From the author who brought you the massive New York Times bestseller Bringing Down The House , Rigged is the startling, rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange. Black Gold. Texas Tea. Everybody wants oil but only a rare few have truly made a killing mastering its intricacies. One of those lucky bastards is Johnny Castino, a ballsy Italian-American from Brooklyn with an ego and a keen intelligence to match his ambition. Rigged is his story: a startling rags-to-riches tale of an ordinary kid turned Harvard grad who found himself caught up in the ultimate high-stakes adventure filled with money, sex, exotic locales, life-threatening danger, and extraordinary international consequences. Moving from the streets of Brooklyn to Dubai, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, Jakarta, Moscow, and Shanghai, Rigged reveals how the business is run and what happened when a man with solid gold cajones decided to flip a business—and an entire Exchange—on its head. “Gripping and stylish, Rigged keeps the reader moving through its pages at the pace of its characters’ Ferraris and luxury jets. Crafting a narrative with vivid energy and scope, Ben Mezrich records another flash point between tradition and transformation. This is living history.” - -- Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn decides to take on the testosterone-fueled Merc Exchange in lower Manhattan—where billions of dollars in oil money trade hands every week and where fistfights are known to break out on the trading floor. Soon our hero is living the good life in the gold-lined hotel palaces of Dubai and on private yachts in Monte Carlo, teeming with half-naked girls flown in by Saudi sheikhs, and making deals in the dangerous back alleys of Beijing. But that's only the beginning. Taken under the wing of another young gun and partnering with a mysterious young Muslim, the kid embarks on a dangerous adventure to revolutionize the oil trading industry—and, along with it, the world. This is a true story. Ben Mezrich graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991. He has published twelve books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Accidental Billionaires , which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network , and Bringing Down the House , which has sold more than 1.5 million copies in twelve languages and became the basis for the Kevin Spacey movie 21 . Mezrich has also published the national bestsellers Sex on the Moon , Ugly Americans , Rigged , and Busting Vegas . He lives in Boston. Rigged The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai By Ben Mezrich HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2008 Ben Mezrich All right reserved. ISBN: 9780061252730 Chapter One Three-thirty in the morning, maybe closer to four. A packed club in the Flatiron District of Manhattan, a place called Gypsy Tea. Trendy as hell, the velvet rope outside lorded over by a doorman with a shaved head and a name nobody could pronounce, and a girl in a leather skirt so short she could have worn it as a wristband. Two couch-strewn floors teeming with pretty people in designer clothes, their New York hip-factor ratified by the fact that it was past three in the morning on a Tuesday and that they'd somehow made it past the door-bitches and their mysterious and uniquely New York vetting practices. The music was dangerously loud, bouncing off the walls in ear-shattering waves, and the champagne was flowing freely, splashing down the sides of crystal flutes and splattering all over the thick faux-leather carpeting. The VIP area took up most of the back corner of the first floor, separated from the rest of the club by another velvet rope. The bouncers at this rope were wearing headsets and holding clipboards, but the clipboards were really just for show. If you were going to get into the VIP, the bouncers wouldn't need to find your name on a list. The crowd beyond the rope was young—twenties and thirties—and obviously well-heeled. Bankers in tailored Brooks Brothers mingled with hip-hop execs in Armani and Sean John. Prime Time celebs swirled about like errant weather patterns, trailing wakes of PR flunkies, oversized bodyguards, and harried assistants. And of course, there were girls—there were always girls, models from Ford and Elite and Next, too tall and too thin and too angled, more giraffes than gazelles. David Russo watched the circus from the safety of a corner banquette, his shoulders tense beneath the thin material of his charcoal-colored Zegna suit. The banquette was lodged behind a black marble table, which struggled beneath a glass metropolis of champagne and vodka bottles, ensconced by overflowing buckets of ice. David had a drink in his hand—som