Trial runs for Wall Street’s finest

It’s muggy here – a point emphasised by the increasing number of sweating brows I’ve watched on TV the past week. These brows mainly belong to men in suits who are on their way in and out of courthouses on charges of white-collar crime.

One theory, according to prosecutors and TV pundits, is that desperate economic times encourage desperate measures. Statistics from the FBI show the number of investigations is rising.

So in one week we’ve watched Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi, managers from Bear Stearns, charged with securities and wire fraud, walk uncomfortably in handcuffs. There have been pictures of Sam Israel, the hedge-fund trader, convicted for fraud, now allegedly on the run having faked his own suicide.

Then, most sensationally, there’s the good-looking, dark-haired Italian Raffaelo Follieri, the former boyfriend of actress of Anne Hathaway, who had planned to spend his 30th birthday last weekend in Capri but was instead behind bars.

Follieri’s crime? He is accused of falsely telling investors that the Vatican had appointed him to manage its financial affairs and wanted to divest itself of church properties. With the money he got, the charge against him says, he spent at least $6 million on private jets, holidays with Hathaway, dog-walkers and, intriguingly, flying a doctor to Italy from England at the cost of $30,000 for a “minor ailment”.

I wouldn’t rate the chances of this drive against white-collar crime that highly though. If such crime is rising with the economic downturn, there is no certainty that the authorities will be able to keep up.

Indeed, a recent announcement by 32 prosecutors said the authorities had been over-zealous towards large corporations in the post-Enron environment and urged caution. There is a risk when large firms are involved that those accused become scapegoats for a large institution’s poor judgment and for a general climate of panic.

But if I were Follieri I wouldn’t find comfort in all that. He is not part of a large institution. He is a bold young man with Icarus characteristics who would have behaved the way he did regardless of the economic climate. The only way he is feeling the downturn is that, as of Friday, two days after he was indicted, still no one had posted his $21 million bail.

This piece was first published by the London Evening Standard.

Follow Vicky Ward on Twitter: www.twitter.com/VickyPJWard

Michelle will be a fine feisty First Lady

A friend saw Laura Bush recently and told me how “poised” our First Lady was: “petite” and “gracious”, a “listener”, not a talker. These are the traditional qualities we are supposed to admire in a First Lady. Feisty Democratic women have had a harder time fitting the mould than their Republican counterparts, except for Jackie Kennedy.

So now poor Michelle Obama is confronting the media speculation of how she will fare in the White House. The odds are already stacked against her, thanks to charges of anti-patriotism, radical racism, and – most absurdly, because of her fistbump with her husband – the notion that she is a secret terrorist. Even Hillary Clinton, who as First Lady played the role of political dartboard sans pareil, never faced hostility on this scale.

But Michelle Obama with her good looks, her lucrative job, her opinionated views on race – and other things – is a lightning rod for controversy. So she’s playing the game that all potential First Ladies have to; appearing on TV shows aimed at housewives, and trying to show a “softer” side.

Not everyone is buying it. A columnist in the conservative New York Post described her as looking “bored and superior” on The View, a morning show.

Of course she looked “superior” – she was the tallest woman on screen. Bored? She’s a Harvardeducated lawyer being forced to prove her girliness in the equivalent of an on-air sewing circle.

Michelle Obama has no need to spell out her femininity, or her wifely assets: she is brimming with both. Her affection for her husband may have been their winning weapon on the campaign; he appeared to be the only candidate with a sex life.

If the Right-wing press keeps stooping to outdated pettiness in criticising Michelle, it will hand the Obamas the election. The point is that the Obamas are about change: polls show America wants this.

So we expect Mrs Obama to modernise the traditional role of First Lady. We know she is clever, so her reforms will be carefully calculated. She has watched Hillary’s missteps as First Lady and she now has Clinton’s ex-campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, to help her avoid any clunky repetition.

That Laura Bush wrote to Michelle last week, commiserating with her, showed great personality and generosity of spirit from the present First Lady. It was also a reminder that the key to being a successful First Lady, no matter what the critics say, is to stay true to who you are.

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Talking Politics in London

I returned from London last week after a whirlwind trip of reporting for Vanity Fair and seeing old friends. It’s funny how the very second you get off the plane at Heathrow, life seems to slow down compared to Manhattan’s frenetic pace. (Unless, of course, you are Naomi Campbell and Heathrow baggage-handlers have lost your luggage…)One of my stops was the cozy Notting Hill house of British shadow chancellor George Osborne, 37, and his auburn-haired wife, Frances, who has just written a best-selling biography, The Bolter. The book, which is about Frances’s oft-married great-grandmother, Lady Idina Sackville, is due out next spring in America. The conversation wasn’t all politics at the Osborne abode. After red wine and takeout, George cracked the Indiana Jones whip he’d bought for his 7-year-old son and described the boy’s delight when he received the plaything. Truth be told, the toy seemed to be giving the boy’s youthful-looking father considerable pleasure as well. Every time the whip cracked, the theme music from the movie played.

The great thing about this couple, whom I have known for many years—Frances and I have been friends since we were teenagers—is that they never take themselves too seriously, unlike many Americans of equivalent status. I remember I was once telling George some story about my life in New York, when he began searching for a pen and paper.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Making notes for the literary or film-writing career I’ll have to develop when my political one fails,” he deadpanned.

But he’s not going to fail. The current Labour government is highly unpopular in Britain, and chances are the young Conservatives will be the next government, and George the next chancellor.

Monday took me to the set of Harvey and Bob Weinsteins’ movie Shanghai, a period thriller set in 1941 starring John Cusack, who is showing an unswerving determination to highlight both the death toll and fiscal cost of the war in Iraq, as well as the iniquity of profiteering from the war.

He films all day, then stays up all night, either to go on shows like MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann to promote his film War, Inc. (still remarkably holding up despite its miniscule marketing budget), or record anti-McCain television commercials for MoveOn.org.

On Olbermann’s show last week, Cusack said he wouldn’t shut up until Obama is in office and Bush was impeached. You have to hand it to Cusack—the man fights for what he believes in.

Speaking of Bush: I also went to Scott’s, the new “it” restaurant in London, where my companions included the British historian Andrew Roberts and his wife, financial publicist Susan Gilchrist. They were looking forward to dinner at 10 Downing Street with the president and first lady, along with Rupert and Wendi Murdoch. I later learned that Roberts was seated next to President Bush, who has invited him to dinner at the White House before his term runs out. To prove how serious he was, Bush wrote down his personal phone number.

Now all I have to do is ask Roberts for it, give it to Cusack, and watch what happens. I’d pay for tickets to see that—wouldn’t you? Their exchange would likely make Naomi Campbell’s airport outburst look tame.

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London, you’ve changed for the better

For the first time in a year I have spent the week in London, working and seeing friends. It has been an eye-opening experience; after all, it has been 11 years since I lived here.

I was expecting to complain about the weather. When I left New York the temperature was in the high nineties. But here it has not yet rained and the temperature has been pleasantly warm. Other things are refreshing too. Unlike their New York counterparts, my English friends’ every other sentence is not about the economy. “The recession is coming,” one person in finance told me, “but we relegate it to background talk.”

People prefer talking about their children and the Indiana Jones movie to what they’ve been doing at work. A girlfriend told me how an expat English banker friend recently bored everyone with a monologue about his job throughout dinner. No one will be rushing to ask him back.

I have been lunching well. I cannot say I enjoyed Maze, in Grosvenor Square: my idea of lunch is not four laborious courses, each served in a martini glass. The Wolseley was better: my lunch companion offered me a glass of champagne. I don’t think I have ever drunk alcohol at lunch in Manhattan. Here, I drank the champagne willingly; for once, it was fun.

To my surprise, I’ve been out dancing three times, finishing Thursday night at Mahiki with 300 Sloanes under 30, dancing to disco music written well before they were born. They dance with a furious frenzy, in groups, often of the same sex. That didn’t happen when I lived here.

Taxi drivers are, as ever, opinionated, but also thoughtful: one reminded me not to forget my phone as I got out. In fact, in general the service has unquestionably got better; to my surprise I found you can get a pedicure on a Sunday.

But other things don’t change. I went to a wedding where, during one speech, the groom’s genitalia were graphically mocked. I realised, with horror, that I was undergoing a uniquely “British” moment.

So, London, thank you. I’ve enjoyed my week here. Now I need to go go home, detox and sleep. The pang will come when I get the bill for this trip on my credit card – and it will be have to be paid in US dollars.

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My nursery shame as a no-show mom

It was the one item in the diary marked “DO NOT MISS”, scheduled for 10.30am on Thursday. What occasion merited such urgency? My children’s graduation ceremony … from nursery school.

Given that my parents did not make it to my university graduation, I was amazed to receive emails from other (more involved) parents advising me that this occasion was a special event, preceded by dinner at the school head’s home two nights before, and everyone must dress up especially for it. DVDs of the five-year-olds receiving their certificates had to be ordered and pre-paid; there was much discussion of who would bring what food to the post-graduation party in Central Park.

Guilt immediately flooded my veins. In the past few months I have, as one mother put it to me nicely, been “MIA” (Missing in Action) from school. After the fiasco of getting them into kindergarten for next year was resolved, I had concentrated on my work instead of volunteering to chaperone school field trips or watch tap-dancing performances (a good thing as it turned out, as one child got “stage fright” while another was so overtired he just sat down on stage). So I felt that missing graduation would be a sin too far.

The pre-graduation dinner didn’t go entirely without mishap. I was relieved to see there were name tabs because even though my children are in two of the four classes in the school, my non-intervention in their education might mean that no one would know who I was.

The problem, I found, as I hopefully handed round a plate of brownies, was that they all did: I’m known as the no-show mom. And the women wanted to reassure me how sweet and lively my children were, since they – and not me – had been their chaperones on field trips.

Yet despite feeling utterly ashamed, as my little cherubs processed out of the place on Thursday, I cried. I may be the school’s token useless, no-show working mother, but the nurturing environment of this little school – and the back-up of all those kind non-working mothers – has more than made up for my absence.

“Remember, you have really great boys,” one of the teachers said as she hugged me farewell. I was speechless with emotion. So next time someone says they cannot miss their child’s graduation from nursery school, you will hear no mockery from me.

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Big Apple macho men spin out of control

I will readily confess to being a New York gym rat: I like to go for a run or workout on the elliptical machines. The only times it isn’t relaxing is if I happen to enter the gym at the same time as the “spinning” class is taking place; then, you can literally smell the dripping sweat of the cyclists.

No matter how high I turn the volume on my iPod, the class’s booming music and instructor’s gravelly microphoned voice intrude into my private space. I find myself secretly hating the spinners and their ostentatious brand of energy. I stare at the men and women in their tight-fitting Lycra and lurid sneakers, as they race to sign in, and wonder: did you not get enough opportunity to strut, preen and explode during your day in the office?

So it was with some satisfaction I read last week of a lawsuit concerning a fight during a spinning class on the Upper East Side. Apparently the defendant, a thick-set, orange-headed, bearded hedge fund manager named Stuart Sugarman, 48, had grunted so obnoxiously, Monica Seles-style, furiously shouting “Yeah!” along with unprintable obscenities, that eventually a broker two bikes down, Christopher Carter, 44, could take no more. Carter asked the instructor if he could quieten the hedge fund manager down; the instructor replied: “If this is the the way this guy wants to psych himself up for class, I’m not going to stop him.”

What a typically New York response: go ahead, exercise the right to free speech with zero consideration of its effect on others. Carter snapped. He yelled “shut up” and when this didn’t work, got off his bike, grabbed Sugarman’s bike by the handlebars and pushed it back against the wall, thus injuring Sugarman.

Not to be publicly humiliated, Sugarman carried on biking for 20 minutes before calling an ambulance. He was diagnosed with a herniated disc and hospitalised for a week, requiring surgery and metal screws in his neck. When asked why he had continued biking, he replied: “I was trying to be macho – a football player plays through the pain.”

He did wrong, but it’s hard not to feel sorry for Carter, who faces a year in jail if found guilty. Sugarman sounds an idiotic man, and the instructor not much better. As for the testosterone-laden world of spinning – even in aggression-fuelled New York, such behaviour seems out of place.

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John Cusack’s Viral Success Story

Critics in the mainstream media scoffed, for the most part, at John Cusack’s low-budget didactic satire, War Inc., calling it heavy-handed and five years too late. The film struggled to get into festivals, finally making it into Tribeca this year. But on the Web, voices sang a different tune, calling War Inc. “prescient” and groundbreaking for its strange tonal shifts and for highlighting the morbid absurdity and immorality of the war in Iraq and those who profit off it. Writers such as Arianna Huffington, The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, and even British artist Damien Hirst all gave blurbs for the movie’s Web site and Cusack’s MySpace page. Juno writer Diablo Cody interviewed Cusack about it for MySpaceTV, Vanity Fair quizzed him in print and online, and I talked with him on CNBC.Despite the negative reviews, I found War Inc. innovative and subversively ironic. And it appears that early audiences are responding to it, too. Last weekend, the film opened in two theaters—one in New York, the other in Los Angeles—and grossed $50,714 after four days. Per seat, according to Cusack, who spoke to me a few days ago, its performance was second only to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

The encouraging results may be proof of the power of viral marketing, an instance when the subculture becomes the culture. Today, looking bleary-eyed from London, where he is filming Shanghai for the Weinstein Company, Cusack used MySpace to talk about the success of his film and to ask people to go see it this weekend. If the figures are good enough, he said, the film will go national.

And if that happens, it won’t just be the anti-war message of the movie that is groundbreaking; War Inc. could become a model for a new, grass-roots type of marketing, in which a film’s potential audience (with a little help from the director) may be better able to advertise it than the so-called experts are. To me, that’s exciting. Just as the war’s main orchestrator in the movie, a capitalist played by Ben Kingsley, meets a gruesome end after running from an angry crowd, so too, if the drum roll is loud enough, can the views of critics be overruled by people who will see what they want to see, no matter who tells them not to.

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Give me Michelle over Hillary any day

It was an intensely political evening. First, the premiere of the amazing new film Recount, starring Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary, turned the dry legal arguments about “hanging chads” in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election into fascinating drama. Then screens hung down at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant so we could watch the results come in from the polls in West Virginia.

Few people were talking about anything else. We were all invited to vote ourselves – for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or John McCain. Not surprisingly – this is New York – Obama won the restaurant poll.

But while everyone knows he is more than likely to be the Democratic nominee, I was surprised to hear negative talk about him. And it was especially his wife, Michelle, whom I have always found to be deeply impressive, who came in for a bashing. One senior TV executive told me how when they’d filmed a puff piece recently on the Obamas, no one had commented on how every campaign staffer had on their desk a note along the lines of “Michelle is always right”.

I volunteered that it seems that Clinton, with her outrageous remarks about race and her unwillingness to give up despite her inability to win, seems to be far more the deranged, power-hungry woman than ice-cool Michelle.

No, no, they said. The truly angry, power-hungry woman here was Michelle Obama. Had I read her Princeton dissertation? It was all about race.

I have now read it: it is indeed about race and attitudes to race. But why shouldn’t it be? It is a subject she has talked about openly.

And having re-read profiles of Michelle Obama, frankly it seems to me that she is being attacked for being … well, just like me and most other professional career women.

She once complained that her husband didn’t put the butter away – and a columnist wrote that this was “emasculating”. Please. She has also been on his case for smoking, since one of their daughters has asthma (he has never smoked in front of her or their kids). Well, the same thing happened in my family. I don’t consider myself a harridan.

She introduces herself as a wife, mother and a “professional”. Ooh – dangerous! What’s worse: a “professional” – or a woman who says she’ll stand by her unfaithful man? Personally I’d choose the smoker husband and a profession for myself – but then I’m not in the running to be First Lady. And having watched the nail-biting Recount, all I can say is – thank goodness.

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Chattering Class

Guest commentators on the financial cable shows tend to be shouty men in striped shirts. But a rather different face has been showing up on CNBC lately, one that’s familiar to New York’s social and media types: Vicky Ward, Talk magazine survivor and current Vanity Fair contributing editor. Ward credits her new gig as a talking head to “stalking” the channel’s senior VP, Jonathan Wald, whom she met through mutual friend Dan Abrams. (“You can never know enough people,” she counsels.) So far, the blond Brit (wait, this is CNBC, not Fox News, right?) has sounded off on everything from the declining newspaper business to the booming call-girl industry—the latter is becoming a bit of a journalistic obsession for the writer, who has profiled Jeffrey Epstein and the D.C. Madam. Speaking to Ward about what it’s like to appear on TV, Style.com was quick with the tough questions: What’s it like, for example, sitting through all that hair and makeup? “The traditional helmet hair and power-shoulders look is far behind us,” she said, sounding relieved. “But I’ve learned that what looks great in real life can be horrendous on camera. I’ve worn the same dress about five times, as it was the only thing in my wardrobe that I realized worked.” Now it seems all she needs is one of those catchy television nicknames, though we hear Money Honey is already taken. —style.com

To view this article on Vicky, please click here

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Life’s just a deal for the new gurus

Last week, in a dash to get to a television studio, I lost a valuable ring. Devastated, I later narrated the story to a friend who works in finance. “The ring was worth X. How much was TV paying you? You clearly didn’t rationalise the situation,” he said. I was speechless at his words, but he’s not the only one around me who talks like this.

The reason perhaps lies in an article that appeared last week discussing America’s “new business gurus”. They write best-selling books and give motivational talks at jaw-dropping prices – $75,000 a pop, apparently. Even more remarkably, some of these men – of course they are men – have never worked in business.

In the wake of my personal disaster, I emailed three CEOs of major financial services firms and asked if they had read any of the five books mentioned in the article, if they believed in “business gurus”, and whether they offered employees “motivational seminars”. I am delighted to report that all three had not read the books, did not believe in “business gurus” and agreed with me: the fundamentals of business are simple – either you can do your job or you can’t.

However, the article made one interesting point: two of the new five “must-reads” are not written by academics or businessmen, but by journalists. One of the new bibles, Blink, is by fuzzy-haired New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, who I see most days in the gym, looking so pale and thin I worry he might faint on the treadmill.

Gladwell has established a reputation for capturing the psychology of the zeitgeist in a funny and clever way. In fact, Blink has become such an integral part of a New Yorker’s reading list that, frankly, it’s a bit uncool for anyone, in business or otherwise, not to have read it.

Nonetheless, its premise – that our split-second intuitive responses often trump the well-researched decisions of experts – is not exactly earth-shattering. One could also argue that our current president has followed the guidelines explicitly. After all, G W Bush christened himself “The Decider”, and expounded upon his ability to make swift decisions that come not from his brain but his gut. And look where that has got us.

Look also where following Gladwell’s theories got me: one five-minute TV appearance – and a missing, uninsured ring.

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