her miraculous transformation so they could eat their hearts out with envy.
Saving over $40,000 was almost impossible, however, when your salary only supported a standard of living barely above the poverty level. Since graduating from high school Ethel had toiled away in the Financial District in a series of clerical jobs that mostly involved filing and data-input.
While other girls received promotions and became executive assistants or entered training programs to become brokers and traders, Ethel had never been offered similar opportunities. She attributed this to her unattractiveness. Male bosses tended to equate good-looks and your cup size with intelligence and drive. No matter how hard she worked or how much unpaid overtime she put in, it hadn’t make up for her much-to-be-desired appearance.
Ethel wasn’t stupid, however, she was street-smart and understood more about what was going on at the investment firm where she worked than most people there. For example, she recognized a Pump-and-Dump scheme when she saw one. And she was aware that whistle-blowers could now collect substantial reward money from the SEC by reporting financial crimes. It was due to a new law passed by Congress to help clean up Wall Street; a novel twist on the many age-old State laws entitling bounty hunters to collect rewards for apprehending escaped fugitives.
She wasn’t a snitch by nature and didn’t have a moral problem with sharpies bending the law a bit to make a fast buck. After all, her great-uncle, Max Kramowitz, aka ‘Maxie the Enforcer’, had been an underboss for Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel in the Jewish Mafia in the 1930s. Life is a contact sport and you needed to protect yourself at all times. Greedy suckers deserved a comeuppance when they poured cash into investments which promised outlandish returns with no risk. Caveat Emptor -- Let the Buyer Beware -- was a motto near and dear to her. If something looked too good to be true; it was a scam.
And Ethel also had no sympathy for people who put no money down and lied about their incomes in order to purchase expensive homes they couldn’t afford that were now in foreclosure. With a few exceptions, they were all guilty of fraud and got exactly what they deserved.
But she balked when the sharpies sought to fleece senior citizens out of their retirement savings; the dirty business her employer specialized in. To her, this was a vile crime, one for which there was no punishment too harsh.
Tonight she intended to discuss her whistle-blower plans with Ruthie at the Bull & Bear and decide on a course of action.
*
Bull & Bear Tavern
The Bull & Bear Tavern is nestled off Wall Street and behind The New York Stock Exchange in a blind cobblestone alley with no name. Strangely, its existence is not recorded in the official real estate records of the City of New York. That is because when the Great Fire of 1835 broke out in Hanover Square and destroyed almost a thousand buildings in Lower Manhattan, all the structures in that locale were thought to have burned to the ground as well.
The sole survivor – unobtrusive at a mere two-stories amidst the charred rubble of so many larger structures -- turned out to be the brick colonial style building which the tavern currently occupies. In the great chaos after the fire, however, this pertinent fact was never documented by the newly formed and inexperienced NYC Buildings Department. And the towering replacement structures hastily erected higgledy-piggledy around it during the ensuing years soon obscured its modest footprint.
As far as today’s City Hall bureaucrats are concerned then, the Bull & Bear Tavern has no address and doesn’t exist although a number of them drink there every night. This suits the owner, Hilda Gluckmeister, just fine since she prefers to fly under the radar whenever possible.
Finding the bar can be difficult for strangers to the Financial District. There are no flashy neon signs out front, not even a tiny brass nameplate announcing its presence in the alley. A person with a huge thirst, feverishly searching for the upscale watering hole, has to know exactly where it is located; which also suits the owner just fine since Hilda doesn't want tourists in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops on low-budget tours mobbing the place. To this end, she pays the Association of Travel Agents an annual stipend to not include the Bull & Bear on its New York list of hotspots. Hilda isn’t xenophobic and welcomes tourists, however, she only likes the well-heeled, free-spending variety.
Once you enter the vestibule of the tavern you immediately realize that you’re in the correct place because directly under the impressive Viennese crystal chandelier there are two bronze statues -- a Bull and a Bear -- to greet you. Each is four feet high and mounted on pedestals facing one another as if they are about to do battle. The custom is for new arrivals to rub the bull’s right front hoof for good luck. Since Wall Street people are a very superstitious clan by nature, the bull’s hoof has developed a golden sheen from being touched by so many oily human hands over the years.
It is a mystery how the Bull and the Bear became metaphors for boom-and-bust Wall Street, the upward and downward stock market trends. Many traders will tell you that it dates to 1714 and it’s because bulls thrust upward with their horns when fighting whereas bears swipe downward with their paws. If you ask Hilda about it, she will tell you she hasn’t the remotest idea how the fighting styles of these two animals came to symbolize market movements. If you press her hard, she’ll tell you that the metaphors are just so much bullshit.
The bar was opened in 1919 by Hilda's grandfather, a poor Austrian immigrant and cagey extrovert by the name of Fritz Gluckmeister. It occupies the premises of a former private bank that went belly-up as a consequence of unwisely speculating in Russian securities which became worthless after the Tsar was executed and the Bolsheviks seized power at the tail end of World War I.
The original, massive steel underground vault, ten inches thick and impervious to both dynamite and artillery shells, once stored the gold bullion reserves of several small South American countries and is still intact. Today, it serves as a discrete dining room for Wall Street players who don't want their competitors or the SEC to discover the modern-day shenanigans they are up to.
The rumor mill has it that Fritz, a lowly waiter in a sausage bar and beer hall up in Yorkville at the time, was bankrolled by the infamous Charles Ponzi, his silent partner. Ponzi had immigrated to this country from Italy in 1903 with only $2.50 to his name and a fierce determination to become filthy rich; no matter what. He promised people a 50% return on their investment within 45 days and was destined go down in the history books as the ingenious inventor of the classic Ponzi Scheme; a financial fraud which resulted in many thousands of mom and pop investors being bilked out of $7.0 million dollars of their hard-earned savings in 1920. This was a hell of a lot of money in those days when you consider that a tall stein of ice-cold beer in a saloon cost only a nickel.
It is interesting to note that one of Charles Ponzi's present-day acolytes, Bernard Madoff, the modern bogeyman of American finance, orchestrated an identical, but much larger rip-off of investors to the tune of $15 billion, give or take a few billion. This only goes to show you that a truly clever, really evil scam never dies and easily withstands the rigorous tests of time.
The irate creditors of Ponzi sued Fritz in Federal court, claiming that stolen funds had been used to finance the opening of the Bull & Bear. Nothing could ever be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, however, and Fritz, like so many other guilty defendants, walked away a free man.
His defense attorney for the trial was Tommy 'Silky' Callahan, a devious criminal lawyer and master of New York’s legal labyrinth, with a one-man law office on Maiden Lane. Callahan was suspected by the NYPD of engaging in jury tampering when the stakes were high enough in a case. Again, nothing could ever be proved conclusively, so, he too, walked free of all charges.
Callahan lived to 102; fabulously rich, supremely contented, and quietly enjoying the fruits of his ill-gotten gains, delighting in the best of what the world had to offer – French champagne, steaks from Delmonico’s, Russian caviar, fast European cars, and equally fast Asian women – up in his sumptuous Park Avenue apartment. It seems only fitting that Callahan's grandson, Thomas Callahan, III, a former General Partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co., remains to this day a faithful customer of the Bull & Bear.
Fritz