Free The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray Page B

since childhood: He became a billionaire. Subprime mortgages were booming, and Danforth Blaue, a bank once perceived as a starchy also-ran, was thanks to his leadership right at the heart of the action. The day stock options took his wealth on paper to the magical ten figures, Blankly celebrated with a quiet dinner at home with his wife and legal team. Then he bought eight stories of the Empire State Building.
    Porter Blankly has always dreamed big. Hailing from a hardscrabble town of blue-collar laborers, many of them employed on his father’s private railroad, he was spotted as a teenager by a scout for Harvard’s varsity golf team. He dropped out of ‘Old Crimson’ after only a year to play full-time, and although a shoulder injury cut short his professional career, his experiences on the courses of the 1960s were formative. This was a time of ferment in the Massachusetts golf scene. Ideas and books by the young firebrands of the new
conservative movement were being passed around – as well as other material. ‘[US Ryder Cup team captain Don] Hartford turned up one day with a sheet of blotter acid,’ Blankly recalled later, ‘and everything changed. The fairways were rainbows, the holes were mouths, speaking to you. You’ve heard about crazy golf – at that time all golf was crazy. People were showing up in sunglasses, without ties … everything was being questioned.’
    The potent cocktail of fiscal conservatism and perception-altering drugs would shape an entire generation. Many of the figures Blankly encountered at that time went on to become key figures in politics, banking, and in the nascent world of computing, into which they carried the revolutionary concept they had learned on the fairways – that reality was plastic and could be molded as they saw fit.
    Though he never completed his degree and had no training in finance, arriving in Wall Street Blankly found his +2 handicap much in demand. He was taken under the wing of the legendary Walter Wriston of Citibank, and, as he quickly came to dominate in interbank and pro-am tournaments, effectively given an open brief. At the time the major banks were plowing money into Latin American dictatorships, but Blankly, never one to follow the crowd, instead staked his money on a then little-known warlord in the Middle East. The bet paid off: While Wall Street lost a fortune when their dictators were deposed, Ahmed bin-Ahmed, as he was then known, went on to become the Caliph of the oil-rich state of Oran, and today remains one of Blankly’s biggest financial backers and closest personal friends.
    Tragedy was to strike at the end of the 1970s, when his wife of only six months, heiress Cressida Heinz-Boeing, committed suicide, but Blankly bounced back, taking a position at Drexel Burnham as the junk bond boom began. This was the age of the so-called ‘Masters of the Universe,’ when traders made millions from peddling mountains of practically worthless bonds; Blankly soon became famous for his aggressive acquisitions strategy and his colorful private life, dating a string of models, and being photographed in New York’s hottest nightspots.
    Yet behind the scenes, he was under considerable pressure. The collapse of the junk bond market following the indictment of his boss and close personal friend Michael Milken left him with personal losses of over ten million dollars. A greater loss was soon to follow with the suicide of his second wife, Caspian Dupont. Reeling from this double blow, Blankly spent some time in the financial wilderness. According to friends, he thought seriously about leaving banking and beginning a new career, possibly in restoring old boats. However, the dearth of professional-level golfers in the major houses soon had Wall Street beating a path to his door. He returned to Citi in the early 1990s, where he remained a divisive figure – beloved among employees for his inspirational memos, but attracting controversy for his refusal to indulge