I’m not a big fan of Wall Street and merchant banker excesses. I’ve met a lot of good young men who have been corrupted by the Gordon Gekko myth and the whole notion that greed is good.
About a year or so ago, I read a story in Vanity Fair about the murder of Robert Kissel, a Merrill Lynch and former Goldman Sachs investment banker in Hong Kong. The story was unputdownable. It had a plot impossible to make up. A brutal father, a brutal murder, a brother killed, and right at the heart of the story, a high living, insecure, conniving, driven, expatriate wife, Nancy.
Joe McGinniss has just published a book about the whole mess called Never Enough. Order it now. If you know any merchant bankers, expatriate wives, or people who live in Connecticut or the goldfish bowl that is Hong Kong, you must read this book. It’s a true story of two brothers who wanted to own the world, but instead, both wound up murdered continents apart. For one of them the end came via Nancy, a modern American desperate housewife for whom having it all just wasn’t enough. We’re talking about a modern day morality tale full of dysfunctional new millennium families. The book is written with a newspaper journalist’s rapid fire style and it’s just dying to be a movie for Tarantino to direct and Uma Thurman to star in. And because it’s true, not everything gets tidied up, so there is great after dinner fodder too. Who killed Andrew? And how did Michael Del Priore keep out of it?
