Greed abounds, but there’s more to Wall Street story

Growing up a distant cousin of Kurt Vonnegut and going to Harvard didn’t make him a novelist, but 15 years immersed in the cut-throat culture of Wall Street drove Norb Vonnegut to the pen. The stock broker turned writer, who worked at Kidder, Peabody in Providence 20 years ago, is now settled in Rhode Island and just released his third novel, “The Trust.” The thriller is about a network of financial criminals involved in adult entertainment who hide behind the Catholic Church and infiltrate a wealthy family.
The world of high finance is the backdrop for all of Vonnegut’s novels and when he isn’t writing or promoting a book he is commenting or blogging about Wall Street. Now with a successful fiction franchise, Vonnegut has no desire to go back to money management. He’ll be talking about “The Trust” at the Brown University Bookstore Sept. 20.

PBN: What triggered the decision to abandon wealth management and start writing thrillers?
VONNEGUT: I would like to tell you that there was a pivotal point in my career, but I think my decision was more evolutionary than instantaneous. In my family we have always been storytellers and I have told stories all my life. I built my business at Morgan Stanley by telling stories to clients about securities and the things that happened on Wall Street. And many of them found it riveting. I was writing newsletters and using it as a way to build business and a Harvard classmate after a reunion panel said [I] should think about writing. But the bigger thing that was that, as a writer, I deal with the same questions I did in financial services. … What is different is I am trying to create a roller-coaster thrill ride for families to read at the beach.

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PBN: When you start a book, are you starting with an experience or character from your time in finance, or do you start with an idea and use the details from your experience to fill it in? VONNEGUT: I lived a soap opera on Wall Street 24/7. I have enough material to write for 50 years. But every book begins with a big idea and the big idea of “The Trust” is how financial criminals can hide behind the first amendment, freedom of religion. … The story I tell traces back to something 19 years ago when we were building our business. We got a call from someone who said he wanted to invest $50 million. My partner met with this fellow and everything seemed promising, but some things didn’t stack up. So we submitted the guy’s name to Morgan Stanley’s compliance office. They kept a bad-guys list and he turned out to be Pablo Escobar’s first cousin. Can you imagine if we had opened up an account with this fellow? It would have been horrific. We shut down communications with him, but it occurred to me that the families we worked with didn’t hire teams of lawyers. They had lots of money, but they didn’t have the defenses. That is the story that gave rise to The Trust.

PBN: Are the characters drawn from real people you worked with and, if so, how much color do you add to them?
VONNEGUT: Wall Street is a really tough environment, where there is an expression “you eat what you kill” and a lot of people embrace that philosophy. The things I write about have occurred or are reflective of things I have heard about people or experienced directly or read in the paper. They are also reflective of some of the bizarre behavior on Wall Street. … My villains come from Wall Street, but so do my heroes and that balance is important. I would say there are plenty of really good people who come from finance and they outnumber the villains. I think that balance is important because ultimately we will need our financial institutions to grow and stay economically healthy.

PBN: Has the attitude in finance changed a lot since 2008?
VONNEGUT: I don’t know that it has changed. 2008 was really scary. I think a lot of things came to light, like the Ponzi schemes and really bad predatory behavior where the banks packaged mortgages designed to fail. I never saw those things while I was on Wall Street, although they were obviously going on while I was there. I was just as angry as anyone else – that’s terrible behavior. I think that there are a lot of things we really need to ask ourselves. If you look back to 2010 and look at the amount of earnings that hedge-fund managers made, it is extraordinary. The 25 highest-paid hedge-fund managers had aggregate earnings of $22 billion. General Electric as a company made $11 billion. That’s just out of whack. I think as a country we are struggling with that. I am not sure I really see the long-term value in trading things in a way that $22 billion comes back to those guys. The compensation mechanisms are engineered to encourage risk-taking and favor the managers that use the hedge-fund formulas.

PBN: You are working on a nonfiction project. Can you talk at all about that?
VONNEGUT: We are still marketing it, so I can’t go into detail. But it is a story I heard from a fellow who spent a few years in jail and it is a compelling story. I think when the story comes out it will be a very positive contribution to the dialogue on money management on Wall Street and money management relating to large corporations – and to what happens in the world of justice when white-collar criminals are prosecuted. It reads like Cain and Able run afoul of the Department of Justice. But as much as I love that, I love writing fiction. •

INTERVIEW
Norb Vonnegut
POSITION: Author
BACKGROUND: Born in the South and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, in New Hampshire, and Harvard, Vonnegut spent 20 years working in finance for firms including Chase Manhattan, Morgan Stanley, Paine Webber and Kidder Peabody. After 15 years on Wall Street he embarked on a fiction-writing career that has seen him publish three white-collar crime thrillers.
EDUCATION: Bachelor’s in American history, with minor in Asian history, from Harvard, 1980; master’s in business administration, Harvard, 1986
FIRST JOB: mowing lawns in Charleston, S.C.
RESIDENCE: Narragansett
AGE: 54