Done reading. (But really shouldn’t have!)
Matt Taibbi recently recommended this book written by Guy Lawson, a fellow Rolling Stone contributor.
Octopus is an incredible dark comedy with one of the craziest true-life ironic twists you can possibly imagine.
That sounded intriguing enough. Taibbi likes the way Lawson describes the deeply corrupt netherworld of endless, relentless insider trading. This environment apparently warped the mind of the hedge fund manager and Ponzi schemer whose downfall the book covers – to the point where he could be “perhaps the biggest dupe in the history of con artistry.”
Kirkus called the book:
An eye-opening window onto Wall Street’s destructive culture of unchecked hubris and a harrowing thrill ride into the unraveling mind of a desperate operator.
Ok. Well, it turns out, all of the above is pretty accurate. The book is indeed a portrait of a “society populated with the peculiar mix of the devious, the dangerous, and the deluded.” The stories of soul-sucking deceit in this book do make Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, by comparison, seem pretty understated and outright believable.
Octopus is about Sam Israel, a member of a wealthy Louisiana family, who bilked sophisticated investors out of a reported $450-million. Israel’s con game went on for years but he eventually grew increasingly desperate to recoup years of losses and by 2005 his jig was up. How the bullshitter was bullshitted is a long and unfortunately tedious story.
Lawson turns Israel into such easy prey that it’s hard to fathom anyone ever took this nut job seriously. The author goes to great pains to explain how a con man like Israel could be beaten at his own game and even laboriously outlines the whole choreography of the con: telling the tale, putting the mark on the send, taking off the touch, the blow-off, putting in the fix. Yet, the cons and conspiracy theories Israel fell for are too transparently idiotic and have such crazy-ass byzantine complexity (at least as told in this book) to take much of the book’s cautionary tale about Wall Street as a gigantic criminal operation seriously. In that sense, the book sadly undermines its own cause.
However, with scenes like the one in the bizarre mansion Israel rented from Donald Trump, or in the hedge fund’s HQ in a Connecticut boathouse, or on the bridge from which Israel attempted a fake suicide, Taibbi will probably be proven right: someone soon is going to make Octopus into a movie. My money is on Paul Giamatti as Sam Israel.
As a book, though, this is not much more than an inflated, medicore magazine article.
Quotes:
- “He mastered the most American of all performing arts: self-invention.”
- “You’re not going to learn how to shave by practicing on my beard.”
- “Lying naked in his bed in the Trump house watching SpongeBob SquarePants, Sam Israel confided to one of Bayou’s employees that he was going through a liquidity crisis” (#understatementofthedecade)
