Straight to Hell

May 11, 2015
LeFevre writes for Business Insider and has been interviewed by a plethora of news outlets—but readers are most likely to know him as creator of the @GSElevator Twitter account, a raunchy, irreverent stream of poor-judgement statements supposedly overheard in the Goldman Sachs elevator (though in fact most were not). LeFevre tracks his life in finance, from his start in Salomon Brothers’s fixed-income department, to a job offer at Goldman Sachs itself. His story reads like a frat boy’s fever dream of the high-flying life: morning drinking, late-night drinking, and drinking all the hours in between; pranks, bar fights, cheating, travel, and prostitutes. Peppered with a range of his tweets, which range from the thigh-slapping to the grimace-inducing, LeFevre’s story is orchestrated to prove that Wall Street turns its adherents into automatons focused on money above anything else. Equal parts fun and train wreck, this is a tale engineered to astonish anyone who wondered which fools were behind the crash of 2008; few could have pictured how absurd the truth really was. Agent: Byrd Leavell, Waxman Leavell Literary Agency.

May 15, 2015
A scattershot syllabus for billionaire boys-club bankers in Bad Behavior 101. "As we see it," writes LeFevre, "if you're dumb enough to get caught cheating, you probably don't belong on Wall Street." Cocaine, bloody marys, more cocaine-and that's before breakfast. No, it's not a day at Hunter S. Thompson's ranch but rather a training day at an ordinary big-ticket investment bank, a place full of starry-eyed Ivy Leaguers and a few Oxbridge types looking to score big. Cheating, to hear the author-famed for his tell-all tweets before this book deal-tell it, is ordinary behavior, hardly worth pausing to ponder except to figure out ways around the traps laid by fellow cadets. LeFevre is the real-world embodiment of Patrick Bateman, coming off as soulless, unapologetic, and full of overweening pride-the very stuff of which successful Wall Street honchos are made. But he is also strangely unreflective. Where readers might want to know a bit about, say, why supposedly heavily regulated institutions are so open to corruption and system-gaming, LeFevre brags about the fact that his "garbage disposal eats better than 99% of the world" and insists that "morality and deviance are relative." (Yes, readers may be thinking, but if it's my money at stake, some absolutes are in order.) What we learn instead is that it's easy to chalk up a $2,700 bar bill in an evening, that drugs are as easy to come by as potato chips in communist China, and that part of the job description at any brokerage worth its salt is "to proactively throw my competitors under the bus at every possible opportunity." Reading this book-length swagger, you'd be forgiven for keeping your money under the mattress henceforth. But if LeFevre is truly hell-bound, as his title suggests, then it's for indifferent writing as much as for any fiscal peccadilloes.

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