Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice Read Online Free Page A

really wanted to upset my parents, then I would have to come up with something else.
    Then, toward the end of high school, it hit me. I would put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist. Nothing would piss my family off more than that.

3
Chip and Winthrop
    The only problem was that since I was such a poor student, every university I applied to rejected me. Only after the intervention of my high school’s guidance counselor did I get a place at the University of Colorado in Boulder on appeal. While barely getting into Boulder was humiliating, I recovered pretty quickly when I realized the school had been ranked as the number one party school in the country by Playboy magazine.
    Based on countless viewings of the movie Animal House , I decided that if I was going to go to a party school, I might as well do it right and join a fraternity. I pledged the Delta Upsilon fraternity and, after the requisite hazing, was accepted as a member. Everyone had a nickname there—Sparky, Whiff, Doorstop, Slim—and mine, on account of my curly, black hair, was Brillo.
    Being Brillo was fun, but after a few months of too much beer, chasing girls, ridiculous pranks, and watching countless hours of sports on TV, I started to think that if I kept it up, then the only kind of capitalist I was going to be was the kind who collected tips as a parking lot attendant. It all came to a head when one of my fraternity brothers, and someone I idolized, was caught robbing the United Bank of Boulder to fund an out-of-control coke habit. After he was sentenced to a long stretch in federal prison, I had something of a wake-up call. I realized that if I kept it up, then the only person who would suffer from this particular form of rebellion would be me.
    From that moment forward I stopped partying, spent every night in the library, and began to get straight As. At the end of my sophomoreyear, I applied to top universities around the country and was accepted to the University of Chicago.
    I worked even harder at Chicago, and my ambition grew. But as I approached graduation, I felt an overriding need to figure out what I was going to do with my life. How was I going to go about being a capitalist? As I mulled this over, I came across an announcement for a lecture by the dean of the graduate business school. Since my plan was to go into the business world in some capacity, I decided to attend. The speech he gave was about the career paths of Chicago MBA graduates, all of whom seemed to be doing important things and getting paid well to do them. Business school, it seemed, was the obvious next step for me.
    According to the dean, the best way to get accepted at one of the top business schools was to get into one of the two-year pre-MBA programs at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, or at one of the twenty-five other firms with similar programs. I bombarded all of them with letters and phone calls asking for a job. But of course it wasn’t as simple as that, because every other college senior with similar ambitions was doing the exact same thing. In the end, I received twenty-four rejection letters, along with a single offer from Bain & Company in Boston, one of the top management-consulting firms in the country. It wasn’t clear how I’d slipped through their filter, but somehow I had, and I grabbed their offer with both hands.
    Bain chose students with top grades from good schools who were ready to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for two years. In return, they promised you would get into one of the top business schools in the country. There was a rub that year, though. Bain’s business was growing so quickly that they needed to hire 120 smart “student slaves” instead of just twenty, like all the other firms running two-year pre-MBA programs. Unfortunately, this ruined the implicit deal Bain had with the business schools. These schools did indeed like to admit young consultants from Bain, but they also liked McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Morgan