In The Hellhound of Wall Street, Michael Perino recounts in riveting detail the 1933 hearings that put Wall Street on trial for the Great Crash. Never before in American history had so many financial titans been called to account before the public, and they had come within a few weeks of emerging unscathed. By the time Ferdinand Pecora, a Sicilian immigrant and former New York prosecutor, took over as chief counsel, the investigation had dragged on ineffectively for nearly a year and was universally written off as dead.
The Hellhound of Wall Street provides a minute-by-minute account of the ten dramatic days when Pecora turned the hearings around, cross-examining the officers of National City Bank (today's Citigroup), particularly its chairman, Charles Mitchell, one of the best known bankers of his day. Mitchell strode into the hearing room in obvious disdain for the proceedings, but he left utterly disgraced. Pecora's rigorous questioning revealed that City Bank was guilty of shocking financial abuses, from selling worthless bonds to manipulating its stock price. Most offensive of all was the excessive compensation and bonuses awarded to its executives for peddling shoddy securities to the American public.
Pecora became an unlikely hero to a beleaguered nation. The man whom the press called "the hellhound of Wall Street" was the son of a struggling factory worker. Precocious and determined, he became one of New York's few Italian American lawyers at a time when Italians were frequently stereotyped as anarchic criminals. The image of an immigrant lawyer challenging a blue-blooded Wall Street tycoon was just one more sign that a fundamental shift was taking place in America.
By creating the sensational headlines needed to galvanize public opinion for reform, the Pecora hearings spurred Congress to take unprecedented steps to rein in the freewheeling banking industry and led directly to the New Deal's landmark economic reforms. A gripping courtroom drama with remarkable contemporary relevance, The Hellhound of Wall Street brings to life a crucial turning point in American financial history.
The "extraordinary" (Financial Times) instant New York Times bestseller exposing how a "modern Gatsby" swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others--a "must read" (Booklist) tale of finance run amok and "the heist of the centur...
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Atlantic • The Huffington Post • Men’s Journal • MSN (U.K.) • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION AW...
At the end of 2008, Ford Motor Company was just months away from running out of cash. With the auto industry careening toward ruin, Congress offered all three Detroit automakers a bailout. General Motors and Chrysler grabbed the taxpayer lifeline, b...
“It’s not the magic that makes it work; it’s the way we work that makes it magic.”The secret for creating “magic” in our careers, our organizations, and our lives is simple: outstanding leadership—the kind t...
From Wall Street to Main Street, John Brooks, longtime contributor to the New Yorker, brings to life in vivid fashion twelve classic and timeless tales of corporate and financial life in America. What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster ...
Renowned business author David Magee fuses both the interesting history and philosophy of one of America’s most well-known companies in this entertaining aid for business management. While other American businesses are crumbling under low-cost...
The financial establishment—banks and investment bankers, such as Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley—were the cowboys, recklessly assuming risks, leveraging up to astronomical levels, a...
A riveting and timely intellectual history of one of our most important capitalist institutions, Harvard Business School, from the bestselling author of The Firm.With The Firm, financial journalist Duff McDonald pulled back the curtain on consultin...
The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos. Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content...
{"id":"241914","ean":"9781400188567","abr":"Unabridged","title":"The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance","subtitle":"How Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance","author":"Michael Perino","rating_average":"0","narrator":"George K. Wilson","ubr_id":"241914","abr_id":"0","ubr_price":"21.99","abr_price":"0.00","ubr_memprice":"13.19","abr_memprice":"0.00","ubr_narrator":"George K. Wilson","abr_narrator":"","ubr_length":"Unabridged: 15 hr ","abr_length":"Abridged: "}
