Whores, cocaine, $40,000 bottles of bourbon: these are not your grandfather's bankers
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which is not to suggest that there weren’t horrible, awful people down in the canyons before today
Crazy, “money is no object” bidding wars in Greenwich explained: the money is everywhere, as reported in this NY Post story, Wall Street Gone Wild. The Louts of Wall Street have always been around, of course, and articles like this one have cropped up every couple of years since at least the 80s, when the M&A guys began making until-then unheard of bonuses. But the amount of cash being tossed at houses now is unprecedented — the Fed’s free-money policy has been very, very good to some people.
The scene is hopping at Valbella, in Midtown, which, after 5 p.m. attracts flocks of guys from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America. With people working at home some days and spending others at the office, manager/wine-director Elio Papa told The Post, “Thursday is the new Friday.”
He explains that the finance hotshots tend to favor the elite bourbon Pappy Van Winkle. “We’re only allocated one bottle per year and it goes for $380 per shot,” Papa said. “Luckily we stashed some during Covid. So Covid was good for something.”
“I had a private equity guy who was throwing his girlfriend’s 30th birthday party,” Beni Metsch, head of VIP services for The Blond, told The Post. “It didn’t matter if the budget was $5,000 or $20,000. But ultimately, he did 20 people for $15,000. The girl was happy. Everybody was happy. Nobody had to wait outside. They had 1942 [Don Julio tequila] and bottles of Dom Perignon” — brought to the table by cocktail waitresses after Metsch personally settled them in. “They didn’t want anything out of the ordinary.”
Sometimes, though, when young Wall Streeters sit at opposing tables, things get competitive. “We had a champagne war two weeks ago,” Richie Romero, managing-partner of Nebula, told The Post. “One guy sees the parade of cocktail waitresses, bringing bottles to the table, maybe with the ‘Rocky’ theme playing and girls run to the table. The guy single-picks and shoos away whoever he doesn’t want. Egos get bruised and it’s revenge of the broker. Then the other guy wants to outdo him and it goes back and forth. They were both over $30,000 or $40,000 that night.”
Or else they can make like some of their stock-slinging bros and skip the g-string formalities altogether. They just need to know where to go. A source inside the nightclub world told The Post that a venerable Italian restaurant in Soho “is the definitive place to go if you are a Wall Street guy with a bonus of $500,000 or more who wants a young prostitute.” He added, “You go there and see very attractive women sitting alone or with equally attractive friends or with less attractive men and you might wonder what the connection is. It’s an extremely deliberate kind of matchmaking and is booming right now.”
I’m going to assume that these particular ignorant, no-class thugs (many with Ivy League MBAs, but there it is) aren’t the same people who are touring and bidding on Greenwich houses during weekend daylight hours — the Wall Streeters I’ve worked with have all been very decent, educated people (then again they’re all readers of the blog, so …) but this article does illustrate how much money is currently flushing through the system if the louts can toss tens of thousands of dollars on an evening with whores and fellow-lowlifes. Good luck bidding against them.
