>> 'Roses are red, violets are blue, God invented shit to be
along side of you.'
>> 'Roses are red, violets are blue, shit rises to the
surface, along with you.'
>> 'Roses are red, violets are blue, gotta look over my
shoulder, doing business with you.'
>> Roses are red, violets are blue. Your kid sucks toes, how
about you?'
The independent oil and gas business was, for me, an open penitentiary and unless you believed that paranoia improves peripheral vision you were sure to be fucked. You were dealing with people looking for black gold (oil and natural gas) that was as many as 3-4 miles and more below the earth's surface, so taking advantage of two legged animals (people) was like shooting fish in a barrel. In the Texas oil fields the New York investors were often called 'their Jewish mullets'. For the non-sports people, a mullet is a fish that's easy to catch. Make no mistake. I cherish the many fruitful, fun years I spent in and around the old time oil men. They lived like there was no tomorrow. They were a once in a lifetime experience and genre.
One day I was breaking bread with King Kong (a/k/a John Myers) who at that time was EVP of the GE Pension Trust when KK brought up an oil and gas investment that the Pension Trust had made in a partnership managed by Torch Energy. He was uncomfortable with J.P. Bryan, the CEO, which led to his being concerned about GE's $65 million investment.
KK's DNA contains a mass of street smarts. He is a graduate of the Queens, NY schools of stick ball, stoop ball and kick the can. His MBA and PhD are in street smarts. KK briefly outlined the deal that GE was in with Torch. I told him that he was right; GE was getting fucked (and without being kissed). At one point, after my 'educating' him, King Kong summed Bryan to Connecticut where the confrontation culminated in KK inviting Bryan outside for a shootout with fists not guns. Chicken shit Bryan declined the invitation. I would have too.
Naturally, initially, KK questioned my judgment since I hadn't seen any of the documents. I pointed out that the nature of deal made it an automatic limited partner fucking. A few days later King Kong phoned and asked me if I would look at the deal and negotiate for GE an exit from the partnership with Torch. I would be paid on success. Done deal though I did question whether other button down GE big shots would accept me. In spite of my Brioni suits, Hermes bow ties and monogrammed Turnbull and Asser shirts, my Bronx fuck 'em attitude always shone through all of that superficial nonsense. Thank God.
I hardly fit, with my foul mouth and long hair, the button down GE image. King Kong guaranteed me that he was not about to expose the GE hierarchy to me. So he didn't allow me past the Pension Trust. We had some words when he flat out refused to allow me to introduce Leo Hindery, President of ATT, to a very high ranking GE corporate executive because KK was sure the executive would take exception to my clothes. That really pissed me off, a lot. I was walking around dressed in about $6,000 worth of clothes though I always seemed to need a haircut. Leo's character never was discussed only my clothes.
Turns out that King Kong was right for the wrong reason. Leo turned out to be, in spite of his business success, a total flake. A terrible human being that John Myers didn't trust from day one.
I started, happy as a clam in mud, ready to put my paranoia in motion. First I discovered that the GE investment guy who recommended that piece of shit to the investment committee had been the beneficiary of J.P. Bryan's 'hospitality' many times. The father of the toe sucker would fly the GE guy, on a private aircraft to Telluride, Colorado from Houston to ski and stay at J.P. Bryan's house and then fly him back to Houston. Mr. Ethical would fly commercial back to Connecticut and recommend the investment and speak highly of his illicit backer, J.P. Bryan.
In looking at the numbers of the deal, I was horrified but not surprised to see that Torch bought packages of oil and gas properties, kept the best ones for itself and unloaded the poorer ones on the partnership. And charged unbelievable fees. G.E. and its partners were Torch's milk cows and Bryan pulled on those teats mercilessly. And the dollars flowed to Torch. The investors were getting fucked without being kissed.
I met with Bryan, in an effort to extricate GE, several times in the Bay Area. He would blow in on his burner. I would meet him at the private jet terminal just outside of SF or at a downtown hotel. Also, we spoke on the phone quite a few times. Without a filter between my brain and my mouth I said some really dumb things about the CEO of the Pension Trust. They weren't necessarily wrong; they just didn't need saying.
While all this bullshit was going on, GE assigned a kid who couldn't find his ass with either hand to work with me. He got his job at the Pension Trust courtesy of his father-in-law, a very high ranking GE executive. We spoke every day. I sent him books on the oil and gas business. I ran a school for that ungrateful jerk.
The kid did confirm my suspicion that Bryan was seducing most all the institutional money managers, not including Betty Sheets of IBM, but including the GE guy with luxuries like picking them up at the airport in limos, putting them up in suites, giving them carte blanche spending privileges at the hotel gift shop, entertaining them, on and on. Maybe a 'hostess' or two. As I told KK, Bryan was in both the oil and gas business and in the entertainment business. And most of the managers went for it all -- hook, line and sinker, mouths wide open. Just like mullets.
In the midst of all this, I found that Bryan, that asshole, had unbeknownst to me illegally taped all our phone conversations, printed them out, highlighted my dumb comments about the CEO, and then sent them to the CEO who went berserk. When he found that I was going to sue Bryan (we all know that one of the three most dangerous people in the world is a Jew with a lawyer), he shagged my lower case Bronx Jewish ass back to Connecticut twice and threatened me, and even King Kong for hiring me, with dire actions if I went through with the lawsuit. I went from hero to bum quicker than you could tell Bryan to take a flying fuck to the moon.
In lieu of the lawsuit, I started sending 'roses are red etc', Stanford picture postcards every week to Bryan. Each one, I hoped, really unpleasant. It got to the point where Bryan's attorney called the GE attorney to try to force me to stop. I told the GE attorney to tell Bryan's attorney to suck eggs out of small holes but slowly.
Thanks to basically my efforts, GE retrieved their $65 million plus a treasury rate of return. After the settlement, the 'student' never returned another of my phone calls. But I laughed all the way to the bank.
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