My friend was so happy that I was there to hear him chat with "Ace" that he put the call on speakerphone.
Whereupon Mr. G. cuts directly to the chase and shouts, "Where's my fucking $10 million dollars?"
My friend took the call off speaker and asked if I would excuse myself for a few minutes.
From the New York Times:
Alan C. Greenberg Is Dead at 86; Led Bear Stearns Through Its Rise and Fall
Alan C. Greenberg, a risk-chasing Wall Street titan who built Bear Stearns into a global investment banking powerhouse and presided over its collapse as America slid toward a calamitous recession in 2008, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 86.The cause was complications of cancer, his son, Ted, said.Mr. Greenberg’s nickname was “Ace,” and he kept a deck of cards on his desk, ready to deal. He was a champion bridge player, a magician who conjured coins with sleight of hand, a show-off who could whiz-bang a yo-yo, an adventurer who played pool with sharks and stalked game in Africa.He was a cigar-chomping capitalist in shirt sleeves: balding, muscular, poker-faced — some said icy — and he enforced strict regimens among employees: no loafing or small talk, no big salaries but commissions based on performance, and no long meetings.He loved the trading room, with its maelstrom of shouts, jangling phones, desks overflowing with paper and high-speed transaction displays. In his office he kept a photo of himself crouching over an African antelope he had slain with bow and arrow.That buccaneer spirit propelled him over five decades from Bear Stearns’s stock room, where he began as a clerk in 1949, to trading floors, where he mastered moneymaking skills, and into the executive suite, where he became chief executive in 1978, chairman in 1985 and chairman of the executive committee in 2001.
Mr. Greenberg led Bear Stearns on one of Wall Street’s legendary roller-coaster rides, a climb to dizzying heights as one of the country’s biggest brokerages, and a breathtaking free fall into bankruptcy. Stuck with billions in all-but-worthless mortgage securities as its clients made a run on the bank, Bear Stearns was taken over by JPMorgan Chase in a $270 million fire sale sanctioned by the Federal Reserve.The failure, the first among several brokerages, helped ignite Wall Street’s collapse, which dragged the nation into the worst credit crisis since the Great Depression. Bear shareholders, whose stock had traded at $170 in 2007, got $10 a share. Most of the firm’s 14,000 employees lost their jobs, and some their life savings. Thirty percent of the equity was held by employees, including many senior executives who were wiped out.But Mr. Greenberg, who had cannily cashed in his stake over the years and had sold $50 million in Bear Stearns shares since 2007, emerged almost unscathed. And he signed a lucrative contract with JPMorgan to stay on as vice chairman emeritus and take 40 percent of trading commissions he generated. In early 2010, JPMorgan discontinued the Bear Stearns name....MORE
