John Mack, Who Led Morgan Stanley Into a Crisis, Regrets Little

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- teems with its star’s name. “You’ve got to talk to John Mack,” a Duke University bigwig tells corporate recruiters. “Goddamn it,” an early Wall Street coworker says after seeing him in action, “John Mack just did that!” One veteran tells a big-time rival he’s now No. 2, behind a new No. 1: “John Mack!” When he lets a colleague take the bigger bedroom at the Dolder Grand in Zurich, their German-accented concierge announces: “Herr Mack, you are a true gentleman.” Then, after leaving Morgan Stanley amid a power struggle in 2001 and returning in 2005 as the boss, his colleagues greet him with howls: “Mack! Mack! Mack!”.The memoir (Simon Element, $28.99) serves up a rare opportunity to hear power’s unvarnished internal monologue. It is an atlas of Wall Street ego, mapping the topography of self-regard, and a vivid guide to the kind of executives who pride themselves on wearing Savile Row suits made by tailors in business before Napoleon lost at Waterloo. They pull strings on hospital boards, have regular tables at French restaurants, can get coach Mike Krzyzewski on the phone, golf at clubs you can’t get into, and have to be reminded to see their kids. .Mack’s book is also an account of Wall Street’s fateful growth from a staid business of quiet corporate advisors to a multi-trillion-dollar industry of globe-trotting trading giants that became too big to fail. Mack, who led Morgan Stanley into the global financial crisis and says the firm was a few hours or so away from bankruptcy, takes responsibility for being too aggressive. At the same time, he writes that he wouldn’t change a thing..These are the bankers and traders who love risk, success and themselves. As Mack climbs the ranks of Morgan Stanley, a colleague ribs him about his new chauffeur: “I was unapologetic. I didn’t want to waste my time driving.” When he leaves Morgan Stanley the first time, he clocks a “three-minute standing ovation.”.Mack self-describes as radically honest (“I don’t lie”), brawny (“I’ve always been a big, strong guy”), altruistic (“compelled to stand up for people who don't have power”), intuitive (“I’m good at reading people and sizing up situations”), direct (“I enjoy calling people on the carpet when they deserve it”), and courageous (thanks to “a titanium-strength stomach for risk”). On a trip to the Miraval resort in Tucson, he’s also a horse whisperer: “I took one step inside that corral, and the horse obeyed me.”.This is not a book about the sweetness of professional kinship. In the late 1970s, annoyed to find his sales desk briefly abandoned despite telling underlings never to let it go unstaffed, he uses backhand strokes to clear their desks: “I swept off papers, coffee cups, pens, staplers, telephones, ashtrays, cigarette butts.” (Was this a good move? “Looking back now, I am torn.”) Later, as Lehman Brothers barrels toward bankruptcy and financial executives and staff elbow each other for emergency work space inside the New York Fed, Mack calls dibs on a conference room with a wave of the arm: “is where Morgan Stanley sits.”.Mack sees himself as an “an incorrigible prankster,” which means pouring sand into desk drawers up to the rim, screwing salmon sushi into a phone’s mouthpiece for a few days, sneaking car transmissions into neutral from the passenger seat, and getting into a colleague’s bed at night while he’s in the bathroom. .But his behavior elsewhere does not give the sense of lightheartedness. He spots a worker wearing denim shorts to the office on a Friday and follows him to his desk so he can report him to his boss, and tells a low-level employee who calls Mack over Memorial Day weekend that he’ll fire her if it’s not worthwhile. At Credit Suisse, where he works between his Morgan Stanley stints, the cost-cutter known as Mack the Knife helps fire 10,000 people to trim expenses. Inside his Morgan Stanley office, he keeps a sculpture of a head with a spike between the eyes: “I like to throw people off-balance.” He does apologize, though, for screaming at a colleague who missed work to dress up as Santa Claus for kids..The book’s play-by-play of his career includes intense scenes. Here’s Mack refusing to care for a puking client on a plane to Hawaii; there’s Mack getting locked out of his room naked the morning he’s pushed out of Morgan Stanley. After he comes back, while the financial crisis is roaring, he brings a blood pressure machine to the office to lighten the mood—instead it sends one beloved deputy to the emergency room..These people and numbers leave a mark. What makes the cast of characters so memorable isn’t just the power of the bigwigs around Mack but their novelistic and blue-blooded names: J. Frederick Van Vranken Jr. from Smith Barney, Mellon’s Dick Van Scoy, Morgan Stanley’s Robert H.B. Baldwin, Samuel Burton Payne, Barton Biggs, Anson Beard, Mayree Clark and Joanne de Asis. (Mack is on the board of Bloomberg Philanthropies, founded by Bloomberg LP majority owner Michael R. Bloomberg.).Mack has a merchant’s memory for price and weight. In his early years, he makes $60 a week at his first job, puts on seven pounds, turns down a $12,000 job in the hospital industry, favors $1.85 tuna sandwiches at Smith Barney, loses eight pounds in four months, pays $186 a month for a studio in I.M. Pei’s Kips Bay Plaza, makes $150,000 from buying real estate with his mother, and pulls in $110,000 when he jumps to another firm. The numbers grow with time, so that when he gives up a quarter of his pay it costs him $8 million. But about the fortune he reaped when Morgan Stanley went public, he says only it was “more money in six and a half hours than I had ever dreamed of making over a lifetime.” And though he says he turned down a bonus for 2007, he doesn’t mention that he was rewarded with a record $40 million or so the year earlier.. doubles as a kind of Wall Street drinking memoir. All is forgiven when a young Mack gets “hammered” at lunch and messes up the math on a trade. At Morgan Stanley, where the partners drink dry sherry, he lets the firm pay for handles of Wolfschmidt vodka, Bacardi rum, Canadian Club whiskey, and Dewar’s scotch, plus Kahlua, Yago sangria “and Chablis for the women” on a trip with clients. After one asset manager opts for ice-cold gin martinis at lunch, Mack heads home and passes out for so long that his wife puts a mirror under his nose to make sure he isn’t dead. There’s Sapporo with a colleague in Japanese hot springs, maotai in China, “a couple of icy beers” in the University Club, and, inside Morgan Stanley’s office, an angry executive who cracks open a morning beer..The French restaurants would make Patrick Bateman squirm with jealousy. Mack can tell you the difference between A La Fourchette’s velvety private alcove (“I knew all the waiters”) and La Grenouille (“haute”), La Côte Basque (“switch out my wingtips for loafers”) and Chez Yvonne (the bartender “kept the drinks coming”). The Box Tree doesn’t sound like a French restaurant, but was one (“tiny, discreet”); Le Directoire sounds like one, but wasn’t (just “a disco I knew.”) The steakhouse Sparks and Italian spot San Pietro count here as diversity..Mack’s memoir (written with Linda Kulman, who’s collaborated on books with Andrew Cuomo and Amanda Knox) has little time for morality or even politics. He describes his work on massive oil pipelines without any flick at the climate catastrophe, describes a colleague’s “win-at-all costs ruthlessness” like it’s a nice haircut, and has little to say about why a firm that considered itself a meritocracy had no Black people or women in power for so long. He hunts doves with Phil Anschutz, flies in lobsters for a client, commends himself for letting Chinese power-player Wang Qishan smoke in his office, and says about former Morgan Stanley board member Dick Cheney only that he’s a “hard-nosed” thinker..Mostly, Mack’s book sings the praises of risk and ambition. It barely pauses to give the sense that the rise in risk-taking that made him rich might not be best for everyone else: “We didn’t realize that this intertwining of risk held unforeseen consequences,” he writes. Otherwise, he puts down “overly cautious” traders and his “risk-averse” rival at Morgan Stanley, Phil Purcell. Why? “Risk was–and is–inherent to investment banking. We had to take risks to make money. It was inevitable that some of those risks result in losses. That’s just how it is.” The book doesn’t just lack a reckoning with Morgan Stanley’s role in the financial crisis, it fast-forwards from Christmas of 2007 to the next year’s Lehman collapse as if there’s nothing to report..That’s not the only missing piece. The book makes no mention of his time on the board of Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, in 2013 and 2014. Run by former Putin deputy Igor Sechin, the world’s largest publicly traded oil producer had deep ties to Morgan Stanley. .It’s a similar story with Art Samberg, an old friend whose Pequot Capital Management Inc. was one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. Mack describes his short stint there as chairman in 2005 as easygoing, without mentioning the firm closed a few years later and spent $28 million to end an insider-trading probe. .Otherwise, the book is punchy. Mack loves the pizzazz of short sentences: “It was a hoot.” “We were thrilled!” “He was teary-eyed.” “I was rattled.” “Then I left.” “Bam.” .Mack saves his most meaningful short lines for his finale. In an addendum, he says he’s been diagnosed with a mild cognitive impairment. “My prognosis is far from perfect, but my life is perfect,” he writes. “I have f---ing killed it. I knocked the cover off the ball in the financial world.”.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com.©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

John Mack, Who Led Morgan Stanley Into a Crisis, Regrets Little

“I have f---ing killed it,” he writes in a new memoir.

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