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But on the screen or in books we adore our Wall Street super-villains. They appear impenetrable and invincible with delightfully underhanded characteristics: When they steal someone\u2019s money they offer to help their victims look for it; they have strong wives and very sexy girlfriends; they speak in sound bites, \u201cGreed is good\u201d; they surround themselves with scapegoats and disposable people like friends and family; they always keep lying, even when everyone knows they\u2019re lying, \u201cI didn\u2019t do it!\u201d; they act like the devil but dress like an angel. All of which makes the inevitable crash in the third act just as fun to watch as the climb in the first two.<\/p>\n
The thing about Wall Street villains though, either real or imagined, is they don\u2019t have staying power in popular culture. With the exception of Gordon Gekko, who lives on in infamy, and perhaps Bernie Madoff who was so much of a louse it\u2019s hard to forget him, the rest of the crooked French cuff crowd disappear like smoke from a Cohiba. And as time goes on, these great liars become the answers to the \u201cWhat ever happen to?\u201d questions.<\/p>\n
And so, in the interest of preserving the financial rogue\u2019s gallery for posterity, below is my top ten list: <\/p>\n #8 \u2013 Nick Leeson. No villain list is complete without a dastardly Brit. Leeson\u2019s memoir and the movie based on it both called Rogue Trader tell the tale of fraudulent and reckless speculative trading that bankrupts England\u2019s oldest banking establishment. And he did all this by the time he was 28! It\u2019s like a Wall Street version of the Children of the Corn. Ewan McGregor plays a Leeson on screen.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n #7 – Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street, who lied, stole and cheated his way to make millions on a daily basis at the firm Stratton Oakmont in the 90s. Scorsese and DiCaprio are bringing his story to the big screen. This will be one of those rare occurrences when the movie is better than the book.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n #5 \u2013 Greg Weinstein, the boss from hell in the movie Boiler Room is played by Nicky Katt: \u201cWe don’t sell stock to women. I don’t care who it is, we don’t do it. Nancy Sinatra calls, you tell her you’re sorry. They’re a constant pain in the ass and you’re never going to hear the end of it alright? They\u2019re going to call you every fucking day wanting to know why the stock is dropping and God forbid the stock should go up, you\u2019re going to hear from them every fucking 15 minutes. It\u2019s just not worth it, don\u2019t pitch the bitch.\u201d And, \u201cDon\u2019t you have a canoli you can stick in your mouth?\u201d A chauvinist or misogynist and evil son of a bitch, Nicky Katt\u2019a portrayal makes you love to hate him. #4 – Let\u2019s see\u2026 Richard Miller (Richard Gere) in Arbitrage has it all: financial fraud, adultery, manslaughter, leaving the scene of an accident, cooking the books to sell his company and calling his young African American friend who is trying to live an honest life and making him an accomplice. And he gets away with it all\u2026 or does he?<\/p>\n #3 – Den of Thieves three-headed monster \u2013 Financiers, bankers and lawyers\u2014oh my! Except in this story there\u2019s no Dorothy. James B. Stewart\u2019s non-fiction best-selling work fascinates the insider trading scandals of the 1980\u2019s. Names like Milken, Boesky and Levine, which once held household status, have gone from inmates to their photos on the back of milk cartons.<\/p>\n #1 – Patrick Bateman, the American Psycho. Stereotypes on steroids. Wall Street during the late 80s boom filled with sex and violence mixed with postmodern literature lands at number one. Bret Easton Ellis created a god. Bateman is insecurely insane or insanely insecure, it doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n Sorry Gordon Gekko professionals don\u2019t count.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Would Bernie Madoff make a great movie villain? Maybe, if, say, Robert De Niro played him, with a cool catch phrase: \u201cThe only difference between a Ponzi scheme and a great investment model is the jail sentence\u2026\u201d or something like that. But in print or on the six o\u2019clock news, Bernie\u2019s more reviling than interesting. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/turneyduff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n#10 – Kenneth Lay. Enron\u2019s Smartest Guys in the Room is part of the Mt. Rushmore of corporate greed and under handling. R.I.P.
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\n<\/a> #9 – Sam Israel. He has issues. Guy Lawson, in his book Octopus, brings Israel\u2019s utter insanity to vivid life. He was a bad boy. He may have scored higher on his VQ (Villain Quotient) if you didn\u2019t feel so bad for him. While reading this compelling story you aren\u2019t sure if he\u2019s crazy or crazy smart. I still don\u2019t know. But having faked a suicide, initiated a nationwide manhunt, embroiled in a secret shadow bond market and enlisting a former black-ops intelligence operative as his wingman \u2013 you\u2019re a lock for the top ten villain list.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n#6 – The Duke Brothers, Randolph and Mortimer, in Trading Places make a wager in the \u201cusual amount,\u201d to settle a dispute on nature versus nurture. Laughing the whole way through, in the end we discover after all of the elaborate lengths they go to conduct their experiment that the \u201cusual amount\u201d is $1.<\/p>\n
\ndont pitch the bitch<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\n#2 – \u201cFuck Warren Buffett,\u201d says Dick Fuld played by James Woods in Too Big To Fail. Those are some fight\u2019n words. There are a few people you never take shots at: Jesus, Shakespeare, Eminem and Warren Buffett. Woods played Fuld brilliantly. He makes you forget about the investors and employees of Lehman Brothers. Early on we learn of Fuld\u2019s biggest weakness, he doesn\u2019t know how to negotiate from a place of weakness–fun to watch. And the irony of his first name is lost on no one.
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