"RAINMAKER: The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street's Mad Dog"

by Anthony Bianco ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1991

Among the high-profile Wall Streeters who swaggered through the 1980's, few were as colorful and effective as Jeff Beck. Bianco, a senior writer at Business Week who once agreed to collaborate with the former investment banker on an insider's view of high-stakes dealmaking, now offers a tellingly detailed and thoroughly absorbing account of the mercurial Beck's career that amounts to an object lesson on an era. Self-described as a nobody from nowhere, Beck served a lengthy apprenticeship at top securities firms, including Lehman Brothers. Given a chance to start a mergers and acquisitions department at Oppenheimer, he achieved a breakout of sorts, brokering a couple of multibillion-dollar transactions. In-house resentments over business that did not materialize and Beck's purposefully aggressive behavior, however, led to his ouster in mid-1985. Within four months, the self-styled ""mad dog"" joined Drexel Burnham, which, thanks to Michael Milken, was then at the top of its junk-bond game. Though a certifiable success with a seven-figure income and contacts throughout corporate America, Beck aspired to superstardom. As one result, he began to tell tall tales of fictive exploits with the Special Forces in Vietnam. The driven operator also hinted of CIA connections and a sizable family fortune. These deceptions gained him a small role in the film Wall Street and the friendship of Michael Douglas (who even commissioned a script on his new pal's military experiences in Southeast Asia). Early in 1990, a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal disclosed that Beck's putatively martial background was a fraud and put paid to any notion tie stood to inherit big money. Having left Drexel Burnham before its plunge into bankruptcy and his own exposure, Beck (now 45) is currently out of high finance and back in a real world. Whether Beck's vaulting ambitions were a metaphor for casino capitalism, a mindlessly materialistic decade whose cost has yet to be reckoned, or other targets of opportunity seems almost beside the point. In Bianco's sure hands, the story of Beck's ascent and comedown is a narrative wonder that attests to the validity of Byron's reminder that truth is ""stranger than fiction.

Pub Date: April 1, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION