Free Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? by Charles Raw, Bruce Page, Godfrey Hodgson Page A

Cowett's book was addressed to the problem that blue sky laws exhibit many complicated differences in different parts of America, so that activities legal in one state may be illegal in the one next door. So, while Carla Cowett concluded her studies at the Law School, her husband and Professor Loss combed through the security statutes of every State in the Union, analysing the differences between them, and drafting a model statute which could unify practice throughout the country. Loss and Cowett on Blue Sky Law became the standard textbook on the subject.
        With all this behind him, Ed Cowett must have seemed exactly the kind of young man that Stroock & Stroock & Lavan were looking for, but he clearly flourished better in the more freewheeling fund world. 'Jack Dreyfus like him a lot,' said one friend, 'and I think there was even some suggestion that Ed might join Dreyfus, but it didn't come to anything.' Indeed, Cowett's direct connection with Dreyfus broke off after a couple of years, when he left Stroock & Stroock. But he was there long enough to negotiate on Dreyfus' behalf with Bernard Cornfeld, who was making considerable impact as a Dreyfus Fund dealer in Paris. One might have expected the two of them to have run into each other while Cornfeld was selling in New York. But Cornfeld's impatience with ipc had boiled over too soon. By Richard Robert's account, he was planning an expedition to Paris almost as soon as he started work at ipc, and originally, indeed, a group removal was proposed. 'The idea was that we would land in Paris and contact Bernie's uncle Albert Cornfield, who was vice-president of Twentieth-Century Fox in Europe by then,' says Roberts. Cornfeld, Roberts and friend booked passage for Paris. 'But Bernie missed the boat. He missed it by several months.'
        It was not until 1955, while Ed Cowett was still researching at Harvard, that Cornfeld finally did get on the boat. By that time, Roberts and his companion had given up and sailed back to New York.
        Bert Cantor's account is that Bernie left New York because, at long last, his backlog of parking tickets was catching up with him 1 , and he wanted to avoid being caught and fined. This is not so: Cornfeld was caught and fined rather heavily for an impressive log of unpaid tickets. And there is no need to assume any such motivation on his part.
        The likeliest thing is that he left New York because he was still looking for the environment which would let his talents flower to their fullest. A relatively short acquaintance with mutual funds seems to have left him in no doubt about the nature of those talents.
        But New York was a difficult environment, where the competition between rival fund-selling organizations was already intense. It was a highly developed and regulated market, in which the fund organizers and sellers had to contend with each other, and with the sceptical officials of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was the home of the brave - but no country ruled by the Securities Act (1933) could ever be the land of the free to a man with Bernie's ambitions.
        Before he left New York, Cornfeld sought and obtained an interview with Jack Dreyfus himself. 'At that time, you could
         1 The Bernie Cornfeld Story, by Bert Cantor.
        walk in off the street and get to see Jack,' recalled a Dreyfus executive of that period. 'We were still, relatively, a small fund; we were sti
ll hungry for dealers.' If Cornfeld angled for a dealership at this meeting, he did not do so very hard. He complimented Dreyfus effectively upon the simplicity and excellence of the Dreyfus prospectus, and made enough impression for the great man to remember him by. In the autumn of 1955, with a few hundred dollars in his wallet, Bernard Cornfeld arrived, alone, in Paris.
        
Chapter Four
        
The first missionary journeys
        
         Paris, Geneva - and many other places, from Caracas to Cox's