had aped those of the manipulators in the bad and presumably gone old days before the New Deal had brought the S.E.C. into being. The other disquieting aspect was the presence on the S.E.C.âs list of Re associates of the name of Edward T. McCormick. If the Amexâs president had been a personal participant in Re transactions, was it not implied that the Amex authorities, or at least the chief of them, may have known what was going on all along?
Before examining that question we may well take a look at those authorities. To a marked extent, they were a breed. President Ted McCormick, Arizona-born of an Irish father and a Spanish mother, a former S.E.C. commissioner who had jumped the fence from bureaucrat to businessman; Chairman Joe Reilly, slum-bred, one of nineteen children, a tough-talking self-made man who had worked his way up from floor page on the Curb to his present eminence; Vice-chairman Charley Bocklet; Jim Dyer, finance committee chairman; and Johnny Mann, chairman of the important committee on floor transactionsâit was they who ran the Amex in 1961 and, with some variations, they who had run it over the preceding seven years during which the Res had romped. By and large, they had the blunt good humor and the disinclination toward fine moral distinctions of men who have bulled their way from nowhere to somewhere. Few, like McCormick, were scholars with advanced academic degrees; few had any degrees, and some had never finished high school. Virtually all of them were hard drinkers who brought indoors an old and honored tradition of the Curb that, in the outdoor days, had at least enjoyed the justification that alcohol helped keep out the cold and the damp.
To a man, they were of Irish extraction. The boisterous Irish like Mike Meehan and Ben Smith who had first made their mark in Wall Street thirty years earlier were now followed by a generation that had captured a key Wall Street institution, or come near enough to capturing it so that, in the middle fifties, to speak of the Irish-American Stock Exchange was almost a definition, rather than just a joke. But they did love jokes, too, loved them as few in dour Wall Street had ever done before them, and they gave the place a kind of rough levity. Old Joe Haff, for example, an Amex man, used to like to jump off ferry-boats and race them to shore swimming, and at Christmas on the Amex floor, a clerk would dress up as Santa Claus, other clerks would mount headlights on one of the posts and pretend it was a truck, and everyone would get gloriously drunk.
The reasons this rather aberrant Establishment undertook to shelter the Resâfor, in retrospect, it is fairly clear that they did in fact shelter themâcan only be inferred. It was not chauvinism; the Res were of Italian extraction. Plainly, it was not a case of conspiracy for profit; there is no evidence that the Amex officials shared in the Resâ boodle. On the other hand, some of them were good friends of the Res, and frequent house guests of the elder Re at his place in Florida. More important, they were by temperament boosters; they believed passionately in the Amex, wanted it to grow and to rise in public esteem; and they knew that the Res were powerful old timers who could not be eliminated without a scandal. Like politicians, they would do almost anything to avoid a scandal. As for McCormick, he may well have had only the vaguest notion of what the Res were up to. Unlike Reilly, Bocklet, Dyer, and Mann, he was seldom actually on the floor, and, as the Amexâs paid administrator rather than a member, he did not know the intricacies of stock trading at first hand. He was the upstairs man, the front man, and when he wasnât upstairs he was out on the road spreading word of the expanding Amex and bringing new business to it.
During his ten-year term as Amex president, McCormick had functioned chiefly as a salesman. The holder of a B.A. from the University of Arizona (Phi Beta
Before examining that question we may well take a look at those authorities. To a marked extent, they were a breed. President Ted McCormick, Arizona-born of an Irish father and a Spanish mother, a former S.E.C. commissioner who had jumped the fence from bureaucrat to businessman; Chairman Joe Reilly, slum-bred, one of nineteen children, a tough-talking self-made man who had worked his way up from floor page on the Curb to his present eminence; Vice-chairman Charley Bocklet; Jim Dyer, finance committee chairman; and Johnny Mann, chairman of the important committee on floor transactionsâit was they who ran the Amex in 1961 and, with some variations, they who had run it over the preceding seven years during which the Res had romped. By and large, they had the blunt good humor and the disinclination toward fine moral distinctions of men who have bulled their way from nowhere to somewhere. Few, like McCormick, were scholars with advanced academic degrees; few had any degrees, and some had never finished high school. Virtually all of them were hard drinkers who brought indoors an old and honored tradition of the Curb that, in the outdoor days, had at least enjoyed the justification that alcohol helped keep out the cold and the damp.
To a man, they were of Irish extraction. The boisterous Irish like Mike Meehan and Ben Smith who had first made their mark in Wall Street thirty years earlier were now followed by a generation that had captured a key Wall Street institution, or come near enough to capturing it so that, in the middle fifties, to speak of the Irish-American Stock Exchange was almost a definition, rather than just a joke. But they did love jokes, too, loved them as few in dour Wall Street had ever done before them, and they gave the place a kind of rough levity. Old Joe Haff, for example, an Amex man, used to like to jump off ferry-boats and race them to shore swimming, and at Christmas on the Amex floor, a clerk would dress up as Santa Claus, other clerks would mount headlights on one of the posts and pretend it was a truck, and everyone would get gloriously drunk.
The reasons this rather aberrant Establishment undertook to shelter the Resâfor, in retrospect, it is fairly clear that they did in fact shelter themâcan only be inferred. It was not chauvinism; the Res were of Italian extraction. Plainly, it was not a case of conspiracy for profit; there is no evidence that the Amex officials shared in the Resâ boodle. On the other hand, some of them were good friends of the Res, and frequent house guests of the elder Re at his place in Florida. More important, they were by temperament boosters; they believed passionately in the Amex, wanted it to grow and to rise in public esteem; and they knew that the Res were powerful old timers who could not be eliminated without a scandal. Like politicians, they would do almost anything to avoid a scandal. As for McCormick, he may well have had only the vaguest notion of what the Res were up to. Unlike Reilly, Bocklet, Dyer, and Mann, he was seldom actually on the floor, and, as the Amexâs paid administrator rather than a member, he did not know the intricacies of stock trading at first hand. He was the upstairs man, the front man, and when he wasnât upstairs he was out on the road spreading word of the expanding Amex and bringing new business to it.
During his ten-year term as Amex president, McCormick had functioned chiefly as a salesman. The holder of a B.A. from the University of Arizona (Phi Beta
Similar Books
