Rarely in history have so many Americans detested so few, in this case the pin-striped bankers of Wall Street and their kissing cousins, the secretive hedge-fund billionaires hidden within their mansions in Greenwich, Connecticut. There is angry talk emanating from the White House of new government controls and taxes on the financial sector. A revered investment bank, Goldman Sachs, is under investigation and is being charged with fraud, while federal prosecutors are busy strapping recording devices to traders as part of a sprawling probe into alleged insider trading at Galleon Group and other hedge funds.
That makes it a dicey time to be a man whose $12 billion hedge fund was at one time said to trade as much as 3 percent of all the stock moved on the New York Stock Exchange. Especially if you are dogged by ominous whispers of insider trading and secret dealings, and are widely seen as the ultimate target of all those federal investigators. You risk becoming a symbol that embodies all that is wrong with high finance, as Michael Milken was the last time Wall Street was under siege, in the late 1980s. It doesnâ??t help to dwell in what reporters always call the greatest mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, a 30-room palace set inside a compound featuring its own basketball court and two-hole golf course. Or that you are seen as a distant and vaguely threatening man so private that The Wall Street Journal likened you to Howard Hughes and Greta Garbo.
The man in question is Steve Cohenâ??â??Stevieâ? to the Streetâ??whose $6.4 billion fortune makes him the 36th-wealthiest American, according to Forbes, and who is easily the most notorious and least-interviewed hedge-fund billionaire of all. Yet, even before I enter his driveway, things are not what I expected. Out here, in the northern reaches of Greenwich, beyond the Merritt Parkway, the wooded, winding lanes are lined with enormous estates overlooking bright-green lawns the size of football fields. Cohenâ??s infamous home, its long roof glimpsed just beyond six-foot stone walls, seems strangely close to the road; a teenager could heft a softball over those walls and hit the front door.
At the guardhouse, a man in a polo shirt opens the electronic gate and tells me to park â??over by the yellow balloon dog.â? This turns out to be a massive piece of artâ??actually Balloon Dog, by Jeff Koonsâ??set in a bed of tall tulips, one of three enormous, colorful Koons pieces that line the driveway as it curls around to a parking area jammed with a dozen cars and black S.U.V.â??s.
The house is certainly large, its portico seemingly the size of the Library of Congress. From a side entrance, a young man emerges and escorts me inside, past a guardroom lined with video screens and into a small chamber with a high mezzanine whose shelves are packed with art books. Inside, Cohen is waiting, and as he offers a soft handshake, itâ??s hard not to be startled by the gulf between perception and reality. This is Wall Streetâ??s Wizard of Oz. And like Oz, the man who steps from behind the curtain is a doughy little balding man in his mid-50s. There is no sense of power or mystery, only the amiable, clerkish air of your cousin the actuary, in a zip-up sweater and sneakers.
This is only the second time in Cohenâ??s 30-year career that an interview with him has been published, not that anything else about our conversations this spring suggests anything even vaguely Howard Hughesian. On this day, Cohen is working at home due to his aching lower back, and as I take a seat he jams a bright-blue ice pack down his jeans and wedges himself into a wing chair, propping himself stiffly like a vertical sardine. He manages a weak smile, acknowledging the incongruity. â??What can I say?â? he says. â??This is the life I lead.â?
Of all the C.E.O.â??s and billionaires Iâ??ve met over the last 25 years, Cohen comes off as the most unpretentious. Yes, there is a Jasper Johns painting in his library for which he is rumored to have paid $110 million. Yes, there are Picassos and Monets and Francis Bacons everywhere you turn. But vast as the mansion isâ??â??No one needs a house this big,â? Cohen admitsâ??it is also home to his wife, seven children, and elderly in-laws. Cohen says he understands outsidersâ?? fascination with his wealth, but he insists he doesnâ??t deserve to be a symbol of anything, much less Wall Street run amok. The events of the last six months, which thrust him into the tabloid headlines for the first time, seem to bewilder him: the Galleon insider-trading scandal; his ex-wifeâ??s nasty lawsuit, claiming he was hiding money and involved in mail and wire fraud; even the bizarre incident in which a Brooklyn Orthodox rabbi, with supposed evidence of insider trading, allegedly tried to extort $4 million from him. â??Oh yeah,â? he says with a smile. â??Donâ??t forget the rabbi.â?
â??Iâ??ve had a rough six months,â? he continues. â??I could not understand it, what the hell was going on. It was like a circus, a fucking circus. Well, things are finally calming down. The press is moving on. This story will be the last anyone reads about me for a while, I think. Because [reporters] will get sick of me.â?
Cohen, it is clear, is certainly sick of them. In fact, he says, the onslaught of bad press, combined with the bulging disk that is causing his back pain, has him thinking for the first time about an exit from active investingâ??and sooner rather than later. What he describes sounds a bit like a midlife crisis. When I express skepticism that he could walk away from a career as one of the most heralded Wall Street traders of the last half-century, he leans forward and jams a finger at me, Uncle Samâ??style: â??Iâ??m telling you that, within a year, if I donâ??t want to trade anymore, I wonâ??t have to. As the firm grows, it needs to change and evolve. I also need to do that. Iâ??m setting things up where the firm will be better able to leverage our ideas and be more profitable and have more capital than if I was doing it as we have done before. Thereâ??s a lot of other things I can do. I donâ??t have to sit at the desk. Seriously, Iâ??ve got nothing left to prove. Iâ??ve been doing this 33 years, Iâ??ve been to the top of the mountain, and thereâ??s not much there. My dream is to liberate myself. So is that a midlife crisis? Or is it just being fucking smart? I donâ??t know. But itâ??s exciting.â?
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