A real-life thriller—the story of kickbacks and payoffs, of shady deals struck in secret with known felons; a story in which half a million people lose enormous sums—some their life’s savings—in the largest securities fraud of the 1980s, with names like Onassis and Bush numbered among the victims. ABSORBING . . . A PAGE-TURNER . . . THE BOOK IS GREAT FUN TO READ . . . As a tale of ego and greed on Wall Street, Serpent on the Rock is up there with Barbarians at the Gate. — USA Today A COMPELLING TALE, richly laced with details, that shows how trust can be quickly tapped for huge profits by unscrupulous advisers. — Chicago Tribune ENGROSSING . . . A BLOW-BY-BLOW ACCOUNT OF AN UNPARALLELED CRIME . — Barron’s A GENUINE PAGE-TURNER . . . reads like a novel with bigger-than-life characters . . . comprehensive, impeccably sourced and striking in its detail. — Dallas Morning News Kurt Eichenwald’s cinematic storytelling and command of complex details create a disturbing and damning drama. — New York Times IF YOU WANT AN INSIDE LOOK AT WALL STREET AT ITS WORST, READ THIS BOOK. — Washington Post A DRAMATIC BOOK . . . A RIVETING ACCOUNT . . . GREAT WRITING THAT MAKES YOU WANT TO KEEP THE PAGES TURNING. — San Diego Union-Tribune BLOWS AWAY THRILLERS BY JOHN GRISHAM AND TOM CLANCY . . . This book has it all: suspense and horror, greed and pure malice, along with heartbreak and the eternal, valiant struggle of the little guy against the forces of evil . . . By two sentences into Serpent, I found myself hooked, unable to put the book down. — Insight KURT EICHENWALD has written for the New York Times for more than seventeen years. A two-time winner of the George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism and a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, he has been selected repeatedly for the TJFR Business News Reporter as one of the nation’s most influential financial journalists. His last book, the highly praised Conspiracy of Fools , was a New York Times bestseller. His book The Informant is currently in development as a major motion picture. Eichenwald lives in Dallas with his wife and three children. CHAPTER 1 Somebody at Bache & Company was out to get them. The lieutenants in the firm's tax shelter department just knew it. They recognized all the old tricks--the sudden audits of expense statements, the false whispers about misconduct, the unrealistic sales expectations. Probably, they guessed, this was the revenge of that skirt chaser, Bob Sherman. But their boss, Stephen Blank, disregarded the signs. A political war was under way, and Blank would not even arm himself. It was the spring of 1979, and a quiet power struggle at Bache was coming to a head. Blank, a handsome, dark-haired thirty-three-year-old, won some dangerous enemies at the firm during his six years running the tax shelter department. His tough standards in selecting deals for Bache had stepped on the toes of the executives whose pet projects he rejected. When certain of his decision, Blank refused to yield in his judgment--he often told colleagues that reputations in the business were built not on the successful deals that were sold but on the flops that weren't. Still, Blank surprised even some admirers when he refused to sell a real estate deal brought in by Sherman, who as the cohead of retail sales stood higher on the Bache corporate ladder. Sherman was a tough, demanding executive who did not like to be turned down. For Blank, the refusal was a fatal move, one that helped set in motion a series of decisions that reshaped the firm forever. Steve Blank wound up running the tax shelter division at Bache almost by default. A former high school teacher, he backed his way onto Wall Street in 1970 as a consultant helping brokerage firms manage their paperwork. The timing was perfect--the back offices of brokerages were being crushed by the huge volume of paper they needed to move each day in a booming market. When the back-office problems started clearing up, Blank took a job at Bache sprucing up its training programs. Two years later, in 1973, Blank's big opportunity arrived. The executive who ran Bache's tiny tax shelter department abruptly resigned, and the firm launched a desperate search for a successor. Blank quickly emerged as the top candidate. He seemed the only one likely to have instant credibility with the sales force--he had already forged strong relationships with brokers and managers from his work in the training program. Until a permanent replacement could be found, Bache turned the business over to Blank. He was twenty-seven years old. The selection of such a young and relatively inexperienced manager to run a division of a major brokerage firm was met mostly with shrugs. At the time, the tax shelter business was something of an unwanted stepchild on Wall Street. The shelters, also known as limited partnerships or direct investments, raised pools of capital from individuals to invest in business favored by