Marc Dreier
Lately, I have been commuting to Manhattan on the train from Connecticut and I haven’t gone a day in my journey to and from the city without having some uniquely introspective thought or a revelation about society. Today was no different as I exited Grand Central Station on 42nd Street and Park Avenue and proceeded to walk through the streets of midtown Manhattan to the office where I am currently interning in the Flatiron District.
I noticed this man leaving the station in his fifties or early sixties wearing a neatly pressed white oxford shirt, red suspenders, suit pants, and those signature horned-rimmed glasses that somehow define the intellect and success of a man at the probable height of his business career. My first thought was, “Is this what I am going to look like in forty years after I have worked my way through the business ranks?” My second thought was, this guy has probably been doing the same commute for longer than I have been alive and he probably knows every nook and cranny there is to be discovered around the area of Grand Central Station. Lastly, my third and final thought was, “Look at what other uniquely similar business executives of this man’s generation have done to serve their own ego’s and personal ambitions, while seamlessly ignoring a greater moral obligation to the greater good of all humanity.”
Perhaps, this thought was the least pragmatic yet most complicated idea in my brain at the time. I immediately thought about the 60 Minutes interview I saw last night between CBS’s Steve Kroft and Marc Dreier, the disgraced lawyer who attempted to finance his law firm, Dreier LLP, by defrauding investors and clients of around $400 million. After he was caught and convicted this past year and sentenced to twenty years in prison, the man who lived large as the head of a very respectable law firm on Park Avenue with 600 employees, had created an enormous mess for himself, his family, his employees, and the entire community.
I thought back to my prototypical midtown executive and immediately compared him to Dreier and Madoff and all of the recent history of corruption, greed, and moral bankruptcy belonging to this club of power-hungry scam artists. Perhaps this fellow baby boomer in the suspenders and horned rim glasses had risen to the top of the corporate ladder through a life of hard work while abiding by governmental and societal regulations. However, I couldn’t help but wonder, who we can trust to lead our big corporations, law firms, and even government operations in this country. After seeing what Dreier and Madoff could pull of, it is hard to trust anybody in positions of power.
