Latest / Nightmare Success In and Out / Wired on Wall Street: Tom Hardin (Tipper X) on Wearing a Wire and Surviving the Sting

Transcript

Wired on Wall Street: Tom Hardin (Tipper X) on Wearing a Wire and Surviving the Sting · Nightmare Success In and Out

• 0:00
  What do you think's your biggest take away through all of it that
• 0:02
  you've been through? I think my biggest take away is
• 0:05
  that your scars can become your service.
• 0:08
  For years I lived in shame, thinking my life was was over
• 0:11
  because I had lost my reputation.
• 0:14
  And the shame kept me running, like literally and figuratively
• 0:17
  trying to escape myself. But I I realized that that
• 0:20
  coming back from this wasn't about erasing the past, it was
• 0:23
  about repurposing it. And so when I finally started
• 0:26
  using it to teach others about the slippery slope of ethics, I
• 0:29
  found that radical honesty didn't just help others, it
• 0:32
  actually set me free. And so I would say, you don't
• 0:35
  drown by falling in the water, you drown by staying there.
• 0:38
  And you have to decide to build something new out of the rubble.
• 0:43
  What happens when your worst fear becomes your reality?
• 0:46
  Hi, I'm Brent Cassidy, welcome to the Nightmare Success In and
• 0:49
  Out podcast where we explore how to overcome your fears and
• 0:52
  nightmares to set yourself free. We're going to be exploring this
• 0:56
  topic with guys that was in Leavenworth with and others who
• 0:59
  survived their own nightmare. These stories can be inspiring,
• 1:03
  sometimes sad, there's some humor, but hopefully you can
• 1:07
  come away with a nugget of something that'll help you knock
• 1:10
  down some of the prisons you built up in your own mind.
• 1:15
  All right, welcome back Nightmare Success.
• 1:18
  And now, listeners, this is where you come from.
• 1:19
  What happens when your worst fear becomes your reality?
• 1:21
  How do you adapt, survive, overcome?
• 1:23
  Set yourself free, folks. Don't forget to follow,
• 1:26
  subscribe, share this thing out, like it up.
• 1:28
  It really helps the show and I appreciate it so much.
• 1:30
  It's a great thing. So who are we talking to today
• 1:34
  on Nightmare Success? Well, we were talking to Tom
• 1:37
  Hardin and I gosh, he was nice enough to give me his book.
• 1:45
  It's it's I think you can order it now pre release, but it comes
• 1:49
  out in February 26th. But Tom, his book is called
• 1:55
  wired on Wall Street. And is anybody who's followed a
• 2:01
  name called tipper X This is tipper X.
• 2:03
  This is Tom Harden. He is to one of the FB is most
• 2:07
  prolific informants and it's it this reads like a I was on the
• 2:12
  edge of my seat. It, you know, it reads like a
• 2:14
  thriller. And then you've got these Gray
• 2:16
  areas and and there's moments when you say, what would I have
• 2:20
  done? And I always think that makes
• 2:22
  for a really interesting book or movie when you put yourself into
• 2:27
  the action of what's going on. And that's that's because it's a
• 2:30
  good book or it's a good movie. A little bit about TomTom had
• 2:34
  previously spent much of his career as a financial analyst in
• 2:38
  the hedge fund industry. In 2008, as part of a
• 2:41
  cooperation agreement with the US Department of Justice, Thomas
• 2:43
  assisted the US government and understanding how insider
• 2:46
  trading occurred in the financial services industry.
• 2:49
  Todd became one of the most prolific informants in
• 2:52
  securities fraud history, helping to build over 20 of the
• 2:55
  80 plus individual criminal cases in Operation Perfect
• 2:58
  Hedge, a Wall Street house cleaning campaign that morphed
• 3:02
  into the largest insider trading investigation of a generation.
• 3:07
  As the youngest professional implicated in the sting, Tom was
• 3:09
  tasked with wearing a covert body wire to help the FBI bring
• 3:13
  some of the biggest targets in the industry.
• 3:17
  After resolving his case in 2015, Tom was invited by the
• 3:20
  FBINYC to speak to their rookie agent class in 2016 that helped
• 3:26
  really launch his speaking career and is now a global
• 3:28
  corporate trainer, speaker and board advisor on misconduct,
• 3:32
  risk, behavioral ethics and compliance issues from his
• 3:35
  former frontline perspective. And I, I, I just, I can't wait
• 3:41
  to jump into all this because I kind of feel like I know Tom
• 3:43
  back to read his book and, and getting his chapter summaries.
• 3:47
  But before we do, I want to recognize our show sponsor, auto
• 3:50
  Plaza direct, who likes spending a couple of weekends walking car
• 3:53
  lots looking for a car. Then you spend four or five
• 3:55
  hours of dealership to buy a car.
• 3:56
  It's kind of like a root canal appointment.
• 3:58
  Well, there's a better way to take away all that pain in the
• 4:00
  hassle getting a car. It's called auto Plaza direct.
• 4:02
  They're your personal car concierge.
• 4:03
  Just tell them the car you want, what you can pay, and they'll go
• 4:05
  find that car for you, negotiate your best price.
• 4:08
  They also offer you warranties and finance.
• 4:10
  It's all full service. Go to autoplazadirect.com to get
• 4:13
  started with your personal call concierge.
• 4:15
  The new hassle Freeway. The car by experience you
• 4:17
  deserve auto pleas direct telling Brent from Nightmare
• 4:19
  Success sent you folks. I want to share with you a
• 4:22
  powerful and moving new book you won't want to miss.
• 4:24
  My name is Saffron Voices. Silence stifled and taken away
• 4:29
  by author Saffron Gustafson. This isn't just a story.
• 4:32
  It's a journey through resilience, survival, and
• 4:34
  reclaiming your voice after being stylist for far too long.
• 4:37
  Saffron's story takes you inside the hidden struggles, the pain,
• 4:39
  and ultimately the triumph of refusing to be defined by
• 4:42
  circumstances. As Saffron was putting the
• 4:44
  finishing touches on her book, the Prison, she had just been
• 4:47
  released from Federal Dublin. FCI, was permanently closed
• 4:50
  because of sexual abuse of the women prisoners.
• 4:53
  If you've ever wondered what it takes to rise from the darkness
• 4:56
  of places, to find your truth and to speak it boldly, this
• 4:59
  book will inspire you. Pick up your copy of My Name is
• 5:03
  Saffron Today, available now on Amazon or wherever books are
• 5:07
  sold. Trust me, you'll be moved,
• 5:09
  challenged and changed by her story.
• 5:12
  Hello, Tom, How are you? Brian, it's a pleasure to be
• 5:16
  with you here. Well, I, I, like I said, I feel
• 5:20
  like, you know, we follow each other on social media, but I, I,
• 5:25
  you know, we kind of danced around this thing for a long
• 5:27
  time and I've really wanted to have you on the show for a long
• 5:30
  time. And it just so happened that
• 5:31
  you've got this book that's coming out and things have
• 5:35
  slowed down for you because I think speaking kind of slows
• 5:37
  down, you know, kind of after Thanksgiving.
• 5:40
  So I appreciate you making time to to be on the show.
• 5:44
  Yeah, I know it's, it's, it's great to be here.
• 5:48
  Wiley Publishing, I'm sure we'll talk about it.
• 5:49
  Reached out last year about writing a book.
• 5:51
  So that was my my focus this year and got it all together and
• 5:56
  submitted it and it'll be out in February.
• 5:58
  So looking forward to getting out in the world.
• 6:01
  Well, I, I love the name of the book Wired on Wall Street
• 6:05
  because I, you know, we'll get into all this, but, you know,
• 6:08
  that kind of stuff is stuff that people just don't know about.
• 6:12
  I mean, wearing a wire. And, you know, you've got a
• 6:14
  story in there that we'll get into where this guy takes you
• 6:18
  over to his house and you're supposed to go swell, you got a
• 6:20
  wire on. But anyway, Tom, you grew up
• 6:24
  just, you know, like in a suburb outside of Atlanta.
• 6:28
  What? Tell us a little bit about what
• 6:30
  Tom Hardy was doing growing up as a kid.
• 6:33
  Yeah, it was normal families. So the 80s and and 90s.
• 6:37
  I graduated high school in 1995. My father was a Coca-Cola man
• 6:42
  his whole career, you know, experiencing the grueling
• 6:46
  commute around there in Atlanta. And the around that time my
• 6:50
  mother had a childcare business at our at our home watching the
• 6:54
  neighborhood kids. And so they were just real
• 6:57
  models of hard work. My dad always leaving early,
• 7:01
  coming home late, my mom just running around with all these
• 7:04
  kids. And I, at some point as a child,
• 7:08
  I just developed this really focus on just wanting to succeed
• 7:13
  to to show that their hard work meant something.
• 7:16
  So in the book I have a few childhood stories about my my
• 7:19
  dad buying us the World Book encyclopedias before the
• 7:22
  Internet and reading reading that over the next two years,
• 7:25
  starting it, I think it was Acken AACHEN, then ending on
• 7:30
  Zygote, ZYGOTE and so. Tom, that is a crazy story.
• 7:35
  When I, when I read that, I thought, 'cause I, you know, we
• 7:38
  all at that age, you know, I, I'm 58 years old, having the
• 7:41
  encyclopedia is like that. Like if you had a, something,
• 7:44
  you had to, you know, write a paper or something.
• 7:46
  You went to the, you know, whatever alphabet number that
• 7:48
  was, but you read all of them. That's just every every got
• 7:53
  through, got through. It took about two years.
• 7:56
  So I was probably 8 to 10 years old.
• 7:58
  That was my reading. And then just, you know, sort of
• 8:01
  dominated quiz bowl at school, right?
• 8:06
  I wish I could do that now, but it's memory fades.
• 8:08
  But yeah, that was that was a big task I wanted to take down
• 8:12
  and then become a a soccer referee.
• 8:15
  I went to work, make some money, did one of mow lawns.
• 8:17
  And then I got to the point in high school where I kind of
• 8:21
  figured out business was the way I wanted to go kind of by
• 8:25
  process of elimination, didn't really like science or the arts
• 8:28
  and then figured out, OK, what's the top Business School to apply
• 8:32
  to for undergraduate. And my, my high school guidance
• 8:36
  counselor told me that the school I was looking at, the
• 8:39
  Wharton School of Penn, was only an MBA school.
• 8:41
  My dad and I didn't take that advice.
• 8:43
  And we drove to the Public Library to find the US News and
• 8:46
  World Report rankings and found found the pen there as the top
• 8:51
  undergraduate school. So applied early, got deferred.
• 8:55
  And then I always joke in the 90s they probably had a quote
• 8:57
  for people from Georgia to to let the men.
• 8:59
  So I was letting off the the weight the the deferral list and
• 9:02
  got into to Upenn. But you did a little bit more
• 9:06
  than that. I mean, to get in there, you,
• 9:08
  you really made an effort that I think you started a club.
• 9:13
  Was that am I? Remembering right, that's right.
• 9:16
  So that's right. So I applied early, got
• 9:18
  deferred, which lowered my chances to about 5% of of
• 9:21
  getting in and and I wasn't the top kid in my high school.
• 9:24
  It was a big public high school. I was top 10%, I think 55th out
• 9:27
  of a class of 562. And so I knew the odds were kind
• 9:31
  of stacked against me, but I was going to will it kind of willed
• 9:35
  it into to happening or or try to.
• 9:37
  And so I told my accounting teacher and she started a plan
• 9:42
  for me. She said we're going to start a
• 9:44
  a club, the future business leaders of America and you're
• 9:47
  going to be the president because I was the only person in
• 9:49
  the in the club and that was going to be part of my my
• 9:52
  college resume. And then I started just
• 9:54
  peppering the heck out of the admissions committee at Penn
• 9:57
  e-mail had just started around 1995 and every Sunday night I
• 10:01
  boot up our dial up prodigy e-mail and the family e-mail was
• 10:06
  some 17 character numbers and letters at prodigy.net and fired
• 10:11
  it away to Pennant missions. Here's my latest quiz scores.
• 10:16
  Here's my latest APS just giving them updates.
• 10:18
  Hey, this is my top choice if I can get it off the list.
• 10:21
  Just I'm going to go here and every Monday they would always
• 10:24
  say thank you. And so somebody was reading.
• 10:26
  It somebody was reading it. And replying.
• 10:28
  Yeah. The, the reason I wanted to
• 10:29
  bring that up because I thought that was, you know, not
• 10:34
  everybody does that. And it's to get into a school
• 10:39
  like that when you're coming from a public high school out of
• 10:43
  Georgia, your grades aren't at the very top.
• 10:48
  Resilience and tenacity is something that can take you a
• 10:52
  long ways if you take action on that.
• 10:54
  And you did it every week. And somebody, like you said, was
• 10:59
  reading that. And that could have been the
• 11:01
  whole thing that made the difference.
• 11:03
  So I, it's like, you know, I remember Risky Business, you
• 11:07
  know, Princeton can use a guy like him.
• 11:09
  But you, you did go after it and you did whatever it had to be
• 11:15
  done to be able to get in there. So once you got there, was it
• 11:19
  what you had? Cause a lot of times, you know,
• 11:22
  you catch a tiger by the tail and, and you get it.
• 11:25
  Was it everything you wanted it to be?
• 11:30
  When I got there, it was a little bit of a culture sock,
• 11:32
  which isn't a surprise. Like I'm coming out from Georgia
• 11:34
  to, to an Ivy League school and you get there and I went on a
• 11:39
  freshman orientation out in the Poconos Mountains just to get to
• 11:42
  meet kids. But I, I, I took on the persona
• 11:45
  of, of Tom from Georgia just to I guess I kind of in a way
• 11:48
  wanted to come across as an outsider.
• 11:50
  So I wrote that for the first time ever.
• 11:52
  I tried, tried dip, try getting some skull and dipping on the on
• 11:56
  the bus tour and they didn't really end up in too well.
• 11:58
  So I I took on this sort of. Like, that's probably a bad time
• 12:02
  to try that first time on the on the bus ride with Skull Mint,
• 12:07
  Yeah. Yeah, so all the kids have gone
• 12:09
  to the camps together over the years of the Northeast and and
• 12:13
  then got classes started. And I guess it was what I was
• 12:16
  expected. You know, I was around all these
• 12:18
  other, you know, these were the top of the top students, the
• 12:21
  valedictorians. I got in, as you mentioned,
• 12:23
  maybe more through tenacity than than achievement or that was
• 12:27
  what I told myself. Like I just sort of liked having
• 12:29
  this outsider or imposter edge to how I thought of myself.
• 12:36
  And then got in there, got my first C on the economics mid
• 12:40
  term, which was the main class that every Wharton freshman had
• 12:43
  to take. So that was a little bit of a
• 12:46
  set back. But then again, this sort of
• 12:48
  being very tactical about it, having tenacity.
• 12:51
  Let's figure out how to improve the grades and then let's figure
• 12:54
  out how to study. And then eventually improved,
• 12:57
  improved my grades throughout throughout my time in college.
• 12:59
  But it was a little bit of a culture shock shock coming in to
• 13:03
  this school, you know, from, from the outside.
• 13:06
  So when you got to the to that senior year, is it one of those
• 13:11
  things that have Ivy League school that people start
• 13:14
  bragging about, Hey, I got an offer here, I'm going there.
• 13:17
  I mean, is it very like competitive to where people are
• 13:22
  one up on each other on where they're going?
• 13:25
  It's, it's very competitive like that, dropping the names of the,
• 13:28
  of the major banks or where people are going.
• 13:30
  And it's. So for me, the internship before
• 13:33
  senior year, so after junior year was really important to try
• 13:36
  to get as good of a firm as you could get.
• 13:39
  And at the time, the top three were Goldman Sachs, Morgan
• 13:43
  Stanley and the Los Angeles office of a bank called
• 13:47
  Donaldson, Lufkin, Jenrette DLJ, which is not around anymore.
• 13:51
  So I, I applied to all 3D LJLA granted me an interview, went
• 13:58
  into the interview. It was sort of, you know, you're
• 14:01
  walking around outside this interview room in a hotel in
• 14:03
  Philadelphia, and it's like a finance anxiety ward.
• 14:07
  Like all the kids outside are trying to memorize their
• 14:10
  formulas and talk about accounting.
• 14:12
  And I went in there, and I felt like I had bombed the interview.
• 14:15
  But I actually had gotten into Penn through an ROTC
• 14:20
  scholarship, which set me up to be able to cover about 80% of my
• 14:25
  tuition. And so the DLJ interviewer saw
• 14:28
  that on my my resume were interested about that, that
• 14:31
  commitment, which it was to once a week going over and and doing
• 14:35
  drill and classes with with Rozzy.
• 14:37
  And that made me stand out, I think in the pack of candidates
• 14:40
  and then be be accepted for this internship, which later led to a
• 14:45
  job. And I later was able to pay back
• 14:48
  the scholarship, which I'm looking back now as an adult,
• 14:51
  you know, back then where I thought, wow, I basically chose
• 14:54
  the Wall Street route over the, the military, which may have
• 14:58
  been better for my, my character and my integrity.
• 15:00
  And we'll talk about later how that slipped away from me on
• 15:03
  Wall Street. But that was a pivotal moment
• 15:04
  then to getting this job at at DLJ.
• 15:08
  So you had that internship I remember was it, did you meet
• 15:12
  somebody there that came became a part of somebody that you was
• 15:15
  a reoccurring person in your life through that internship or
• 15:18
  that time later? Yeah, My friend Alicia, she
• 15:23
  there was a pen friend who went on to hedge funds and hired me
• 15:26
  at her hedge fund. But then that was, that was sort
• 15:31
  of so she was sort of my closest friend at that, at that job at
• 15:35
  DLJ. So you do the internship, which
• 15:39
  is a big deal. You graduate.
• 15:43
  What happens? So I start working at DLJ and
• 15:47
  investment banking. It's 100 hour work week tonight.
• 15:51
  I expect this but you can just sit there all day and then the
• 15:55
  managing director gives you the work to do at the end of the
• 15:57
  day. Stay up all night, do the work
• 15:59
  and it's on to the next one. And after a few all nighters, my
• 16:04
  friend Alicia had already left DLJ after a month or so and got
• 16:08
  a job at the hedge fund. And she calls and says, hey,
• 16:13
  where my hedge fund is looking to hire other tech stock
• 16:16
  analyst. Would you be interested in?
• 16:19
  It was something I thought would be in my future.
• 16:21
  But after a few years of investment banking, if people
• 16:24
  aren't familiar, usually give you like two or three years at
• 16:26
  these investment banks and that's kind of your finance boot
• 16:29
  camp. And then you're set up to get a
• 16:30
  really good job after that. But I was looking to short
• 16:34
  circuit that and went and interviewed in this hedge fund
• 16:37
  in in Greenwich, CT. So I remember leaving Los
• 16:40
  Angeles, seeing Santa in shorts, and then flying into Westchester
• 16:45
  County Airport in December under so much snow.
• 16:48
  It was there was a snowstorm that year.
• 16:50
  Going to this hedge fund meeting with this 32 year old Craig
• 16:55
  Blaine. I mentioned in the book Blaine
• 16:56
  Asset Management, and he told me he had made $75 million the
• 17:02
  previous year, which I just didn't understand the scale of
• 17:04
  what was possible in that business until he said that
• 17:07
  number, and he was only 10 years older than me.
• 17:12
  So you go into that world and and you in the book you kind of
• 17:17
  walk through was the the work and and being around the the
• 17:26
  buzz of the industry. What was that like for you it?
• 17:30
  Was pretty amazing. It was where investment banking
• 17:33
  was more hierarchical, a lot of politics.
• 17:36
  The hedge fund was very meritocratic where it's flat and
• 17:41
  if you pick the right stocks, you're going to be compensated
• 17:43
  for that. And if you pick the wrong
• 17:45
  stocks, you're going to be fired.
• 17:47
  And I kind of like that scorecard of total
• 17:51
  accountability for your for your, for your work.
• 17:54
  There was no, no answer around that.
• 17:57
  But it also created all the pressures to perform and very
• 18:02
  much a short term focus, not really thinking about the long
• 18:05
  term. And, you know, you have to keep,
• 18:09
  you know, finding good stocks to, to, to, to be long or be
• 18:12
  short to bet against. And so I like that.
• 18:15
  But there was also just at that time, and we're talking about
• 18:18
  the early to mid 2000s in the industry, I became aware there's
• 18:23
  a big part of the book is about that this practice of trading
• 18:28
  stocks on inside information was actually pretty common.
• 18:32
  It was it was almost an open secret in the industry where
• 18:36
  tech stock focused hedge funds would hire people from Silicon
• 18:41
  Valley companies to work there so they could call back to those
• 18:44
  public companies and get non public information that they
• 18:48
  could then trade. And it doesn't excuse what I the
• 18:52
  decisions I made later, but that's just kind of stay in the
• 18:54
  stage for that era, you know, in the industry.
• 18:57
  Well, and I mean, in the news now this year, it's, you know,
• 19:03
  there's, there's big discussion about being a senator or being
• 19:09
  in the House of Representatives and, and making millions of
• 19:11
  dollars and, and the success rate of, of their trading that,
• 19:15
  you know, insider trading is such AII remember being just
• 19:19
  glued to that movie Wall Street when that came out.
• 19:24
  And, and it was, it was like, wow, I, I was thinking in that
• 19:29
  movie like, well, like he just, in one case, he just followed
• 19:32
  the guy around, you know, he got a motorcycle and just drove
• 19:36
  around. Charlie Sheen was just driving
• 19:38
  around seeing meetings, seeing who he was connected to see.
• 19:42
  And it almost seems like it's when you take of how big the
• 19:48
  market is and trying to figure out who knows what there's, it
• 19:54
  automatically creates a Gray surface area, right?
• 19:58
  There's a major, there's a major, major Gray area and even
• 20:01
  today. You know, I share my story with
• 20:03
  these hedge funds. I mean, they're all using drones
• 20:05
  to fly over, you know, Tesla factories to see how many cars
• 20:09
  are being sold or, you know, using cameras to figure out now
• 20:14
  with the AI sort of boom, like where are the next data centers
• 20:17
  going and who's being supplied into those data centers?
• 20:21
  And like, there is a lot of Gray area, like, OK, this is not
• 20:24
  really public information, but is it illegal?
• 20:26
  And you really have to have good kind of compliance today to, to
• 20:30
  kind of work through what is or what isn't, because there
• 20:32
  actually is no statute for insider trading in the US.
• 20:36
  It's actually all prosecuted under securities fraud.
• 20:39
  But there's not actually a statute that defines what it is.
• 20:41
  So it's very much a Gray area for prosecutors to build to
• 20:45
  build cases, even if they're off the mark.
• 20:50
  So did you. I mean, getting into more and
• 20:55
  more of that world. I mean, I know that you had one
• 20:58
  that had nothing to do with insider trading, which it was
• 21:01
  like the pick of the century. If if it all would have followed
• 21:03
  through was the Yellow Pages. Short them, go Google and and we
• 21:09
  become billionaires. Yeah.
• 21:11
  So my my first hedge fund, you know, I knew this was happening.
• 21:16
  I never felt I had to cross that line.
• 21:17
  And then my second and kind of final hedge fund where I got to
• 21:20
  this great job. Now I'm 28, just going through a
• 21:23
  few different jobs I had. I mentioned that.
• 21:26
  Still a very young guy though, Tom.
• 21:28
  Yeah, yeah, Still still. Yeah, still in my 20's.
• 21:32
  The first hedge fund closed down, went to another few, few
• 21:35
  other jobs. I remember just thinking, wow,
• 21:37
  I'm kind of on this treadmill now.
• 21:39
  Is it going anywhere? And then got got a call from
• 21:42
  Evan Murphy in the book, who was sort of a mentor, and he said,
• 21:46
  hey, I'm being seated by a legend in this business.
• 21:50
  His name is Julian Robertson, who has since passed, but at the
• 21:52
  time he ran Tiger management and was now giving a start up
• 21:56
  capital to new hedge fund managers.
• 21:58
  So AT28I became a junior partner at this fund and we started off
• 22:02
  with a a three to five year horizon.
• 22:05
  So you mentioned I love tech stocks because there was always
• 22:09
  new people coming in that you could own the stocks.
• 22:11
  And then incumbent businesses that were going to, I called
• 22:15
  them in the book like melting ice cube businesses like you
• 22:17
  just knew every year they were going to melt.
• 22:19
  And so after a year, after Google was public, I studied
• 22:22
  Google like every day, right? This is the best business ever.
• 22:25
  It's just basically a toll on the Internet.
• 22:27
  And actually, why the heck would we need Yellow Pages?
• 22:30
  And so for younger listeners, Yellow Pages are things we got
• 22:34
  in our driveway that were really, really.
• 22:36
  Gigantic bricks. Yeah, exactly.
• 22:39
  And there was still at the time around the world, about $30
• 22:42
  billion of market capitalization within seven or eight companies.
• 22:45
  And that would have been my career trade if I didn't go
• 22:49
  later with the insider trading, it would just been own Google
• 22:52
  and anybody can pull up the stock price the last 20 years
• 22:54
  and short the Yellow Pages and those all went to zero.
• 22:56
  And that's really all you need. You need one insight in the
• 22:59
  business. People often think it's really
• 23:01
  complicated. You just need one career making
• 23:03
  insight. And that would have been it had
• 23:05
  made other decisions. So how does it start progressing
• 23:10
  for you? Because I mean, you're seeing
• 23:11
  people around, they're doing well.
• 23:14
  Remember, you talk about going to one of your people that you,
• 23:17
  you know, while that he's living in this gigantic mansion.
• 23:22
  What does it start to feel like for you?
• 23:24
  I mean, I know you make an analogy of, you know, people
• 23:27
  driving 85 miles an hour and what would happen if I just
• 23:30
  drove like 72 miles an hour, 73 miles an hour, just a few more
• 23:34
  hours over the speed limit than really going fast.
• 23:39
  And I think that's a great analogy because one of the
• 23:44
  things that I could feel in your book was this, this creeping
• 23:50
  towards this feeling of, I can rationalize this because it's
• 23:54
  not that bad. Everybody else is doing so much
• 23:58
  more. If I just do a little bit of it,
• 23:59
  then I can keep this going and keep that going and actually
• 24:02
  maybe hit a home run over here. But what?
• 24:06
  What was going through your mind at that time?
• 24:09
  Yeah. And we were, you know, still
• 24:11
  playing by the rules with these Google yellow page ideas.
• 24:14
  But we also knew again that funds were buying new positions
• 24:19
  in stocks. We could see it in their
• 24:20
  regulatory filings. And then those stocks were
• 24:22
  acquired within weeks. And so we knew, we suspected
• 24:26
  they had information. This is going on.
• 24:28
  The one pivotal moment is in my second and final hedge fund.
• 24:32
  We lost money in the first quarter and my boss came in and
• 24:35
  said, all right, enough with these three years, three-year
• 24:37
  ideas, Tom, we have to start looking for shorter term
• 24:39
  opportunities to make money every month or we may not
• 24:43
  survive. And so the goal in the business
• 24:45
  went from three years to make money every month.
• 24:49
  And now I didn't ask him any clarifying questions.
• 24:52
  Are we going to stay within the ethical and legal guardrails or
• 24:55
  are we going to do quote, as you said, what everybody else is
• 24:57
  doing? And then a few months later, I
• 25:00
  got a tip from a woman named Rumi Khan, who had this $10
• 25:04
  million mansion in California. And she had worked for the most
• 25:08
  famous guy in these cases, Raj Raja Ratnam, who was later
• 25:11
  charged. And she said, you know, Tom,
• 25:14
  you've made me a lot of money over the last few years.
• 25:16
  I would always give her my kind of stock pick of the year.
• 25:19
  And she said, I have something for you, but you can't tell
• 25:22
  anybody. And it was a blatant stock tip
• 25:25
  where she knew that a company was going to be acquired in a
• 25:29
  few weeks. Like, here's the date, Here's
• 25:30
  the price, Here's the private equity firm.
• 25:32
  So it's a little bit analogous. You mentioned the movie Wall
• 25:35
  Street where it's sort of blue horseshoe likes likes the stock
• 25:39
  to be acquired in a few weeks. And and at that moment I'm like,
• 25:45
  this sounds like a very specific tip.
• 25:47
  It sounds illegal. So I didn't trade it that that
• 25:49
  day, But later that day I'm talking to a friend outside my
• 25:53
  firm. He's down that month.
• 25:55
  We're talking. He said, are you hearing
• 25:56
  anything out there? And I said, hey, if you want to
• 26:00
  trade this, go ahead and do it. And I told him everything like,
• 26:03
  here's the company Kronos, here's the date, here's the
• 26:05
  price. Now just right there, I've
• 26:07
  actually violated the insider trading laws, at least in terms
• 26:12
  of the SE CS eyes, because I tipped it and I haven't, but I
• 26:15
  haven't even traded yet. Now he has it.
• 26:17
  He tells his whole firm every day.
• 26:20
  I see the stock going up a little bit.
• 26:23
  And he told me how much he bought.
• 26:24
  He's going to make millions if this plays out like she says she
• 26:27
  has her entire E*Trade account in the stock for this event.
• 26:31
  And then I'm thinking, you know, another week goes by and and so
• 26:36
  the stocks tipping up and I'm starting to feel a little bit of
• 26:39
  FOMO and the rationalizations were OK, these guys are doing
• 26:44
  it. And in that fraud triangle with
• 26:46
  the, that we talked about their sources, the need that to, to,
• 26:50
  to cross a line, maybe we have the short term performance need.
• 26:53
  There's the rationalizations which are starting.
• 26:55
  And for me, there was also that opportunity where I could buy a
• 26:59
  stock in our portfolio and not have to talk to my boss as long
• 27:02
  as it was a small position, less than 1% of our assets.
• 27:05
  And I remember calculating and buying a very small position,
• 27:09
  like 0.9% position in Kronos. And I told myself, these guys
• 27:13
  are going to make millions if this, if this trade plays out,
• 27:17
  my fund will make a couple 100,000.
• 27:19
  I, I didn't even think about personally what I would make
• 27:21
  because it wasn't even about me making money personally.
• 27:23
  It was like I'm helping to fund out my boss wants short term
• 27:26
  performance. If this happens, it's going to
• 27:29
  help us out this month. And I thought, I'm actually, you
• 27:34
  know, going to just do this one time.
• 27:36
  And I still thought that myself as a good person because hey,
• 27:39
  I'm not buying millions of shares.
• 27:40
  I'm just buying a small amount. So that rationalization, the
• 27:44
  self talk is very easy to to kind of to get myself to cross
• 27:48
  that line. Yeah.
• 27:50
  And I, I can't remember if it was part of what you were
• 27:53
  talking about or probably was. It's like getting the answers to
• 27:58
  the test, you know, and, and, and you find out that most
• 28:03
  everybody in your class has the answers to the test.
• 28:07
  Do you choose to take the answers to the test or do you
• 28:10
  want to just take it cold and knowing that 80% of the class is
• 28:14
  going to do really well and you're the the sucker who tried
• 28:19
  to play it by the rules? Or it's not so bad because you
• 28:23
  know, it's the teachers fault for allowing these answers to be
• 28:27
  out here and and be found by everybody.
• 28:30
  And the crazy thing about that whole thing, that analogy is in,
• 28:36
  in a lot of colleges when, like when I was going to school in
• 28:38
  the 80s, there were a lot of teachers that were just real
• 28:41
  lazy on like they have an astronomy class or something.
• 28:44
  And then you know that they, the every fraternity had those
• 28:48
  tests. So what do you do?
• 28:52
  You know, and that that's that whole rationalization thing, But
• 28:55
  you're, it's in such a much bigger picture.
• 28:58
  This is real life, real dollars, millions of of transactions,
• 29:03
  millions of dollars. And what do you do?
• 29:06
  And you kind of just step into it a little bit, step into a
• 29:09
  little bit a. Little bit, a little bit at a
• 29:12
  time. And then eventually I make the
• 29:14
  trade and like, to your point, when I was in college, I would
• 29:17
  think about my rationalizations. The the the service Napster came
• 29:21
  out. So technically you're, you're
• 29:23
  stealing music if you're using it.
• 29:25
  And I just download a few songs every week.
• 29:28
  So it's very easy through life to rationalize or or, you know,
• 29:32
  cheating or that or just not feeling like you're hurting
• 29:34
  anybody. And so exactly, I buy the stock
• 29:37
  a little bit less than these guys.
• 29:38
  I remember thinking, like, this is dropping a penny in the Grand
• 29:41
  Canyon, like nobody would ever know I'm doing this.
• 29:45
  And then if my boss Evan has a problem, he's going to say what
• 29:47
  the heck, what's going on with the stock?
• 29:50
  And then just Long story short, a few weeks later on the news
• 29:55
  wire, exactly what she says, the stock Cronus has acquired, the
• 29:59
  stock is up 30%. And I remember thinking, oh, my
• 30:02
  gosh, this is actually not a rumor.
• 30:04
  Like the woman that called me was always full of rumors and
• 30:07
  innuendo. And I thought this actually
• 30:09
  happened as she said, my boss, is he going to fire me?
• 30:13
  Like what's going to happen? And then he looks at the stock
• 30:15
  and he says, oh, it's one of those just keep me out of it.
• 30:19
  So he's being willfully blind to my to my trade.
• 30:23
  But that further fuels my rationalizations because he's my
• 30:25
  mentor. I'm 2829, he's much older and
• 30:29
  he's fine with this. I'm surprised on the next tip.
• 30:32
  I didn't even buy a bigger position because he he was
• 30:34
  looking the other way, but that could have told me it was OK
• 30:39
  because he wasn't, didn't say anything really.
• 30:43
  OK, so you have a a thing that happens.
• 30:46
  It's that really is like a movie where you are strapping $15,000
• 30:51
  to your body, in your pockets and on your chest.
• 30:55
  And can you walk us through that whole story?
• 30:59
  Yeah. So the there was three more tips
• 31:01
  that came in this way where she would call, I would make the
• 31:04
  small trades. And then the third tip, I was
• 31:07
  like, you know, why is she being so kind to me, giving me free
• 31:09
  information, right? And so she says, well, these
• 31:12
  aren't for free. If this is going to continue,
• 31:13
  her source wants $15,000 for the tip.
• 31:18
  And she said, could I write this person a check?
• 31:21
  And I thought, Oh my God, I couldn't do that.
• 31:23
  That's illegal. But you know, I'd rationalize
• 31:24
  the trade. But I said, oh, my God, I can't
• 31:26
  do that. But let me then the moral
• 31:28
  compass comes comes into play. But I said, let me, let me call
• 31:31
  these other guys. Yeah, let me call these other
• 31:34
  guys who I tipped and see if I can get maybe cash together.
• 31:37
  And so I meet my friend Gotham, I mentioned in the book, and he
• 31:41
  has no problem getting cash together, slides it to me at
• 31:44
  Grand Central, like just sort of Keystone Cops, 22 guys
• 31:47
  clandestine and Grand Central with cash going across the
• 31:49
  table. And then I'm flying to San
• 31:53
  Francisco to see here. I'm going to a conference, but
• 31:55
  I'm going to give her this cash. And then I get to, so it's in a
• 31:58
  bank, it's in a FedEx envelope, a bank envelope, so $15,000.
• 32:03
  And I get to LaGuardia and I think I probably shouldn't slide
• 32:06
  my laptop back with this through the, the belt there because
• 32:11
  they're going to see it. And at the time there were still
• 32:13
  metal detectors. It wasn't like the screening
• 32:14
  machines now. So I went to the restroom.
• 32:17
  I said, let me just stuff all this cash in my shirt, you know,
• 32:21
  in, in my socks, in my waistband.
• 32:25
  And then I go into the the metal detector and they always say
• 32:28
  nothing in your pocket, Sir. And there was actually nothing
• 32:30
  in my pockets. So I'm sweating profusely.
• 32:37
  She didn't notice that I walked through, got through the metal
• 32:40
  detector. Fine, go back to the restroom.
• 32:43
  I remember kind of just like my knees were shaking so much.
• 32:46
  They buckled a little bit and kind of like collapsed on the
• 32:48
  nasty airport restroom and they just took the money off my body
• 32:52
  and looked in the mirror. And I'm not sure I even remember
• 32:56
  writing this or I wrote it. Maybe I cut it out.
• 32:58
  But I thought, what would, what would Grandma think about this?
• 33:01
  Grandma Harden is a character in the book who helped pay for my
• 33:04
  education. And like, what would she think
• 33:07
  about me right now? She wouldn't be, you know, she
• 33:10
  wouldn't be happy. So that's always good to have
• 33:11
  the grandma test. But.
• 33:12
  That would grandma think. That didn't stop me.
• 33:14
  Yeah, that was just the pause in the mirror.
• 33:17
  And then I went out to San Francisco, gave it to her, and I
• 33:20
  said never again. This is crazy situation.
• 33:23
  And of course she's like, of course, Tom, you're going to do
• 33:25
  it again. So she, she knew me.
• 33:29
  So it's not too long after that, I don't think if I'm
• 33:33
  chronologically you get a phone call where you feel like or she
• 33:40
  says that she's been contacted, right, Is that?
• 33:45
  Right, it was only a. Pause that.
• 33:48
  Oh well. I wonder if this means that
• 33:52
  we're all in this in some form or fashion.
• 33:56
  So a few months after that, so early 2008, she gives me a call
• 34:02
  and says she had been approached by the SEC or contacted by the
• 34:05
  SEC about one of the trades. She's going to be in New York
• 34:10
  and we need to talk through scenarios that she could tell
• 34:12
  the SEC as to why she bought these four stocks.
• 34:15
  So it did I, I got pretty nervous thinking.
• 34:19
  She said, oh, I didn't give them your name.
• 34:21
  They weren't asking about you. They were just asking about
• 34:23
  reasons I bought these stocks. So she said, let's meet in New
• 34:26
  York, let's have lunch. And she's never, I've never met
• 34:29
  her in New York. She lives in California.
• 34:31
  I only met her out there, so I never even knew she'd been to
• 34:34
  New York. And then we sit down for lunch
• 34:37
  outside the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink there
• 34:41
  overlooking that and had this lunch.
• 34:43
  And she's basically asking me, you know, what would I, what
• 34:48
  should she say about these trades?
• 34:50
  How should she cover her tracks? And I would learn later that a
• 34:53
  few months before that lunch meeting, she had been approached
• 34:57
  not by the SEC, but by the actual, by the FBI.
• 35:00
  So I'm pretty sure that she was wired up on me there.
• 35:02
  And they, I told her every cover story she could use.
• 35:06
  And so I then, you know, implicated myself, but I, but
• 35:10
  several more months went by and I didn't, she didn't really talk
• 35:13
  about it. And I kind of stopped thinking
• 35:15
  about that meeting because then we're into 2008, the stock
• 35:18
  market starts crashing and I'm just focused on survival at
• 35:21
  work. You know, that spring, going to
• 35:24
  that early summer and that meeting with her, I didn't
• 35:27
  really, she know she kind of stopped calling after that too.
• 35:29
  She didn't really check in much anymore.
• 35:31
  And I was kind of just trying to survive at work until 1 morning
• 35:35
  in in July of 2008. Yeah.
• 35:38
  And I mean, the the crazy thing about when all this happened for
• 35:41
  you, the whole world was going Lehman Brothers and all the big
• 35:45
  things and that nobody ever thought, you know, were too big
• 35:47
  to fail, start falling apart. And and what, what, what was
• 35:51
  that like being in that world at then, that time?
• 35:56
  That was it was just insane because the people like the
• 35:59
  famous, the movie, The Big Short profiled some of the people who
• 36:02
  were early on to this. And so we had one guy who said
• 36:05
  across from us, Chris, his name's escaping me now, but he's
• 36:10
  in the book where he was sort of like the Michael Bury character
• 36:12
  in The Big Short, where he's seeing this happening years in
• 36:15
  advance and he's too early shorting these bank stocks.
• 36:18
  But he said this is going to happen in these mortgages.
• 36:21
  This is not sustainable. And for me, I remember I was in
• 36:24
  China on a research trip in March of 2008 and Bear Stearns,
• 36:29
  like it, it went to like $3 and this was a $70 stock.
• 36:34
  I'd never seen something like that, right?
• 36:37
  And I called and called back to to Evan and said we have to
• 36:40
  really reduce our risk to the market because this is crazy.
• 36:43
  This is Bear Stearns. These are sort of the Cowboys of
• 36:45
  Wall Street with a great history stocks gone like that was just
• 36:49
  seeing something go to 0 eventually.
• 36:51
  I'd never seen it before. Like that was just crazy to be.
• 36:53
  And that was just the beginning. That was just.
• 36:55
  That was just the beginning. And yeah, you know, And this
• 36:58
  time you you've, you've you've gotten married, Sue is, is your
• 37:04
  wife. And when this all kind of starts
• 37:09
  happening for you, do you keep, are you a man on an island?
• 37:13
  Do you share any of this with her or how does that how does it
• 37:16
  work in your personal life? So before.
• 37:20
  Before you have the the event that happens with the dry
• 37:24
  cleaning, which we're going to talk about, yeah.
• 37:26
  Yeah, I'm kind of on an island. It's a really good question
• 37:31
  because I always tell people now, if you're never not sure,
• 37:34
  just sort of reach out, get some help, like talk these issues
• 37:38
  out, talk to somebody, get outside your own head because I
• 37:41
  was making these decisions in isolation.
• 37:43
  Everybody's doing it. I'm just taking a flyer, a small
• 37:46
  trade. If I had talked to Sue and like,
• 37:49
  she's very, you know, the, the, the moral person in the in the
• 37:53
  book, just a very good sense of ethics.
• 37:54
  I think. Hey, Sue, you know, these other
• 37:57
  guys are doing it. This woman just called me.
• 37:58
  I'm thinking about making a trade.
• 38:00
  Like Sue would have slapped me around.
• 38:01
  Like, why would you ever do that?
• 38:03
  Like you, you're, I married you. I know who you are.
• 38:05
  You're a good guy. That's why I married you.
• 38:07
  You would never do that. I think if we if we played this
• 38:11
  back again through history, if I had told her, it may not have
• 38:14
  ever happened. Like I probably wouldn't have
• 38:16
  made the trades because I was in my own head the whole time.
• 38:18
  And yeah, had I talked to her, she probably could have like put
• 38:21
  the put the stop on this before it before it happened.
• 38:25
  So she didn't know about the trades?
• 38:27
  Yeah, I was just curious. I and I, I think, you know, it's
• 38:31
  always interesting for guys like us sitting around talking about
• 38:34
  what if, you know, I would have done this or I would have done
• 38:36
  that. The because it really is like a
• 38:41
  fork in the road, true fork in the road.
• 38:43
  But so you have this normal day that's happening.
• 38:48
  You go, you drop the cleaning off, maybe drop the kids off the
• 38:52
  stroll, can't remember, but it's just normal.
• 38:54
  You're just you're you're in your routine and you hear
• 38:59
  somebody say to you, are you, Tom?
• 39:03
  And you turn around. Yeah.
• 39:04
  What? What happens next?
• 39:06
  So it was July 8th, 2008. So now we're in the middle of
• 39:10
  financial crisis, dropping off my dry cleaning, step out and
• 39:14
  the guy behind me, somebody on the New York City sidewalk says,
• 39:17
  are you Thomas Covey Harden? Like my full name and growing up
• 39:22
  in the South, if you heard that, you turn around, it was your mom
• 39:24
  about to whip your butt. So right, it was not it was not
• 39:27
  my mom. She was not New York City.
• 39:29
  So I turn around, it was a male and female agent.
• 39:33
  They identified themselves as FBI agents with the wallets.
• 39:36
  Come sit down with us. And next to the dry cleaner,
• 39:39
  there happened to be a Wendy's. And so people have heard my
• 39:42
  story. They're like, why'd they choose
• 39:43
  a Wendy's? It just happened to be there.
• 39:44
  It wasn't like they said, let's go find the Wendy's.
• 39:46
  So. Yeah, always we meet at Wendy's.
• 39:48
  FBI always meets their informants at Wendy's.
• 39:52
  So people know, yeah, don't go to Wendy's.
• 39:55
  So we, we walked up to this, You know, I was in shock.
• 39:59
  So they said, follow us. We walk upstairs.
• 40:01
  It's like several of these restaurants in New York have two
• 40:04
  stories. Walk upstairs.
• 40:06
  I remember just sliding into those plastic booths.
• 40:08
  You smell the burnt coffee, the bacon.
• 40:12
  It's just. The look of despair upstairs.
• 40:14
  There's a homeless guy, you know, sleeping in a far booth
• 40:18
  and we sit down. My whole shirt and and pants
• 40:21
  just stick to this booth. And they have a sort of good
• 40:24
  cop, bad cop routine. Like the male agent saying, hey,
• 40:27
  we know about your 4 trades last year.
• 40:30
  We know that you were just down last weekend visiting your
• 40:33
  nephew for his baptism in Georgia.
• 40:35
  Like they want to say they know where I am.
• 40:39
  And I thought my first thought with with the FBI here, Wendy's
• 40:43
  was, I thought, oh, my God, you know, my dad's going to kill me.
• 40:46
  What's he going to say? That was my first thought, you
• 40:48
  know, still in my 20s, still very close with my parents.
• 40:51
  And oh, my God, they're going to be so disappointed.
• 40:54
  That was the first. It wasn't about.
• 40:56
  Yeah, it wasn't about my future or any type of consequences.
• 41:00
  It was just that embarrassment with my parents.
• 41:02
  And I thought, oh, my God, Sue's going to leave.
• 41:04
  You know, we had just been married a few years before.
• 41:06
  We had no kids up to that point. So it would be very easy to her
• 41:09
  for her to get the marriage and old like, I had no idea this guy
• 41:12
  was doing this. I thought it was somebody else.
• 41:13
  She's going to leave. And then I thought, you know,
• 41:16
  this might impact my career. Oh my God, what's going to
• 41:18
  happen? And so I start making
• 41:21
  implicating statements. I confess everything.
• 41:23
  It wasn't I wasn't going to take their card and say, oh, let me
• 41:27
  go talk to an attorney. It never even crossed my mind.
• 41:29
  I just, I just started confessing everything.
• 41:31
  Yes, I made those trades. In fact, there was cash payouts,
• 41:34
  which I don't think they knew about.
• 41:36
  So they were intrigued by that. They start writing it down, go
• 41:39
  on, go on. And then they said we think you
• 41:42
  can help us build these cases on Wall Street.
• 41:45
  And I took his card and such. I talked to an attorney and the
• 41:49
  FBI told me not to talk to an attorney, that they would, that
• 41:52
  they would let me know. And of course that's unethical,
• 41:53
  but they're just trying to build cases.
• 41:56
  I'm just, you know, right, one person, one person on their way
• 41:59
  to the next job. So, so I didn't talk to a lawyer
• 42:03
  for, for a while and they, they told me the only person I could
• 42:07
  talk to was sue about this. And then I, I walked out of the
• 42:12
  Wendy's in the daze. The agent got me a taxi to work
• 42:15
  'cause he just was worried about me walking in the traffic, just
• 42:18
  'cause I was so in shock. And then went to the office and
• 42:22
  then I walked to, at lunch, I walked over to Saint Patrick's
• 42:25
  Cathedral. I just converted Catholicism for
• 42:27
  marriage and I thought, what is a great time for a confession?
• 42:30
  So. This is the big.
• 42:31
  So I went to Saint Patrick's, Yeah, to Saint Patrick's.
• 42:34
  And I remember having some gallows humor, like it was kind
• 42:37
  of a crowded, like how many other hedge fund guys are in
• 42:38
  line? They just talked to the FBI and
• 42:43
  sort of just trying to, I don't know.
• 42:45
  There's that thought came into my mind and sat in the in the
• 42:48
  booth. Forgive me, Father, I went
• 42:51
  through my whole life story and then finally got to the bad
• 42:52
  stuff and he's like, wow, it sounds like, you know, most of
• 42:56
  your life you were on the straight and narrow.
• 42:57
  This part of your life you messed up.
• 42:59
  But if the FBI has given you a chance to clean up the industry,
• 43:02
  you should take that that opportunity to do something
• 43:04
  right. So this wasn't about, you know,
• 43:07
  I should have talked to a lawyer too, not just a priest.
• 43:09
  And then I called the FBI. I said, well, I already violated
• 43:12
  your what You told me. I talked to a priest and they
• 43:14
  said, that's fine, you can talk to a priest.
• 43:16
  But I had to tell Sue at some point.
• 43:19
  And I waited till Friday after work.
• 43:20
  And that was a Tuesday morning and I was having, I think I was
• 43:23
  having panic attacks or bed sweats or definitely bed sweats.
• 43:26
  It was crazy like she knew something was up.
• 43:27
  But I, I work such long hours the next two days, I didn't want
• 43:30
  to see her. And then Friday after work and
• 43:33
  she was working in Lehman Brothers, that which was crazy
• 43:36
  at that time. And you know, young couple in
• 43:39
  New York. How was your week?
• 43:40
  And I said, let me go first. I have to tell you something.
• 43:42
  You have to sit down for this. And I told her everything.
• 43:45
  I remember just accepting like, hey, I did this, I made these
• 43:48
  trades. I'm not going to try to tell a
• 43:49
  different story. This is exactly what happened.
• 43:51
  This is what I told them. I talked to the priest on
• 43:54
  Tuesday. He thinks it would be best for
• 43:56
  me to kind of help them clean up the industry.
• 43:58
  And it was such a shock for her. She wasn't expecting that.
• 44:01
  She said, can you say it again? I said it again.
• 44:04
  Yeah, I think, I think the way that you described it, Tom, in
• 44:07
  the book was she thought you were going to talk about that
• 44:10
  you were there was something wrong with your marriage or if
• 44:12
  there was, yeah, yeah, somebody at work or.
• 44:15
  Somebody else, right, Right. She was prepared for something
• 44:17
  like that, 'cause I was acting so weird.
• 44:19
  So in her mind, what could it be?
• 44:20
  It's not FBI agents. It's maybe he's seeing somebody
• 44:23
  else or something's going on. So not that she was relieved.
• 44:27
  Oh, just some insider charity. But it was sort of like, OK,
• 44:31
  like the way she took it was not personal, which I'm very lucky
• 44:34
  that. And it wasn't easy after that.
• 44:36
  But the way she took it was as best as she could have taken it
• 44:39
  in that moment, you know, getting that news and that, you
• 44:42
  know, that the life that she was thinking about in the future was
• 44:45
  not going to happen. You know, she wasn't going to be
• 44:46
  married to the future hedge fund manager.
• 44:48
  And she would have had every right to to say, I don't know
• 44:51
  who you are, that you you you lied in the way of like, not
• 44:54
  telling her about these trades and that she had every right to
• 44:57
  leave. And it wasn't easy, but she took
• 44:59
  it as well as she could. And that was at least from, for
• 45:02
  me, not a relief, but a little bit like off my shoulders that
• 45:06
  now we're going to have you're. Going to have a companion.
• 45:09
  Shared yeah companion through this right.
• 45:11
  It seems like she's going to stay around and I could talk to
• 45:13
  her. And then had she kicked me out,
• 45:16
  I, I would even hate to think how dark it would have been for
• 45:18
  me, you know, at that point so well.
• 45:21
  So she took it as well as she could.
• 45:23
  Let's take a break there because I when, when we get back from
• 45:26
  this, I want to talk about how and, and I could, I could feel
• 45:30
  your uneasiness about am I not any good at this?
• 45:34
  It was almost like you had to try to perform with this wire
• 45:37
  and, and these discussions that you were having.
• 45:40
  And I want to talk about all that because that's just just a,
• 45:45
  just a wild position to be in. So we'll get into that.
• 45:48
  A lot of people don't like how they show up online.
• 45:51
  Many individuals think there's no hope when it comes to
• 45:53
  managing your reputation on Google, there is hope.
• 45:55
  It's called the Discoverability Company that can help you
• 45:57
  whether you're building a reputation from scratch or
• 46:00
  you're repairing your search results after a negative news
• 46:02
  story. Discoverability can also help
• 46:05
  you how you're portrayed on popular AI services like
• 46:07
  ChatGPT. To learn more, visit
• 46:10
  discoverability.co. not.com.co Listeners of Nightmare Success
• 46:15
  can take $100 off with coupon code Nightmare Success.
• 46:19
  Nightmare Success Podcast is sponsored by the White Collar
• 46:21
  Support Group, the world's first support group devoted to people
• 46:24
  navigating the white collar criminal justice system.
• 46:27
  I'm a member of the White Collar Support Group, and I can tell
• 46:29
  you this is a bunch of people who help each other through the
• 46:31
  criminal justice journey for free.
• 46:33
  Whether you're just starting your journey or you've made it
• 46:35
  through to the other side, this is great space for you.
• 46:37
  You can join us on Zoom Monday, 7:00 PM Eastern Time.
• 46:41
  For more information, go to prisonist.org.
• 46:43
  That's prisonist.org. OK, Tom, so you're diving in the
• 46:50
  deep end. You have no idea about what it
• 46:53
  means to be an FBI informant and to wear a wire and to have
• 46:57
  conversations with people where you have to get information that
• 46:59
  means something. And, and I'm assuming because I
• 47:04
  was reading the back part of, of the of all this after it all
• 47:10
  happened when you're going to sentencing there.
• 47:11
  I guess there wasn't any guarantee that, hey, you do a
• 47:15
  great job for us and you don't get any prison time.
• 47:17
  It's just we'll see if you can help us and hopefully that's
• 47:21
  good enough. And if it's not, we'll we'll
• 47:22
  deal with that in the end. It was, it was a pretty surreal,
• 47:27
  like I bet with the FBI and they showed me a small piece of metal
• 47:32
  and I thought it was a BlackBerry battery.
• 47:33
  I was just so naive. And they said, no, this is a,
• 47:35
  this is a recording device. And for me, it's an informant,
• 47:40
  usually an informant would be in a terrible situation.
• 47:42
  Would you wear a wire on the person that you tipped an
• 47:44
  insider trading, which is probably a friend or somebody
• 47:47
  close. And the, and the person I
• 47:48
  attempted already worn a wire on me and the woman had worn a wire
• 47:51
  on me. So I had this open playing field
• 47:53
  with the FBI. Like they asked me who were the
• 47:55
  worst actors in the business. And so the way, the kind of way
• 47:58
  I rationalized again doing this was, hey, they're giving me a
• 48:02
  chance to kind of clean things up.
• 48:03
  And that's the way I thought about it.
• 48:06
  And, and, but easier said than done.
• 48:08
  And so they just kind of threw me into a situation where my
• 48:11
  first meeting was with the Silicon Valley hedge fund
• 48:13
  manager. We're meeting at a coffee spot.
• 48:17
  I meet him headed for the first time face to face.
• 48:19
  I'm introduced to him through one of his analysts.
• 48:22
  And what I'm trying to do on these face to face meetings of
• 48:24
  people who I don't really know that well, I'm trying to get
• 48:27
  them to confess crimes like actual times they traded stocks
• 48:30
  with inside information. And again, there was no like
• 48:34
  multi week training course at the FBI Academy.
• 48:36
  That's just like, or not something I was taught back.
• 48:38
  In that's what I was going to ask you was is did you get
• 48:44
  coached or did you just go into these things?
• 48:48
  I was just kind of thrown into the fire and I was so, you know,
• 48:52
  I describe I was so nervous. I just wanted to get to the
• 48:54
  punchline. Hey, nice to meet you.
• 48:56
  I'm Tom. How's your drink?
• 48:57
  OK, How do you insider trade like?
• 48:59
  And then that would shut down the target and the FBI, they
• 49:03
  would sit at the table next to me.
• 49:05
  So I'd walk in. There were the first couple of
• 49:07
  meetings. I was surprised they were there,
• 49:08
  but I think they wanted to make sure I wasn't sliding.
• 49:11
  Like if you were a target, I wasn't sending you a note.
• 49:13
  Hey, I'm wearing a wire, don't talk.
• 49:15
  So they want to make sure I wasn't doing that.
• 49:17
  And then the person would leave. I would drop the wire to them,
• 49:20
  the device, they would listen to it later.
• 49:22
  And the first few meetings, they said, Tom, you're doing a
• 49:25
  terrible job. Like, hey, it's my first time
• 49:27
  doing this there. There was no training.
• 49:29
  Like I'm just trying to figure this out.
• 49:31
  And then the coaching came in. Hey, ask a question and then say
• 49:35
  nothing. And then if that silence lasts
• 49:37
  like forever, let the other person talk, which is kind of a
• 49:40
  negotiation tactic. It is so I would.
• 49:43
  Ask a question. Yeah, exactly.
• 49:46
  And and the CIA, you know, uses these tactics or espionage.
• 49:50
  And I, I couldn't figure this out.
• 49:52
  Later reading some other books about this, like this is what I
• 49:54
  was doing. Ask the question, say nothing.
• 49:57
  And then there was usually three meetings.
• 49:59
  I called the three meeting, dance in the book, like meet
• 50:01
  with somebody face to face. Then the phone call.
• 50:04
  Then the third meeting, they would usually say enough about
• 50:08
  trades or contacts they had that the FBI would say, hey, your
• 50:12
  work is done here. So that wasn't like good job.
• 50:14
  It was just like you're done with this guy.
• 50:16
  On to the next one. And this went on for two years
• 50:19
  where I would help them. I wasn't clear it was going
• 50:22
  anywhere. And then the craziest situation
• 50:26
  was a guy way up their list who invited me, you know, to to have
• 50:31
  dinner with him in Connecticut on a Sunday night.
• 50:35
  And I called the FBI and said, this guy wants to have dinner.
• 50:37
  He had just invited me that afternoon for that evening.
• 50:40
  And they met me at the train station in Manhattan, gave me
• 50:42
  the wire. I took the train out to
• 50:44
  Greenwich, where this guy lives. And he's kind of like has a
• 50:48
  smile in his car. I get in this car.
• 50:51
  He said, hey, I brought swim trunks for you.
• 50:54
  We're going swimming at my mother's house.
• 50:57
  So I'm going to go swimming with this guy, I guess, in the
• 51:00
  swimming pool in Greenwich, CT. And we drive to this house and
• 51:04
  it's so dark and we go into this room.
• 51:08
  He starts disrobing. He wants to see if it's taped in
• 51:11
  my chest. It was in my front pocket.
• 51:13
  I excuse myself, went to the restroom, took the wire out, put
• 51:16
  up my jeans, put these swim trunks on.
• 51:19
  So it's the two of us walking up to this pool.
• 51:22
  It was so quiet. I saw a shovel against the
• 51:24
  house, a hole in the ground. I thought, oh, my God, is he
• 51:26
  going to? Is he going to have me killed or
• 51:28
  something? And then I saw he was having
• 51:29
  some landscaping done. So I got a swimming pool in the
• 51:33
  small. And we're playing this awkward
• 51:35
  game that catch, like playing catch in the pool.
• 51:37
  He's pouring it on on me. I just want to go home.
• 51:40
  And he said he had spoken to an attorney.
• 51:43
  He has to ask me one question. And I have to be truthful.
• 51:46
  I was going to give it up. I was going to tell him
• 51:48
  everything. I said, what's your question?
• 51:50
  And he said, have you been approached by the SEC, which I
• 51:54
  truthfully hadn't. So the SEC is the regulator, the
• 51:56
  FBI forces law enforcement. So I said, no, not the SEC.
• 52:00
  And it actually was. I was writing the book.
• 52:02
  There's a term called paltering where you're trying to help the
• 52:05
  person with your answer, like get the answer without saying
• 52:07
  it. So I said, no, not the SEC.
• 52:10
  He didn't catch that. He starts making all the
• 52:13
  implicating statements. Of course, that wasn't recorded.
• 52:15
  And he, this guy was actually one of the worst actors and he
• 52:18
  was never charged. And, you know, that was the
• 52:21
  craziest moment where I thought I was actually in danger doing
• 52:25
  this. And, you know, he was actually
• 52:29
  never charged, you know, in these cases.
• 52:31
  But that was the scariest moment.
• 52:33
  So when you go home at night and you and Sue, are you guys
• 52:36
  talking about this? We're talking about it to some
• 52:39
  extent, but really only if she asked me the questions.
• 52:43
  And so I'm trying to protect her as much as I can, but she is
• 52:46
  fearing kind of like our our future's unknown.
• 52:51
  Like what is this? What is this wire wearing?
• 52:52
  Going to what? Does this do for us?
• 52:54
  What does this do for us? And I remember thinking I was
• 52:58
  just trying to say stay positive.
• 53:00
  And so I remember, I don't think I told her this, but I thought
• 53:02
  maybe I'll be a professional, like informant for the FBI, or
• 53:06
  maybe I'll be like the movie Catch Me if you can, Frank
• 53:08
  gabbing now, like I'll be an FBI consultant or, or maybe they're
• 53:12
  going to drop the charges. And then, you know, you just try
• 53:15
  to tell yourself stories, stay positive, like this is all going
• 53:18
  to work out. And so I had those thoughts
• 53:19
  going in my head and then about, you know, over, over well over a
• 53:26
  year end of this, the FBI, you know, told me to talk to an
• 53:30
  attorney. And of course, my attorneys
• 53:32
  like, they're not, what are you talking about?
• 53:34
  They're not going to hire you. What what do you think you are?
• 53:36
  Like you're, you're an informant and they're not going to drop
• 53:39
  the charges like just because you're doing this.
• 53:41
  And so he so. It it had been that amount of
• 53:44
  time that you had never talked to an attorney.
• 53:47
  Never, never talked to an attorney once, and not even
• 53:51
  like, yeah, never, never did. I just felt I'm going to take
• 53:55
  their orders. I'm going to try to clean up the
• 53:57
  industry. Maybe that'll all work out.
• 53:58
  But. And I thought, I thought to some
• 54:02
  degree, my name might not come out forever, which is kind of
• 54:04
  foolish. And then the first arrests
• 54:07
  happened in the fall of 2009 where my wife had just given
• 54:12
  birth to our first daughter. She's home of maternity leave.
• 54:15
  Like 3 days after giving birth, the FBI agent calls me and says,
• 54:18
  turn on CNBC and 20 guys are in the the perp locks and, and
• 54:23
  being locked out by the FBI where the, you know, the news
• 54:26
  cameras just happened to be there when the FBI is there.
• 54:29
  And all these people I recognize.
• 54:32
  And then the Wall Street Journal, it says Tipper X is
• 54:36
  right in the middle of all this. And I didn't know I was Tipper X
• 54:39
  And I called the FBI and they gave me the answer.
• 54:42
  I already knew. They said, yeah, that's you.
• 54:45
  And so I thought, you know, wow, this is this is crazy.
• 54:48
  I wasn't sure. Like, I wasn't sure the wire
• 54:50
  wearing stuff was leading to anything.
• 54:51
  They never really told me how it was going or the details of
• 54:53
  their investigation until all these people were arrested in
• 54:56
  the fall of 2009. What did you feel like when you
• 55:00
  saw those people that you knew or been part of that they were
• 55:03
  being walked out? What did?
• 55:04
  What does that feel like? Yeah, it was pretty.
• 55:09
  It was pretty, you know, I had a substantial hand in doing this,
• 55:12
  but it was pretty gross to see like people being walked out of
• 55:15
  their apartments, you know, just that the news cameras just
• 55:19
  happened to be there. So this is going to be
• 55:20
  sensationalized by the media. And but also I also felt to some
• 55:27
  degree like these are some of the worst, you know, actors in
• 55:30
  the business and I was helping them clean up the industry.
• 55:32
  But I was of I held two opposing thoughts, which is hard to do.
• 55:36
  Like I guess I'm helping them clean things up.
• 55:39
  But also this doesn't seem right to make it such a pomp and
• 55:42
  circumstance out of this. These are also regular people.
• 55:46
  So it was sort of two, two opposing thoughts.
• 55:50
  Yeah, cuz I mean, you were in this, in a sense, you're
• 55:52
  straddling the fence of knowing kind of what that felt like.
• 55:57
  I mean you had that world come down on you at Wendy's and then
• 56:01
  you're on the other side seeing that event happen and and you're
• 56:07
  really on the FBI side of making some of this stop.
• 56:11
  So it's I was I think it's really interesting to be in that
• 56:15
  world because you really were were it was a world divided.
• 56:18
  You could feel both because you you actually were on both sides
• 56:22
  of the world's or divided up. I know that there was a time,
• 56:28
  and I think maybe it was around this time when Sue when this
• 56:32
  comes out and she says something like, why did you do this?
• 56:35
  And that was seemed like that was the first time that it
• 56:37
  boiled to the top with Sue that she's like, wow, this is big.
• 56:45
  Yeah, so eventually Tipper X's identity was not going to stay
• 56:50
  anonymous. The FBI wanted me to to
• 56:53
  cooperate on 2/2 friends who I just felt those are good men.
• 56:56
  Like that's I could have had a code.
• 56:59
  Like, this is a line I'm not going to cross with this.
• 57:00
  Like, I'm going to help you. I'm going to help you with who I
• 57:03
  think are the worst people, but I'm not going to do this to to
• 57:06
  friends. And then the FBI said, fine,
• 57:07
  we're done with you. And so January 2010 on the front
• 57:11
  page of the Wall Street Journal, you know, Tipper X is Tom
• 57:14
  Harden. And Sue had just gone back to
• 57:17
  work that week from maternity leave.
• 57:19
  So on Monday, she's showing pictures of her of her new baby
• 57:23
  to her colleagues. You know, a very happy day.
• 57:25
  And then two days later, on Wednesday, you know, her
• 57:28
  husband's name is on the front of the Wall Street Journal.
• 57:30
  And she had been holding it together.
• 57:31
  She was very stoic. Just like, let's just focus on
• 57:34
  what we can control. We can't control a lot.
• 57:37
  But understandably, she came home from work that day.
• 57:39
  It's already an emotional period for a new mother to go back to
• 57:41
  work with her first, first baby. And then to come home on the
• 57:45
  bus, long commute. The news cameras have been at my
• 57:48
  door all day. Like, phone calls are going off
• 57:51
  the hook. And she just comes home and
• 57:54
  grabs Molly from my arms and just walks into the corner.
• 57:57
  She says, you know, I can't believe you did this to us.
• 58:01
  And so that was the lowest moment.
• 58:04
  I fell through all this. Like, not even like.
• 58:06
  That was the rock. Bottom hole was crazy here we're
• 58:08
  like the Wendy's was crazy, but then seeing how I my decisions
• 58:12
  impacted her and sort of her taking Molly from me and like my
• 58:16
  actions impacted them like that that was just brutal like just
• 58:21
  as a as a man as a father is trying to figure it out as a
• 58:23
  husband. There was pretty much nothing
• 58:25
  lower than that. And she, she had held together
• 58:29
  so well just until that, that day when when it all became
• 58:31
  public because she was holding it a secret too.
• 58:33
  She couldn't tell anybody until. Right, of course.
• 58:35
  This is public, yeah. So you kind of were in purgatory
• 58:39
  for a while because all those cases had to go through before
• 58:42
  they could get to you. Is that kind of how it worked?
• 58:44
  Because I think like four or five hours worked, yeah.
• 58:48
  Yeah, from the FBI's approach on the at the Wendy's to sentencing
• 58:52
  was seven years. So it was a long.
• 58:54
  It was all most of my 30s. So you know, as, as, as we all
• 58:58
  know, it's, it's hard to find work.
• 58:59
  And my lawyer said, Hey, you're not going to really probably be
• 59:03
  hired by anybody. You're going to have to start
• 59:04
  your own thing. And at that point she was just
• 59:07
  amazing. After that she said, just try to
• 59:09
  be the best, you know, your stay at home father at this point,
• 59:11
  just be the best father you can be.
• 59:13
  Just focus on that again. Let's just focus on the
• 59:15
  controllables. We're not, it's not clear you'll
• 59:17
  ever be able to work again or and the and, and you know, she
• 59:20
  was just not clear until I was sentenced if anything would
• 59:23
  happen. So just focus on yourself.
• 59:25
  And so I focused on that, you know, being the Super stay at
• 59:30
  home dad, you know, getting into cooking.
• 59:33
  Eventually I could have had a health scare with this all the
• 59:36
  stress and then that woke up woke me up to to running and I
• 59:40
  got I got really. Running a lot at the.
• 59:42
  Point where, Yeah, not just not just a weekend, weekend warrior.
• 59:48
  It was like every day running twice a day and it got to the
• 59:53
  point where I was doing so much running where it allowed me just
• 59:58
  to focus on my health and getting a super thin.
• 1:00:01
  But it it also kind of gave me a way not to have to deal with
• 1:00:05
  what I had to deal with professionally, like the future
• 1:00:08
  there. So I used it was good in a way
• 1:00:10
  in terms of having that release, but it also was not good because
• 1:00:13
  that's how I was using as a crutch to anytime she wanted to
• 1:00:17
  have a difficult conversation, I said I have to go for a run.
• 1:00:20
  So she put up with that with me and I got into.
• 1:00:24
  Ultra marathons and I signed up for this 100 mile race as I got
• 1:00:27
  into this and it was around the one mile loop, a crazy race and
• 1:00:32
  78 miles into it my legs are breaking down every nothing
• 1:00:35
  happens good at 78 miles in your first 100 mile race.
• 1:00:38
  And remember, mentally, I'm done with this race.
• 1:00:41
  And I go and pop the trunk to my car to take a nap on the, the
• 1:00:44
  air mattress there. And she had brought the girls
• 1:00:47
  earlier. By then we had our second child
• 1:00:48
  and she had left me a note on the pillow and this air mattress
• 1:00:53
  that said, you know, we didn't sleep on you.
• 1:00:56
  You can't sleep on us. So I, I turned around, finished
• 1:00:59
  the race and just like, I just, I'm still amazed by her
• 1:01:05
  resilience and being able to just like, you know, like sail
• 1:01:10
  through this, through the storms, through this, the way
• 1:01:12
  she did. And like, I finished that race
• 1:01:14
  and just figured, well, I think she's going to, she's going to
• 1:01:17
  stay with me. You know, we we had this
• 1:01:20
  conversation, we probably should hit the record button before we
• 1:01:25
  started the interview, but you and I had this conversation
• 1:01:28
  about our wives and like, you never know what's going to
• 1:01:32
  happen. You know, you just don't.
• 1:01:34
  Everything so comes at you as a tidal wave.
• 1:01:37
  And you know, with Sue being that person now that you could
• 1:01:42
  be with and rely on and, and, and see that resilience in her.
• 1:01:46
  I you know, I was talking about Julie with, you know, us having
• 1:01:49
  the three daughters and and I see her being that role model.
• 1:01:54
  I was going through the stuff and probably was very selfish
• 1:01:58
  that it was all coming at me, but it was really coming at all
• 1:02:00
  of us. And Julie really created for our
• 1:02:04
  girls this, you know, thing of what you do in a storm.
• 1:02:09
  And I look at my girls now, we've survived this, you know,
• 1:02:13
  I've been out of prison for nine years.
• 1:02:15
  And and that's like, I know that they went through something they
• 1:02:20
  shouldn't have had to have gone through, but I'm so proud of how
• 1:02:22
  they handled it. You know, they went from a very
• 1:02:24
  well to do family to working through college and doing the
• 1:02:27
  things that had to be done. But I think a lot of that had to
• 1:02:29
  do with their seeing their mom do that.
• 1:02:31
  You know, she was she went to work and she had to go to work
• 1:02:34
  and she had to hold everything together.
• 1:02:36
  And she normalized A horrific situation to where the girls
• 1:02:41
  could live through it. And I think I see that from Sue.
• 1:02:44
  You know, she just did what needed to be done, however it
• 1:02:48
  needed to be done. And she was also getting you
• 1:02:51
  back up on your feet. You know, you kind of went
• 1:02:53
  through this whole depression of what am I going to do?
• 1:02:55
  And she in that time period was seeing that and giving you
• 1:02:59
  courage, giving you confidence to to take those steps that you
• 1:03:02
  need to take. Yeah, she was just like right
• 1:03:05
  when I had the health scare, I was much heavier.
• 1:03:07
  She signed me up for the 1st 5K race, which turned into these to
• 1:03:10
  running and she really and she held down the job like she had
• 1:03:14
  left Lehman Brothers and was a a client of Lehman Brothers.
• 1:03:17
  It was just a touch and go job because it was still cleaning up
• 1:03:20
  the financial crisis even years later.
• 1:03:22
  And she just held it down and with, you know, we decided to
• 1:03:26
  have a a second child, Claire. And so I'm the stay at home dad,
• 1:03:30
  but she's also, you know, being the mother and just like just
• 1:03:34
  unbelievable. I I'm just, you know, as I wrote
• 1:03:38
  the book and I mentioned we were talking before like it's
• 1:03:40
  nothing. It's pretty surreal to interview
• 1:03:43
  your wife and say, how did you get through all this?
• 1:03:45
  And I, I wrote the book in 2025 and she said thank you for
• 1:03:49
  asking me because you never, you never asked, you know, and that
• 1:03:51
  was so many years ago. This all happened.
• 1:03:53
  And I I thought, right, you're right.
• 1:03:55
  I never did ask because I was just so concerned about myself.
• 1:03:57
  And she's like, I was right there with you every step of the
• 1:04:00
  way. And I, I almost took that for
• 1:04:01
  granted brand at the time because I was just so self
• 1:04:05
  consumed, you know? Yeah.
• 1:04:07
  Well, let's talk about that moment when you get, you finally
• 1:04:10
  get through this point of reckoning to sentencing.
• 1:04:17
  What are you thinking, Tom? What's your attorney thinking?
• 1:04:19
  Like this is a different type of case.
• 1:04:20
  This is a different type of involvement.
• 1:04:23
  Like what? What's every?
• 1:04:24
  What are you thinking? So going to sentencing, it took
• 1:04:28
  so long as you mentioned, everybody I helped them with had
• 1:04:31
  to be sentenced and and the, the the PSR pre sentencing report
• 1:04:36
  was, you know, recommending just like a time served sentence, not
• 1:04:39
  not even probation, like a pretty light sentence.
• 1:04:41
  The FBI had written me what's called a 5K letter.
• 1:04:45
  And so they wrote, you know, the first page is the four trades.
• 1:04:48
  But the pages after that were all the cooperation.
• 1:04:51
  But we weren't sure because the judge I had was pretty much down
• 1:04:55
  the middle. She wasn't pro one side or the
• 1:04:57
  other. You know, you can look up those,
• 1:04:58
  those judge ratings in the federal court.
• 1:05:00
  And the Occupy Wall Street movement was still going on.
• 1:05:03
  So judges were going beyond the sentencing guidelines in Wall
• 1:05:08
  Street cases because that was still sort of that populist
• 1:05:11
  movement that at the time was people, you know, in, in
• 1:05:14
  Zuccotti Park in New York, you know, and, and some of these
• 1:05:18
  insider trading defendants were getting sentences.
• 1:05:21
  And, and at the trials, the prosecutors would say, you know,
• 1:05:24
  Miss Mr. Mrs. Jury, you can't pay your mortgage because this
• 1:05:27
  guy bought this stock, which is not true at all, but they would
• 1:05:29
  link that. So there was this populist
• 1:05:32
  outrage against anybody on Wall Street.
• 1:05:34
  So we weren't really sure, even though we had a good PSR.
• 1:05:37
  And then the judge, she made some comment at sentencing,
• 1:05:40
  like, you know, it says here, you didn't talk to an attorney
• 1:05:44
  for, you know, well over a year. And she'd never seen that in a
• 1:05:48
  white collar case. Like, therefore I was all in my
• 1:05:50
  cooperation cleaning up the industry.
• 1:05:53
  Why should we? Why should we ever, why should
• 1:05:55
  she, you know, go beyond any guideline that was, you know,
• 1:05:58
  not in the PSR. So then she sort of hits, you
• 1:06:02
  know, it's it's time served, which is the most lenient
• 1:06:05
  sentence. But then, you know, I remember
• 1:06:08
  talking to my lawyer, like, OK, now I can go with my life and
• 1:06:11
  find a job. And he's like, hey, that's still
• 1:06:12
  going to be, that's still going to be tough because you have
• 1:06:15
  the, the, the securities fraud, you have, you know, 2 felonies,
• 1:06:18
  securities fraud conspiracy charge.
• 1:06:20
  And then you're still going to have to start your own company.
• 1:06:22
  And then the AP reporter walked off and she's like the letters.
• 1:06:26
  The judge was actually really touched by the letters.
• 1:06:28
  And, you know, we all have to get letters at the court.
• 1:06:31
  And I, I didn't want anybody in the courtroom at my sentencing.
• 1:06:34
  And so that was another tough conversation with Sue.
• 1:06:37
  Like, I didn't even want her there.
• 1:06:39
  And there's a powerful moment, the book where she's like, I've
• 1:06:41
  always been there. You know, of course I wouldn't
• 1:06:43
  be there. And so she was there.
• 1:06:45
  But I had sort of that empty courtroom with a couple
• 1:06:46
  reporters and some great letters.
• 1:06:49
  And then the AP reporter says, hey, it's pretty crazy.
• 1:06:52
  You lost like 70 lbs ultra marathons.
• 1:06:54
  You're a vegan. Let me write this up as a story.
• 1:06:58
  This is like an inspirational thing.
• 1:07:00
  And then the first ever podcast discussion came out of that
• 1:07:03
  Ritual reached out, his producer reached out and saw this NBC
• 1:07:08
  story about insider trader becomes stay at home dad, vegan
• 1:07:12
  ultra marathoner. And the most raw version of the
• 1:07:15
  story was right after I was sentenced on the Ritual podcast,
• 1:07:17
  just sharing it. And from that conversation, an
• 1:07:20
  FBI agent heard that story that was actually in the securities
• 1:07:23
  fraud unit maybe a year later. And then he invited me to speak
• 1:07:27
  at the FBI. And every time the FBI called
• 1:07:29
  me, it was a restricted number. And I got that same restricted
• 1:07:32
  number years later. I thought, Oh my God, she was
• 1:07:35
  like, what did you do now? What did I do?
• 1:07:38
  And he said, Hey, you're, we arrested 80, you know, we
• 1:07:41
  charged 80 people. You were the youngest guy.
• 1:07:43
  And you know, you made personally, I made $46,000 on
• 1:07:48
  these trades, which was the lowest by far.
• 1:07:50
  I remember thinking, well, thanks for rubbing it in.
• 1:07:52
  I was trying not to get caught. That's I was picking small
• 1:07:54
  trades. And he said, well, why don't you
• 1:07:56
  come talk to the, to the rookie agents here on rotation about
• 1:07:59
  what it's like, what they should be thinking about with
• 1:08:01
  cooperators and informants and building these cases.
• 1:08:03
  And and we're talking at the FBI and saying, hey, don't, don't
• 1:08:07
  tell them not to talk to an attorney.
• 1:08:08
  You know, that's not the right thing to do.
• 1:08:09
  These people are scared out of their minds.
• 1:08:10
  Like play by some code. But just just share this story
• 1:08:13
  with the FBI. And they encouraged me to go out
• 1:08:17
  and kind of just start a speaking business, which is much
• 1:08:20
  easier said than done. Anybody.
• 1:08:21
  Oh my gosh, it's it's a whole. Like ours.
• 1:08:25
  A whole world of, of having to figure out.
• 1:08:28
  Yeah, but you did. Yeah.
• 1:08:30
  It's. Yeah.
• 1:08:33
  You did do it and, and talk to us about that because that's,
• 1:08:37
  that's a that's and, and you do it.
• 1:08:39
  Well, I mean, if anybody wants to go like and see like just
• 1:08:45
  I'm, I'm pitching you as a speaker now.
• 1:08:47
  But if you look at your sizzle reel and those things, you're
• 1:08:50
  very authentic and you can feel your stories.
• 1:08:53
  And that's, that's what a good speaker does.
• 1:08:55
  But tell, tell, tell us a little bit about how you got into that
• 1:08:58
  world. Obviously the FBI gives you the
• 1:09:00
  leg up, the hand up, but then how do you get out there?
• 1:09:04
  Yeah, and this is is easier said than none.
• 1:09:07
  Somebody with a with a, you know, a past that's not great,
• 1:09:11
  it's going to go talk about it. People are very skeptical.
• 1:09:14
  And so I thought, you know what, what helped me mentally was
• 1:09:18
  actually just volunteering at Church of being of service,
• 1:09:20
  being of service for others. And so I thought not this was a
• 1:09:24
  commercial opportunity at first. Let me just be of service for
• 1:09:27
  maybe students. So let me just cold e-mail a
• 1:09:29
  bunch of universities, business schools, law schools and see if
• 1:09:33
  I can talk for no charge, just to like get my reps and start
• 1:09:37
  doing this. And then a few schools
• 1:09:39
  responded. And then I cold emailed a bunch
• 1:09:43
  of financial firms conferences, a few responded and I kind of
• 1:09:49
  started to see something come together.
• 1:09:51
  Sue had taken a new job at this point, but it was still not
• 1:09:54
  clear for me if this would be any commercial pat because I
• 1:09:57
  wasn't asking for money. I was just like, let me just get
• 1:09:59
  the reps in to see if this even resonates before I even think
• 1:10:02
  about doing this commercially. And at that point, Suet had some
• 1:10:06
  rough commutes. Again, didn't like this new
• 1:10:08
  firm. The only second time I saw her
• 1:10:11
  cry was this day coming home. I can't do this.
• 1:10:13
  And I'd I'd made like $3000 speaking at that point.
• 1:10:17
  I said, hey, you don't have to do this anymore.
• 1:10:18
  I've got this. And that was just unclear at the
• 1:10:21
  time. She's like, you're crazy.
• 1:10:22
  This, this, there's no path. There's no clear path for you to
• 1:10:25
  be able to support the family doing this.
• 1:10:26
  And so they have to figure this out.
• 1:10:28
  And I just started getting getting hired at that point by
• 1:10:34
  financial firms to talk to their young people or their whole
• 1:10:37
  firms about these rationalizations, what these
• 1:10:40
  look like in the industry, what these look like inside their
• 1:10:41
  firms. I read a lot of books on
• 1:10:43
  behavioral psychology, like, why do good people do bad things?
• 1:10:46
  And then it almost made me feel better, like I'm not the only
• 1:10:49
  one. And at that point, I met our,
• 1:10:52
  our, our group, the white collar support group and it's early
• 1:10:55
  days and started going on the calls and meeting other people
• 1:10:58
  in our situations and how they got through it, what they were
• 1:11:00
  dealing with at the time. And that that certainly helped a
• 1:11:02
  lot like not being alone in an island, having that, that
• 1:11:05
  support structure as we have to this day.
• 1:11:08
  And then eventually word spread. It was just word of mouth talks.
• 1:11:12
  And 2017 I did like 80 talks in four countries and I wasn't even
• 1:11:18
  marketing it. I didn't, I just felt it kind of
• 1:11:20
  look weird if I'm marketing talking about my story and, and
• 1:11:24
  then eight or nine years later, now it's been like over 630
• 1:11:29
  talks in 13 countries. And I just can't believe I've,
• 1:11:33
  I've, I've been able to find some meaning, you know, in the
• 1:11:36
  wreckage and, and especially today, anytime I talk to young
• 1:11:40
  professionals who are the young Toms or the young potential
• 1:11:43
  Toms, when they e-mail me and like, I'll never forget this.
• 1:11:45
  I see how easy it is to convince yourself and to surround
• 1:11:48
  yourself with people of questionable integrity and, and,
• 1:11:51
  and how tempting it could be if you have the answers for the
• 1:11:53
  test to look at them right. And so it's just not something I
• 1:11:58
  expected, but I'm in a good about as good a place as I can
• 1:12:02
  be now in terms of my mental health and everything like
• 1:12:05
  thinking about this whole this whole journey.
• 1:12:08
  Well, the reason I wanted you to talk about that is because I
• 1:12:10
  think it brings it all the way back to your warden days of
• 1:12:13
  trying to get into that school. You're you the tenaciousness,
• 1:12:17
  the the discipline of of state is sticking with it.
• 1:12:20
  That that kid still there, he just had to go back, you know,
• 1:12:25
  you know, you lost your 30s, but that that you went back to where
• 1:12:29
  you were, you know, trying to get into that Ivy League school
• 1:12:34
  and whatever that is. I don't know.
• 1:12:36
  That's, you know, it's an intangible thing, Tom, but it
• 1:12:39
  does show people who listen to this.
• 1:12:43
  If you stick with it, you learn up around it, you go out and you
• 1:12:46
  get your practice in, you can get better at this and and it
• 1:12:50
  can become something, but you got to stick with it.
• 1:12:52
  You got to stay after it. And and and you jumped off the
• 1:12:55
  Cliff. You told Sue, Hey, I'm I got
• 1:12:56
  this. You know, it wasn't like you
• 1:12:58
  were making, you know, $25,000 of speech and you can see
• 1:13:03
  multiple speeches coming up. You were just getting started.
• 1:13:07
  But I think it's inspiring because, you know, a lot of
• 1:13:10
  people listen to this show for a lot of different reasons.
• 1:13:12
  But for those who are listening to think, I want to go do
• 1:13:16
  something, but I don't feel like I can do it because I haven't
• 1:13:19
  done it. It's, it's the biggest thing
• 1:13:21
  that stops people from doing things is the unknown because it
• 1:13:24
  gets you out of your comfort zone and but it doesn't mean you
• 1:13:29
  can't do it. It's just unknown.
• 1:13:30
  It's just unknown. And the more you do it, the more
• 1:13:33
  it becomes not an unknown. It becomes something that I can
• 1:13:36
  get better at. It's not as bad as I thought.
• 1:13:40
  It's it's sort of a known unknown, like we know it's an
• 1:13:42
  unknown, but it's there. And to the extent that you can
• 1:13:45
  use people listening, have their own story.
• 1:13:47
  Everybody has a story. I love, you know, everybody you
• 1:13:50
  talk to on the show, because everybody has their own story.
• 1:13:52
  You can use it, use it for good and it's there.
• 1:13:55
  You just have to lean into it. And I think for me, like I had
• 1:13:58
  to own, own the story that let somebody else own it.
• 1:14:01
  So own, own my decisions. Yes, I made these trades.
• 1:14:03
  I'm not going to make up, you know, reasons why I did it or
• 1:14:07
  try to whitewash the past. I have to own it.
• 1:14:10
  I had to reach out to people too, Brent, like I, I was so
• 1:14:12
  isolated for years, just doing at home with the girls that now
• 1:14:17
  that I've been on the speaking circuit and run into people who
• 1:14:20
  I've known over the years, they said, what happened?
• 1:14:21
  Like, where'd you go? Why didn't you reach out?
• 1:14:23
  And I thought it was uncommon to them to reach out to me.
• 1:14:25
  Hey, didn't you see my name in the Wall Street Journal?
• 1:14:28
  I was wide out there, yeah. Like exactly like I guess I
• 1:14:32
  think what would I've done what I've seen my friend that reached
• 1:14:34
  out, I'm not, you know, maybe maybe not, but like reaching out
• 1:14:37
  to people, getting help, getting in the group.
• 1:14:39
  And the hardest part for me, I think was just forgiving myself.
• 1:14:42
  Like I was dealing with all the shame and guilt where we all
• 1:14:46
  have to be able to forgive ourselves at some point.
• 1:14:48
  And that's still, that was probably the hardest thing in
• 1:14:50
  terms of just self forgiveness. Like I had to put the mask on
• 1:14:54
  myself before I could help other people with the speaking
• 1:14:56
  engagements. And that was that.
• 1:14:59
  That was that was harder. What do you think's your biggest
• 1:15:01
  take away through all of it that you've been through?
• 1:15:06
  I think my biggest take away is that your scars can become your
• 1:15:11
  service. For years, I lived in shame,
• 1:15:14
  thinking my life was, was over because I had lost my
• 1:15:18
  reputation. And the shame kept me running,
• 1:15:21
  like literally and figuratively trying to escape myself.
• 1:15:24
  But I, I realized that that coming back from this wasn't
• 1:15:29
  about erasing the past. It was about repurposing it.
• 1:15:31
  And so when I finally started using it to teach others about
• 1:15:35
  the slippery slope of, of ethics, I found, I found that
• 1:15:38
  radical honesty didn't just help others, it actually set, set me
• 1:15:42
  free. And so I would say you don't.
• 1:15:45
  You don't drown by falling in the water, use round by staying
• 1:15:49
  there, and you have to decide to build something new out of the
• 1:15:52
  rubble. Wow, what a great take away.
• 1:15:56
  What a great take away. I don't want to forget for
• 1:16:00
  people they can they can on the wired on Wall Street.
• 1:16:07
  Can can you do the pre buy on Amazon or wherever you you get
• 1:16:11
  that Tom you? Can pre-order now on Amazon,
• 1:16:14
  Barnes and Noble. It's out there now. pre-orders
• 1:16:16
  definitely help a new author like myself and they'll be
• 1:16:18
  trying to make an impact with the book more than anything.
• 1:16:21
  So it's it's out there, yeah. We'll make sure that we do.
• 1:16:25
  That guy and anybody else that's looking for books out there,
• 1:16:27
  check mine out too. It's a nightmare success, loyal
• 1:16:29
  to betrayal, life behind bars, finally breaking free.
• 1:16:32
  I want to give a shout out to Homestead Financial for letting
• 1:16:34
  me use this podcast studio. If you got home mortgage needs
• 1:16:37
  out there, Greg Afdev is your guy.
• 1:16:39
  He knows all that stuff. If you want to know what I'm
• 1:16:43
  doing, go to brentcassidy.com. I spelled it wrong.
• 1:16:45
  I spelled it with ATY, not a DY. And if you want to know about
• 1:16:49
  more about Tom would go to his website.
• 1:16:51
  Is it? Is it Tom Harding dot dot com?
• 1:16:54
  It's tipperx.com. I just found Tipper X I've
• 1:16:57
  trademarked. I've trademarked Tipper X now.
• 1:16:59
  So, OK, I like that. You should.
• 1:17:01
  It's yours. You own that.
• 1:17:04
  OK, tipperx.com is I used to say to my people when I was writing
• 1:17:09
  my emails back and forth from Leavenworth, stay strong.
• 1:17:11
  I'll do the same. Tom, what a great, what a great
• 1:17:13
  story. Thanks for sharing it with us.
• 1:17:15
  I think you threw out a lot of different pieces that people can
• 1:17:18
  grab onto that they can implement, put into their own
• 1:17:22
  lives on how to get through something and survive.
• 1:17:24
  So I appreciate it. Thank you, Brent.
• 1:17:27
  Pleasure. Nightmare success in and out.