Ruthless, flamboyant, manipulative and, above all, greedy. That's how one contemporary at New York's City College in 1963 recalls the 21-year-old economics student Gordon Gekko. Born on Long Island in 1942, the son of working-class immigrants, Gekko went into the world with a chip on his shoulder and little in his pockets. He never lost the chip but soon found a way to fill his pockets, graduating quickly from minor league, cold-call stockbroking to become the ruthless, Maserati-driving corporate raider whose flamboyant style and creed, "Greed is good", came to symbolise the brash, self-serving, Yuppie-led Eighties.
His route to success took no shortcuts through the portals of the Ivy League. Instead, he won a place on merit at CCNY, founded for the poor by a New York businessman in 1847 and the first free public higher education institution in the US. City was known as the "Harvard of the Proletariat" and Gekko never lost sight of his origins or the fact that any respect that came his way had been earned, rather than inherited. In the 1987 film Wall Street, Gekko is complimented on his club and says: "Yeah, not bad for a City College boy. I bought my way in; now all these Ivy League schmucks are sucking my kneecaps."
Few of Gekko's fellow economics students attained his crystal-clear grasp of the subject and none was as eager to apply its tenets to the practical business of accruing vast amounts of personal wealth. Something of Gekko's philosophy was captured in another quote from Wall Street. Asked what he regarded as "enough" money, Gekko says: "It's not a question of 'enough', pal. It's a zero-sum game; somebody wins, somebody loses."
Legend has it that among Gekko's fellow students, quite a few lost. Supposedly for his dissertation, he spent six months devising and operating a Ponzi scheme, anticipating the activities of Bernie Madoff in style, if not scope, and persuading most of the student body to invest real money in an entirely fictitious company. Technically, he had done nothing illegal; all his investors knew the company did not exist, and those lucky enough to cream off some of the early returns, supplied by the investments of latecomers, did not think - or care - to ask where the money had come from.
Gekko did not graduate. By the time the scheme imploded he was gone, his pockets full of the seed capital he needed. "A fool and his money," as he once said, "are lucky enough to get together in the first place." It is likely that Gekko's first merger was carried out while still a student. If so, it may have been his most significant. Whether he was invoked or not, in 1963, his third year at college, Omicron Delta Epsilon, one of the world's largest academic honour societies, was formed by the merger of Omicron Chi Epsilon, a society that had been set up at City University in 1955, with Omicron Delta Gamma (ODE), a Harvard-linked institution.
Today, ODE has 578 chapters in dozens of countries, including the US, Britain and the UAE. How many of the names in Gekko's bulging Filofax date from this time? Gekko's asset-stripping rampage through corporate America co incided with the eight-year presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose laissez-faire, regulation-lite philosophy of Reaganomics created a playground in which the likes of Gekko were able to romp with impunity. And romp he did, buying and selling his way to a personal fortune on the back of insider intelligence about such companies as BlueStar Airlines, Anacott Steel and Fairchild Foods.
By January 1989, however, Reagan was gone and, so it seemed, was Gekko. When the film Wall Street hit cinema screens, he appeared as a man who considered himself not only beyond the law, but almost a public servant whose job was to liberate moribund companies and "that other malfunctioning corporation, called the USA". While he clearly enjoyed the notoriety that came with his activities, the blaze of publicity not only burnt him badly but also served as a pyre for the era of greed and arrogance he had come to personify. After Wall Street, Gekko vanished from the public eye.
At the time he faced allegations of securities fraud and tax offences, but although the sequel is said to reveal that Gekko finds himself behind bars, the prosecution would have found the more serious charges hard to prove. In 2003 Daniel Davies, a stockbroker who blogs on the Crooked Timber site, analysed Gekko's activities as documented in Wall Street and concluded that "very few of the actions which bring down the whole house of cards on Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko were actually illegal under securities law at the time ? [which] has been materially tightened since the 1980s".
To a great extent that tightening could be credited to the activities of Gekko - and one of his less fortunate contemporaries. Ivan Boesky was an arbitrageur who, like Gekko, made a fortune by acting on insider information. Both men had appeared on the cover of Time ("Ivan the Terrible", the magazine labelled Boesky in December 1986, "Making millions with your money"); the difference was that Gekko had moved faster and left fewer clues and it was Boesky upon whom the full wrath of the US Securities and Exchange Commission fell. Boesky was fined $100 million and spent two years in prison, where he embraced Judaism. For the moment, Gekko, his modus operandi of choice now compromised, remains a man of mystery.
So what did he do next? Perhaps he changed his name, dyed his famous mane of hair, ditched the striped braces and cashed his chips, investing in a small Caribbean hideaway and returning to the States only to visit his proctologist and to indulge in the occasional nip and tuck. Surely, though, it is more likely that Gekko, today still only in his late 60s, would never have been content to lie dormant. It is his spirit, if not his hand, that can be detected in many of the minor and major quakes that have shaken the financial world in the past 20 years.
Take the Enron implosion; on May 25, 2006, Kenneth Lay, the corporation's former chief executive, was found guilty of 10 counts of securities fraud and related charges. His behaviour - persuading his employees to buy stock while secretly shedding his own - was classic Gekko. He died before he could be sentenced but his fellow executive Jeffrey Skilling lived to pay the price and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
One man's financial disaster is always another's golden opportunity, and if anything was likely to have lured a retired Gekko off the sun lounger it would have been the opportunities created by the global meltdown of the past two years. When stock market values plummet, billions of dollars are never really "wiped out"; it's just that when they bounce back up, as they always do, somebody else is usually holding them. As Gekko liked to say, "Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred".
Hollywood, however, loves redemption and it is rumoured that in its upcoming sequel to Wall Street - Money Never Sleeps - Gekko will be portrayed as having paid his debt to society, emerging from a 14-year prison sentence older and greyer (and, perhaps, marvelling at the size of today's mobile phones). There is much speculation about whether Gekko will use his powers for good or evil, though this week the film's producers told The New York Times that Michael Douglas, who will reprise the role, "will resume his machinations on a global scale in the hedge fund era". One port of call, apparently, will be Dubai.
Some have said that Gekko was a creature of his time; that the world has changed and that in the wake of the global financial meltdown his creed of greed no longer has resonance. Some, however, have not been paying attention. What, if not greed - personal and institutional - lay behind the subprime mortgage disaster, credited as the trigger for the worldwide financial crisis? The economist Robert Shiller, writing in Atlantic magazine in August, commented that many culprits had been blamed for the crisis: "unscrupulous mortgage lenders, dishonest borrowers, under-regulated financial institutions. And all of them played a role."
But too little attention, he argued, had been paid to "the most fundamental cause", the one responsible for every cycle of boom and bust: "the contagious optimism, seemingly impervious to facts, that often takes hold when prices are rising". Or, to put it another way, greed. As the world wobbles on its financial axis, someone, somewhere, is almost certainly on the receiving end of a large slice of the billions of bailout dollars being showered on banks and car companies worldwide. Many of the contacts collected by the young Gekko will have since percolated up through the ranks of the finance industry and various governments; today, some will be among the hard-pressed ministers and executives struggling to come to terms with the global financial meltdown - and giving and receiving billions of dollars in government bailouts worldwide.
All of their names will be in the yellowing pages of the battered Filofax that Gekko is rumoured to use to this day. And who better placed than the predatory Gekko to emerge smiling from the rubble, his fists full of taxpayers' dollars? jgornall@thenational.ae