Employment Agency
Wolfman casually changed the subject as he cut into his steak.
“By the way, Sanha, I looked through your account activity... actually, I’ve been dying for the past few days because I wanted to ask you about this. If you don’t mind, could we talk a little about your returns?”
“Of course.”
“Glad to hear it. I’ll get straight to the point. Your last investment—Chapter 11 warrants—went past 3,000 percent, didn’t it? Your total cumulative return is over 6,400 percent now, right? Haha, honestly, I’ve never seen numbers like that even on our desk. That’s incredible.”
Victor and Vivian, sitting beside him, both went wide-eyed.
It seemed their father had never praised anyone that lavishly before.
Wolfman shrugged.
“I took a look at how you traded, too. I was curious how the actual orders were being handled. When your first order hit the account, I had one of the youngest traders answer the call. Since it was a student account, I figured it was just some penny-stock chase or a kid fiddling around with his parents’ money.”
It was only natural to think that way.
I said nothing and kept moving my fork and knife.
Wolfman continued.
“Phones start ringing before the market even opens. By 8:30 a.m. Eastern, brokers are shouting and institutional clients are scrambling to unwind futures positions. A student account tucked in among all that isn’t exactly common. A few days later, that kid brought me a report and said the order memos were getting too long. He said he’d used up an entire memo pad and still couldn’t keep up.”
“Was there something wrong with my order ticket?”
“Wrong? Quite the opposite. Your order sheets were meticulous—ticker, size, price, and even the execution conditions. Most retail investors just throw in a market order or roughly call out a price, but not you. Limit buys and sells were standard enough, but you even included stop-loss instructions for automatic selling if the loss hit a certain threshold... That was institutional behavior. It was so precise and clean that it was hard to believe it came from an individual, let alone a student.”
“...”
“Once your order memos piled up on the kid’s desk, the traders next to him started joking, ‘Hey, did you finally get assigned a hedge fund?’ They were wondering if they’d need to create a separate line item on the desk risk sheet just for one student account. Hahaha—”
Wolfman burst out laughing, clearly remembering it.
“And because the execution-confirmation calls were going out several times a day, the kid kept complaining that he couldn’t get his own work done. So in the end, I took a look at it myself. When you see an order, you can usually tell how that day’s volatility is being handled.”
Wolfman smiled faintly.
“So here’s the conclusion: from now on, your orders won’t go through that kid anymore. They’ll come straight to my office. If you need to place anything, call my direct line. I’ll take it myself, or one of the senior traders under me will. It’ll be faster and more accurate that way.”
That was good news.
A seasoned trader could get orders worked into the market much more quickly.
My orders had ended up changing the flow of an entire trading desk.
Then Wolfman added, his expression turning serious.
“It’s impressive, but be careful. Leverage like that can make a person drunk. Once you’ve tasted it, it’s like a drug that’s hard to quit, Sanha.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You do know institutional trading and retail trading are completely different games, right? Institutions operate within rules. At our firm alone, the daily loss limit is set at 2 percent of total assets. If a trader goes beyond that, he’s out of his seat that day. Shut down the computer and go home. No trading until the next morning.”
Wolfman’s advice was practical, but it was also dead-on.
Since I’d spent my previous life in Wall Street, I understood the value hidden in his words immediately.
Wolfman went on, sounding a little bitter. “I know a guy who blew seven years’ worth of salary in ninety minutes. All because he broke that rule once. Still, I guess he was lucky—it ended with discipline and getting thrown out. But private traders are different. There’s no one there to stop them. That makes it even more dangerous. They take a loss, then average down because they can’t bear to realize it. Then, when emotions run hot, they go on revenge trades. They think they’re fighting the market, but in the end, the market eats them alive. Don’t forget that the hand on the knife is your own. Always calculate whether the position is small enough to survive before you enter. Profit comes after that.”
I agreed.
I had seen countless colleagues vanish from Wall Street myself.
At the desk where I used to sit, there had been a senior trader once called the “King of Options.”
Every expiration day, he turned over thousands of options contracts and walked away each year with a bonus worth a Manhattan apartment.
Then, on one day when the market crashed in a way eerily similar to Black Monday, he levered up again, desperate to recover his losses.
Three days later, his name had disappeared from the risk report.
After bankruptcy, he received divorce papers from his wife, and the yacht and penthouse he loved bragging about went up for auction.
No one ever saw him again after that.
Some said he was living in a trailer somewhere in Florida. Others claimed he had been found swollen and bloated under a bridge.
Nothing was ever confirmed.
Only the framed family photo that had sat on his empty desk remained there for a week, until the janitor finally tossed it into the trash.
Another junior colleague had been a model employee who followed every company rule to the letter... but he copied margin trading exactly the same way in his personal account.
At the firm, his positions were force-liquidated when they hit the loss limit, but at home there was no risk manager to yell at him.
Three months later, he had lost everything.
He even used his father’s retirement money to pay down the debt, and when that, too, melted away, he finally left Wall Street.
The last time I happened to see him, he was standing in line in a poor section of Brooklyn, waiting for free day-old donuts and sandwiches.
People who suffered irreversible losses from a single moment of bad judgment and left the industry behind.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I nodded.
Wolfman would probably take my nod as nothing more than a child meekly agreeing with an adult, but so be it.
Then—
“Um, excuse me.”
Vivian, who had been quietly eating pancakes, raised her hand.
“Is Sanha oppa really a genius? I’m just surprised that he can actually talk stocks with Dad like an equal.”
Her voice carried a trace of embarrassment.
Victor narrowed his eyes.
“What’s that supposed to mean, Vivian? That baby voice? You’re still a kid and already thinking about flirting with men. And older men at that. Go find a boyfriend your own age~”
“What are you talking about? Four years isn’t that big of an age gap. Besides, boys our age all look like monkeys, so I don’t even feel anything toward them. Oh, and it’s not just boys our age who look like monkeys. You do too. A pizza-loving monkey.”
“What?! So Sanha’s cool and I’m a monkey!?”
“Yep, that’s exactly right. Sanha oppa is smart enough to hold a conversation with Dad, but you’re still living off allowance from him, aren’t you? There’s a huge difference.”
“Hey! You’re the one who’s always begging Dad for allowance too!”
“Me and you are the same? We’re four years apart.”
“You just said four years wasn’t a big deal!”
“Then you should’ve argued about it back then, shouldn’t you?”
Victor and Vivian.
The two geniuses, both too proud for their own good, were trading silent curses with their eyes.
Wolfman chuckled and shook his head.
He refilled my cup with coffee and asked, “So what are your plans from here? Are you going to keep running everything through a personal account?”
“No. I’m planning to set up a company. An investment firm.”
“Oh? That’s a great experience. Forming a corporation gives you better tax options, and it also opens the door to outside capital, so you’ll get to see a much broader world. If you need people, let me know. I can introduce you to some. Properly vetted ones.”
“Well, I still don’t know much about the world, so I’d like some advice.”
If a young man admitted his limits and asked for help humbly, then from the perspective of someone who had lived longer, it was hard not to want to do something for him.
Wolfman answered my request with a very serious, almost solemn attitude.
“Hmm. First, you’ll need a lawyer who can professionally structure the fund’s setup. From SEC regulations to the shareholder agreement, it all has to be built solid from the start, or you’ll run into trouble later. A lawyer is the one who draws the blueprint for the castle. If you write the partnership agreement or the Limited Partnership contract sloppily, then once profits start rolling in, the fighting begins over who gets what.”
He counted off points on his fingers.
“An accountant is the lookout who reports every day whether the walls have cracked. The moment you start making the financial statements prettier than reality, the market will catch on eventually. Numbers have to be honest if you want trust. A tax lawyer is another matter entirely. That guy is the one who knows the secret passage in and out of the castle. He builds legal tax-saving structures in advance so that when the tax audit comes, you can proudly say, ‘We took this route.’ Those three have to move as a team. Fortunately, among my friends there are some reliable people who work together well. I’ll introduce them right away. They’ll be happy too—opportunities to watch a smart young man grow from up close don’t come around often.”
“And... if possible, could I get recommendations for someone who knows the auction business too? I’ve been looking into that lately.”
“Auctions? Hah, good for you. I thought you were only looking at stocks.”
“I’m still at the studying stage.”
“Good. Then I’ll introduce you to an auction specialist as well. One of the friends I mentioned just now, actually. He’s the kind of guy who can handle not only straightforward property auctions but also messy, tangled liens and mortgages cleanly.”
Wolfman pulled a thick leather card holder from his inside pocket.
...pop!
He opened his fountain pen cap and quickly wrote something on one of the cards.
“Call this number tomorrow morning. Say it’s Wolfman’s referral, and they’ll know right away.”
A business card slid toward me.
I took it and tucked it into my inner pocket.
Then Wolfman added one more thing.
“And Sanha, one more thing. The IRS.”
IRS—Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. tax agency.
Unlike the soft, half-hearted tax bureaus in some other countries, where delinquent taxpayers could simply keep the door shut and force the officers to stand helplessly outside, the IRS was on a completely different level.
It was, in effect, a semi-military organization with its own armed investigators.
Special agents carried guns and had the authority to freeze bank accounts and seize assets without a warrant.
Once tax evasion was confirmed, the next stop was the federal penitentiary.
And not with some slap on the wrist, either—five to ten years was the baseline.
Most frightening of all was the burden of proof they wielded.
In ordinary criminal cases, the prosecution had to prove the defendant’s guilt.
But tax cases were different.
The taxpayer had to prove his own innocence, and the moment the IRS raised suspicion of evasion, it was entirely on the taxpayer to prove otherwise.
...And it was still 1992.
The IRS would later be reined in by the 1998 Restructuring and Reform Act, which greatly strengthened taxpayers’ rights, but for now it was a hunting hound at the height of its prime.
This was a time when collections were the metric by which agents were judged.
Auditors would cling to even the smallest error in pursuit of bonuses.
Once they picked a target, it was not unusual for audits to run for three, even five consecutive years.
This was the same country where Al Capone went to prison not for murder or bootlegging, but for tax evasion.
The FBI and the CIA couldn’t get him, but the IRS did.
That was America.
Wolfman was worried about exactly that.
“If you’re making that kind of return at your age, the tax office is definitely going to take interest. You could be audited. A student account earns several thousand percent and no one looks at it? That’s impossible. These days the IRS is especially sensitive to unusual trading by young investors.”
And that wasn’t all.
Besides stock trading, I was also developing an oil field without a permit and running a cash business on top of it.
On top of that, I’d bought up countless gas stations at auction with cash, so if the tax authorities got hold of me, they really could rip me apart and leave nothing behind.
...But.
“Don’t worry. I’ve been preparing for that for a long time.”
I’d already made various arrangements so I wouldn’t get pinned down by tax issues.
The IRS in 1991 was terrifying, but it was not perfect.
Bank-to-bank computer networks were still not interconnected, and currency transaction reports were still being written by hand and stacked in storage rooms at local offices.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, cash transactions over $10,000 required a CTR report—but if ten separate $9,000 deposits were made at ten different banks at the same time, there was simply no system in this era that could see the whole picture at once.
From the IRS’s point of view, Garden Queens was the backwater of all backwaters in Texas, little more than a dead-end settlement where only immigrants of uncertain status lived in clusters.
Even if some apparently wealthy outsider had bought up a few gas stations there, they’d only be treated like a ragpicker hauling in scraps—someone who had scooped up the cheapest, most unwanted auction leftovers with pocket change.
In the churn of America’s rapidly shifting economy, the IRS had bigger prey to chase.
At the end of the day, my father’s factory, my uncle’s junkyard, the gas stations I’d bought at auction, and my student accounts were all just unrelated small businesses and private individuals.
For the IRS to connect all of that into a single line, it would take at least thousands of hours of manual work.
At least a year should be safe. Still, I need to finish all my preparations before then.
By the 2000s, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network would have pattern-analysis systems, and by the 2010s, foreign accounts would be automatically reported.
At that point, tricks like this wouldn’t work anymore.
But right now it was 1992.
I had enough time to build a legal structure.
And—
If it comes to it, I’ve still got my “trump cards.”
Even if an IRS investigation started right this second, I had two more ways out.
Though ideally, I’d handle things without ever going that far.
Meanwhile, Wolfman laughed heartily.
“They say a clever fox digs more than one den. Sounds like you’ve got a few escape routes prepared.”
“That’s right.”
“Good. Then that’s enough.”
I didn’t offer any further explanation, and Wolfman didn’t press me either.
Instead, he looked at Victor sitting beside him and let out a sigh.
Victor was still bickering with Vivian.
“Sanha oppa is cool, but Victor is totally lame~ That’s why Becky unni dumped him~”
“Who got dumped?! I told you I wasn’t dumped!”
“Liar. You know Becky’s little brother Jason, right? He told me. He said his sister totally kicked you to the curb. Said the two of you were done.”
“How do you even know Jason!?”
“Jason confessed to me last Saturday. Of course I turned him down—I’m not interested in boys my age. Hmm~ Does that make us one win and one loss against the Thompson family? You lost to Becky Thompson, and I beat Jason Thompson~”
“I’m gonna kill you!”
Victor, enraged, lifted a pickle as if to throw it, then stopped and glanced at a passing waitress.
Vivian kept right on teasing him.
Wolfman shook his head helplessly and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Sanha, take care of Victor for me, will you? If you’re around, maybe this idiot will get his act together.”
“Don’t worry. Victor’s the kind of friend who can manage on his own too.”
I smiled, thinking of Victor before my regression.
Before I returned, Victor had been the most loyal friend I knew.
When I was forced out of Black Diamond, most of the people I knew cut off contact with me.
It was the same when I was discharged after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
But Victor was different.
He dropped everything, flew in from New York, and sat beside my bed.
He changed the water in the humidifier, peeled fruit for me, and talked about our old Harvard days.
You know, Sanha. Do you remember how we used to sit in the dorm eating pizza and talking all night? I mean, who was it again? I can’t remember the name, but anyway, that time I got dumped by my girlfriend? I was a total wreck, crying and carrying on. And then my dad suddenly showed up, and because our room was a mess, even you got yelled at along with me. Hahaha—
Back then, Victor had laughed while crying.
Tears and snot streaming down his face, he’d held my hand.
...When you get better, let’s eat pizza like that again. My treat. Okay?
I could still remember it vividly.
Victor Hamilton.
He might have looked a little foolish on the surface, but he was, in truth, warmer-hearted than almost anyone I knew.
Just having a friend like that beside me at this moment felt incredibly reassuring.
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