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

Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and dozens of other sweatshops for ambitious young capitalists. So in the bestcase, these schools could accept only twenty people from Bain, not the full 120. In essence, Bain was offering the opportunity to work your fingers to the bone for $28,000 a year, and your reward was a 16 percent chance, at best, of getting into Harvard or Stanford.
    The resulting business school application process created a crisis for all of us at Bain. We eyed each other suspiciously for weeks, trying to figure out how we were going to differentiate ourselves from one another. I certainly wasn’t better than my classmates. Many had gone to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, and many had better performance reviews than me at Bain.
    But then it dawned on me. My colleagues may all have had better résumés, but who else was the grandson of the leader of the Communist Party of the United States? No one else, that’s who.
    I applied to two schools, Harvard and Stanford, and told them my grandfather’s story. Harvard was quick to reject me, but amazingly, Stanford said yes. I was one of only three Bain employees accepted to Stanford that year.
    In late August 1987, I packed up my Toyota Tercel and drove across the country to California. When I got to Palo Alto, I turned right off El Camino Real onto Palm Drive, which led up to Stanford’s main campus. The road was lined with twin rows of palm trees ending at Spanish-style buildings with terra-cotta roofs. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue. This was California, and I felt as if I were arriving in heaven.
    I soon learned that it was heaven. The air was clean, the sky was blue, and every day felt as if I were living in some kind of paradise. Everyone at Stanford had killed himself to get there, working eighty-hour weeks at places like Bain, poring over spreadsheets, falling asleep at their desks, sacrificing fun at the altar of success. We were all strivers who had competed against one another for the right to be there, but once we got there, the whole paradigm shifted. Stanford didn’t allow you to show your grades to potential employers. All hiring decisions were made on the basis of interviews and past experience. The upshot of this was that the normal academic competitionwas replaced with something that none of us expected: an air of cooperation, camaraderie, and friendship. I quickly realized that success at Stanford wasn’t in doing well there, but rather just being there. Everything else was gravy. It was for me, and for every one of my classmates, the best two years of our lives.
    Aside from just enjoying the experience, the other purpose of Stanford was to figure out what to do after business school. From the moment we arrived, my classmates and I spent nearly every day going to corporate information sessions, brown-bag lunches, evening receptions, dinners, and interviews trying to choose which job, among thousands available, was the right job.
    I went to a standing-room-only Procter & Gamble brown-bag lunch and watched three female junior marketing executives in pleated blue skirts, white shirts, and floppy ties talk in excited corporate jargon about all the fantastic ways they sold soap.
    I went to a Trammell Crow cocktail reception. I felt so out of place that I curled my toes in my shoes as smooth-talking, good-looking Texans slapped each other on the back and shot the shit about baseball, big money, and real estate development (which was Trammell Crow’s business).
    Then there was the Drexel Burnham Lambert reception where I tried to stay awake as a team of balding bond salesmen with fancy suits droned on about the thrilling world of high-yield bond trading in their Beverly Hills office.
    I thought, No, no, and no thank you .
    The more I went to these things, the more out of place I felt, and one interview in particular drove it home for me. It was for a summer-associate job at JP Morgan. I didn’t particularly want to work there, but how could I not