citizens is the degree to which U.S. segments of European firms also dipped into Ben Bernanke's pockets:

Six European banks were among the top 11 companies that sold the most debt overall to the the Commercial Paper Funding Facility. They sold a combined $274.1 billion, according to data made public today by the U.S. central bank. UBS sold $74.5 billion, the most among all borrowers. The largest U.S.-based user was insurer American International Group, selling $60.2 billion.

An alternative reaction: The fragility and interconnectedness of the financial system was greater than ever before, and the effects of the crisis metastasized all the quicker because of that fact.

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

"And so, too, for a lot of financial stuff: Not everybody who's walking up and down Fifth Avenue at noon is capable of running a derivatives book," he went on, voice low, sitting in the 57th Street offices of the firm Providence Equity, where he's a senior adviser. "It takes a certain amount of skill and knowledge to be in that business."

By now, the idea that Wall Street's cast of characters would have changed just because of a global financial crisis is considered quaint, as Mr. Parsons' short laugh when asked about it showed. "Every time we stumble and fall we think we're the first ones to do it," he said. "Like, 'Oh the world is going to melt down!' Well, it didn't melt down. In fact, you can still go down to the corner and get a pizza." Finance is still finance, and the bankers are still bankers.

>> STILL STANDING: WALL STREETERS WHO STUCK IT OUT

And yet most of the what-happened-to-them-after-the-crisis look-backs, even the really interesting ones, give the sense that most of the executives who led the financial system to the precipice have faded into shadows. It's true that there are enigmas, like Joe Cassano, the former AIG credit default swap kingpin, and a few retirees, but nearly everyone else carries on. When the players have moved, they haven't moved far. Bear Stearns' mortgages head Tom Marano, for example, is the CEO of mortgage operations at GMAC, now called Ally Financial. The Lehman chief Dick Fuld is doing "executive strategic consulting," and his communications head, Andrew Gowers, is BP's head of media.

Even Osman Semerci, Merrill's fixed-income chief, responsible for increasing subprime exposure by about $50 billion in a single year, is a CEO, of the hedge fund giant Duet Group. Two recent AIG ex-CEOs, Bob Willumstad and Eddy Liddy, are at private-equity firms, and a third, Martin Sullivan, is a deputy chairman at a major insurer. Top Treasury officials have landed at Bridgewater, GE Capital and PIMCO. Fannie's old CEO Daniel Mudd leads the $44 billion Fortress Investment Group, and Freddie's Richard Syron sits on the board of the biotechnology behemoth Genzyme.

>>ARTFUL DODGERS: BANKERS WHO LANDED NEW GIGS

Still, any then-and-now tally of Wall Street is bound to be incomplete for two reasons. For one thing, a focus on the main American banks meant leaving out foreigners like Barclays, Deutsche and UBS, and also big U.S. private-equity houses and firms like the risk manager Blackrock, not to mention mortgage giants and hedge funds. For another, the important thing to know these days isn't necessarily that it's the same players on Wall Street, but that it's the same game. As the G-20 conference closed last week, Reuters quietly reported that the world's largest banks, the ones that would be considered too big to fail, "won a reprieve of at least a year" on measures that would require systemically important institutions to rein in risk.

>>WALL STREET'S POST-CRASH EXILES

Divisions between regulators and bank lobbying "led to the softening of the capital rules," the wire report said, "and put off final decisions about liquidity standards." At that conference, the Citi chief Vikram Pandit complained that the new global banking rules known as Basel III are overly strict. A day before Mr. Pandit published those feelings in the Financial Times, as MIT's Simon Johnson points out, a Nobel laureate and more than a dozen top economists wrote a letter to that paper explaining why the rules aren't strict enough.

Back at home, meanwhile, some efforts to soften Dodd-Frank's regulations have been quiet, like the 510 meetings with lobbyists since July, according to an L.A. Times tally, but others aren't. Spencer Bachus, the Republican expected to replace Barney Frank as House Financial Services Committee chair, wrote about the "doubtful" benefits of the so-called Volcker Rule's ban against proprietary trading.

Even the ban stands, though, banks have been saying this autumn that they can sidestep it because of a loophole for what's known as principal investments, like Lehman's leveraged multibillion-dollar takeover of the Archstone real estate trust in 2007. Banks like Morgan Stanley have announced that certain proprietary teams will be spun off, though that would be unnecessary if Dodd-Frank's rules are interpreted loosely, as Mr. Bachus is encouraging.

So are the dadaist old days back? Just before Halloween, two firms called Phoenix Capital and Taylor-DeJongh announced that they had started the first Washington-Baghdad financial services firm. (Iraq, their press release said, is "a potential major oil and gas play.") A few days later, CNBC reported that Goldman may pay out compensation before the year's end, because of 2011 income tax rates. After that, The Times said bonuses and overall compensation will both be up this year. "Are people who once earned staggering sums going to earn non-staggering sums going forward? No," Mr. Parsons explained Monday. The next day, the New York State comptroller released a report saying Wall Street will earn around $19 billion in 2010.

That would make it Wall Street's fourth-best year ever.

Key: Red means the executive remains at the same firm; green means a new finance job; and blue is for the few who've left the business world. The main job title describes the exec's position during the run-up to (or the peak of) the financial crisis, and below that is what the exec's doing now, if it's something different.

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mabelson@observer.com

>>WALL STREET'S POST-CRASH EXILES

>> STILL STANDING: WALL STREETERS WHO STUCK IT OUT

>>ARTFUL DODGERS: BANKERS WHO LANDED NEW GIGS

What the second Wall Street wants to do, to the surprise of moviegoers expecting a rollicking pinstriped adventure, is tell the sludgy story of the financial crisis. But it doesn't know how. Oliver Stone's opus is a strangely fictionalized version of the death of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, but also the rise of short sellers and Goldman Sachs. That makes it, two years after the climax of the subprime debacle, the first big pop-culture meditation on Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon and Ace Greenberg, with some Steve Eisman, Maria Bartiromo and Matt Taibbi thrown in, too. Figuring out what is supposed to be what, and who is really who, should be one of the fall's great parlor games.

But the real surprise is that the Oliver Stone film, as it's called on the beautiful poster, is gentle and forgiving. Greed is bad, and then--consider this a spoiler alert--it isn't. Our heroes are Shia LaBeouf's trader, Jake Moore, more or less a conniving liar, and Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko, introduced as a sage, revealed to be a cackling supervillain, and then given a chance to make good at midnight. The movie doesn't seem to mind that the men win because of theft, irresponsibility, avarice and old-fashioned treachery.

The new Wall Street is a love song to 21st-century traders, disguised as a diatribe.

"WE DIDN'T MAKE it too complex," Oliver Stone said last week, during an interview at noon on Rosh Hashanah. "It's just so fucking difficult." But there are a lot of details packed into the film that ring true. In its best speech, Gekko warns a college audience about the upcoming mortgage collapse. "You don't know it yet, but you're the NINJA generation--no income, no job, no assets," he says, using the nickname for the subprime loans that brokers pushed on unemployed homeowners, which became securities that were traded back and forth.

"Like cancer, it's a disease, and we have to fight back," he says, growing more furious when he describes how his bartender bought three houses he couldn't afford. That's a reference to Steve Eisman, one hedge fund manager who railed against the subprime mortgage bubble, and who realized that his nanny had bought up five townhouses in Queens. (His housekeeper was even going to buy a townhouse with an adjustable rate mortgage and a low down payment, until he convinced her otherwise.)

The film's smart connections to the real-life story of the bubble are as subtle as the high-thread Bowery Hotel sheets that Jake wakes up in when we meet him, nuzzled by Carey Mulligan's Winnie, his girlfriend and Gekko's estranged daughter. But there are bigger links. "We did have scenes with AIG, by the way," Mr. Stone said. "We had the chairman, [Maurice] Greenberg, but I ended up cutting it out because, frankly, it was too complex for the average viewer."

Others made it in. Keller-Zabel, the doomed firm Jake works for, is Bear Stearns, complete with a "bald guy wearing a bow tie," as Bear chairman Ace Greenberg once called himself, at the helm. It's Frank Langella's kindly Lew Zabel, a father figure to Jake, who gets a warm kiss on his pate after awarding him an early million-dollar bonus. There's even a reference to the resentment that lingered on Wall Street ten years after Bear Stearns refused to participate in the 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.

Bear ended up needing the kind of help it had refused to give, which, of course, is Zabel's fate, too. "Two bucks? Jesus, you're out of your mind," he spits when Churchill Schwartz's Brolin makes an offer to save the firm, the same as JPMorgan's bid for Bear Stearns. The sum goes up after haggling, which is what happened in 2008, sort of, although reality was more sinister. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon actually wanted to pay more so that Bear Stearns' shareholders wouldn't get in the way, but Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson reportedly asked him to keep the price low, so the government-backed deal wouldn't look like a bailout.

SEE ALSO: 10 WALL STREET SUPERSTITIONS

Indeed, Mr. Brolin looks like Mr. Dimon, only without the gray hair. But Churchill Schwartz doesn't look like JPMorgan for long. By the time we see a black helicopter with its CS logo, just a line of paint away from GS, the firm has morphed into the great Goldman. "Talk about an evil empire," one character sighs. In the interview last week, Mr. Stone even claimed that Eliot Spitzer was the one who told him that Goldman Sachs was betting against the housing market at the same time it was creating mortgage deals. "This was before it made the news!" he said. "That woke me up, and I said, 'My God, that's some story.'"

By the finale, there isn't any doubt about the firm's inspiration. "The first thing you need to know about Churchill Schwartz is that it's everywhere," the opening line of a bombshell exposé posted to Winnie's Web site says. Her site is called Frozen Truth, which will be a boon to the real-life Canadian named Apollo Lemmon who writes a blog with that name. But her article, of course, is Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone classic, which begins, "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere."

"THE ARTICLE CAME out after the movie was shot," Mr. Stone protested. "Come on! Please." In fact, he's been strange about most of the film's inspirations. Telling The Hollywood Reporter about one bank they shot in, he said it "gave us the right feeling that we needed for Goldman--I don't want to say Goldman, I want to say 'from The Bank' in the film." Mr. LaBeouf is less self-conscious. "I was able to get into the Goldman Sachs office, which is like the Illuminati. Nobody gets to go in there," he recently bragged on camera. "Basically the trade-off was you get me in there, I'll introduce you to Gekko."

Asked in May by Reuters whether the material would be a lightening rod, Mr. Stone sidestepped the question by saying the film was really based on the "solid relationships" between the characters. "We didn't make it about 2008, that was background for me," he said last week. "And it is a serious background, but it's not the movie. It could have been done in another era."

It's not that he's afraid of a lawsuit: At a lunch that The Times wrote about recently, the filmmaker even tried to say there was "a little bit" of Robert Rubin, the former Citigroup chairman, in Brolin's executive.

So is Lew Zabel Ace Greenberg? "I would say he's a combination of tough, hardened Jewish traders who have been in Wall Street over the years," Mr. Stone said last week. Is the shot of the Lipstick Building outside of Zabel's headquarters a nod to Madoff, who ran his scheme there? "It was a happy coincidence," he said. Does Mr. Brolin's banker resemble Jamie Dimon in the first half of the film? "Don't do that to me! You can say there's an archetype of handsome, slick and relatively unscathed by time," Mr. Stone said.

Maybe there's so much slipperiness because his movie's mixed message about its characters and their dishonesty is not what its director would want to say about the real people behind the financial crisis. The sweet Zabel turns out to be psychotically negligent; Gekko gets evil not long after his inspiring speech; and even his daughter is hiding something awfully large. One character complains that CNBC's stars sell fear and panic, but a gaggle of them get cameos. And it's our young hero who spreads a false rumor through a network of short sellers (which earns him a great new job), lies to his fiancé, scares her into doing something awful with Swiss money and is even slightly dishonest when he comes clean at the end.

Even Jake's abiding passion for green technology investments can't help but seem suspect by the end. "I'm doing it to make money," the playboy Vincent Tchenguiz once told a reporter who asked about the conflict between his environmental investments and six SUVs. "The numbers are colossal." The producers talked to him for inspiration.

TWO YEARS AFTER the death of Lehman, and 30 months since Bear's demise, we've had a few great books about the crisis, a nine-volume autopsy of Lehman from its bankruptcy court, a half-billion-dollar Goldman fine with no admission of guilt, Congressional hearings featuring calm non-apologies and now a huge Hollywood film. What we don't have is a way to talk seriously or consistently about the people and companies responsible for the worst financial collapse in a century.

The best the second Wall Street does is present powerful people who are, mostly, good but bad. "That's what it's about," Mr. Stone said. "How money makes you compromised these days. How money taints all our behavior."

If money corrupts, then maybe it's unfair to expect too much from a $70 million Hollywood thriller that features Bvlgari rings (Jake wants to know about the extra-special private Bvlgari collection in the back); the original Wall Street's Charlie Sheen, who had his own makeup artist on set for his brief cameo; and a beer advertisement. "Heineken?" Gekko asks his future son-in-law at a Shun Lee dinner. "Yeah," he answers, before we got a shot of him with the bottle, like Mike Myers jokingly smiling with a Pepsi can in Wayne's World.

They're at Shun Lee for a dinner with Winnie, who, after her father interrupts their conversation to sweet-talk Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter, gets up and leaves. She's back by the end of the film, where the credits roll over a happy outdoor party for a 1-year-old, featuring a live band. "Guys like that, having birthday parties," Mr. Stone told The Times in the Four Seasons, nodding at Steve Schwarzman, "it's not my deal."

mabelson@observer.com

SEE ALSO: THE CAREY-MULLIGAN-MATT TAIBBI HYBRID SPEAKS!

It has seemed throughout this Wall Street debacle that the most powerful have eluded disgrace. John Thain, whose problems at Merrill Lynch were not limited to a $68,000 credenza, was put in charge of the giant lender CIT this February, for example. A month later, Jon Corzine, pushed out of Goldman Sachs, was made CEO of a brokerage. And last week, Robert Rubin, whose years at the Treasury and then Citigroup made him a symbol of deregulation and excess, and whose affair with a former trader was detailed this spring on the Huffington Post, announced his new investment-bank job. Even Steven Rattner, the private-equity guru caught in New York State's massive pension fund scandal, is writing a book and awaiting his comeback.

Mr. Cioffi is not.

Once a legitimate heavyweight of the hedge fund world, he was arrested just after dawn on a summer morning two years ago, handcuffed between two F.B.I. agents. In what is still the only serious criminal case of the financial crisis, Mr. Cioffi and a colleague were put on trial for defrauding investors, who lost $1.6 billion when the subprime bubble burst.

As the newspapers put it, the collapse of his funds, which he had told clients were in fine shape, set off a chain reaction that eventually swallowed Bear Stearns itself. Mr. Cioffi was also charged with insider trading, having moved some of his own money from the funds before the end.

Last November, they were both found not guilty. "The entire market crashed. You can't blame that on two people," a juror said afterward. "How much can two men do?"

In his first public comments since then, Mr. Cioffi, 54, described his life after the fall. He and his family have sold off their New Jersey house and are renting nearby, but plan to move to Naples, Fla., near his parents. He cannot find work, but he has set up shop managing his own money in the two-floor office complex. "I'm not in a bad place. I'm in a good place," he said. "I mean, I certainly would have liked my career to have ended differently. But there's a lot of pain in this world."

FOR THE FIRST 40 months that Mr. Cioffi ran his two hedge funds, neither of them had a losing month. Investors had to phone up his friends at Bear Stearns to get attention, Reuters reported. He had been one of the firm's pioneers of CDOs, securities created from sliced-up and repackaged assets, like subprime mortgages. In fact, his first fund, started in 2003, and the more leveraged fund that followed, which actually had "Leverage" in its name, were built from them.

In early 2007, when the subprime market began its spectacular fall, Mr. Cioffi told his clients they would be fine. "This is not a systematic breakdown," he said on an April investor call, when he insisted there was "no basis for thinking this is one big disaster." At the same time, he and his colleague admitted to each other in emails that their world may be "toast."

During last year's trial, where those emails were read, Mr. Cioffi wasn't rattled, he said. "I felt very comfortable with where I stood. I knew I had done nothing wrong. I knew I was innocent. And I had faith in the system."

By the time the trial began, his old firm had been shuttered for a year and a half. "Keeping in mind that I had a lot going on at the time, I really wasn't thinking so much about [it]," he said. "I obviously felt badly that Bear Stearns no longer existed, but I didn't feel like what happened at the hedge fund contributed to the demise, nor caused their demise."

The notion that the implosion of his highly leveraged funds badly damaged his firm's finances and reputation, he said, is mistaken. "I didn't have any feelings of guilt. I mean," he said, and then paused. "I didn't have any feelings of guilt. Over what?"

Instead, he is resigned to the fact that people need scapegoats in the wake of a disaster. "Look, I think it's just human nature. People want to have a bogeyman," he said. "People don't want to take responsibility for their own actions."

BEFORE THE TRIAL, he unloaded his house in Southampton, along with the New Jersey home. "We sold them from a position of weakness," he said. "People knew." He kept his house in Vermont, where he was raised, but couldn't close on a luxury apartment at the iconic Stanhope on Fifth Avenue, where he lost his deposit. "Believe me, that was kind of our dream, and unfortunately it ended badly."

His choice of automobile has changed, too. "All young men growing up want to see the day when they can afford a sports car of some sort. I was lucky enough to achieve that," he said. "Now it's just a phase of my life that's over." He says he enjoys driving his wife's Honda Pilot. "I would recommend it to everyone, downsizing and simplification. One thing you learn is that one can get by with a lot less than one thinks we need."

Every morning, he drives to the office with his 2-year-old poodle-spaniel, and his two sons, who are both around 25. "They like the market, they like trading, so it's a good opportunity. And it was a great situation for me as well." They get there by 8, and leave by 5, and then he works out, does research and watches the Yankees. "I've tried to create a routine," he said. "I think it's important to have a regular schedule. I don't consider myself retired; I consider myself self-employed."

His acquittal did not end the S.E.C.'s separate investigation. "So I've been unable to find work back on the Street," he said. His personal setup, which he calls Ralph Cioffi Asset Management, does equity investing and some trading. He enjoys it. "I'm lucky that I have this ability to still work, granted on a much smaller scale, managing what I have left."

But if he's opening up a new brokerage account, or out around town, sometimes he worries that his reputation has preceded him. "Maybe I'm imagining that," he said. "It's just one of those things you feel." People don't necessarily know his face, though pictures of him in handcuffs were in the papers. "Even though one's found innocent, you still have that stigma. It never goes away," he said. "I guess at some point in time all of that will fade."

In another New Jersey suburb, Howie Hubler, the Morgan Stanley mortgage trader who lost his bank billions of dollars, is also back at work, building up a firm called the Loan Value Group. The two men used to do a bit of business together. "I'm happy that he's moved on and has found something to do with his life," Mr. Cioffi said. "I don't think he was a villain."

He plans to leave the Northeast relatively soon. "I can honestly tell you I am very much at peace. I am very happy with my new life, I am very happy with my self-employment," he said. "I'd love to be able to get back to a more normal, traditional job. But, obviously, I don't think that's a possibility."

mabelson@observer.com

Correction: Howie Hubler worked for Morgan Stanley, not Merrill Lynch