There was no Human Resources department to speak of at VTR—no manuals about company policy, no liaisons to go to with any complaints. Not that I, or anyone else who wanted to keep their job, would ever complain, however egregious the inciting event — if you complained, you’d be told to go home for the day, and it would be anyone’s guess if you were allowed back. If you were a female and you complained, you’d be given that special label afforded particularly to women, you know the one— “difficult” — and you would likely never be able to ascend the ranks.
The closest I got to any kind of welcome as I found my way to my desk was merely a sympathetic smile from Matilda, one of the head sales assistants who the brokers relied on heavily for administrative support.
It was a quick flash and then it was gone as she looked back down at a stack of papers, brokers already crowded around her, barraging her with questions, pawing at her with requests.
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What was made very clear from the first minute was this: As a cold caller, you would not be given sick days, you would not be given time off, and you certainly would not get overtime if you worked past your usual twelve-hour days. If you were even one minute late to your desk, you would either be sent home for the day without pay, or, perhaps even crueler, you would be allowed to stay and work, but if you didn’t get an arbitrarily high number of leads that day then you might not get paid despite your time on the clock. Oh, and you definitely wouldn’t be getting a lunch break.
Adrenaline and fear alone would fuel you. The Pit was laid out in practical fashion: Upon entering, there was a pod where all the sales assistants sat, within close reach of the brokers who were just beyond them. The brokers all sat at desks on the left side of the cavernous boardroom in neatly ordered rows, each row spanning four or five brokers.
On the other side of the room were the cold callers, who also sat at desks in corresponding rows. Your broker would sit in the same row as you so that they could easily access you—to hurl abuse, to offer advice or a very rare compliment, or to run over and co-opt a whale that you had beautifully landed (a whale being a new client who wants to invest and who has a minimum of a million dollars invested in the market already).
On the left-hand wall of the room where the brokers sat, there was a bank of special phones that could connect the brokers directly to their cold callers so that they could listen in to the caller. The phones had mile-long cords so that the broker could walk close to their cold caller and whisper lines to them if they needed help landing the lead.
On the right wall, the only advantage the callers had was a wall of windows with a beautiful view of the park, though we certainly didn’t have time to gaze reflectively out the windows; we were too busy callousing our hands with dials and trying to survive another day. A seven-figure view wasted.
At the head of the room there were no TVs blaring CNBC or CNN, like you might see in modern offices now. There was only a dot analog board that tickered out the state of NASDAQ and the Dow, and any other markets we should be paying attention to; green if something was up, red if something was down.
I remember looking up from my desk a million times a day, my gaze focused only on the red of the board. There was no art or even a potted plant to adorn the boardroom. The walls were off-white and the carpet was standard-issue gray—clean but abundantly plain, no distractions to take your mind off the work at hand.
Brokers and cold callers all had the same desks—standard-issue office furniture, accessorized with a black swivel chair.
The desk had one drawer to hold pens and a notepad, and one filing cabinet to lock your leads in—leads were valuable, and you didn’t want to be the chump leaving your leads out carelessly for someone else to steal. Apart from your phone, your lead cards, and pen and paper, you were strictly forbidden from keeping anything else on top of your desk. That is, except for the Robb Report.
What is the Robb Report, you ask? If you haven’t heard of it, don’t feel too bad. This magazine targets the ultra-wealthy, the one percenters who either did some shady things in business, were born rich, or were extremely lucky. Their target reader usually has an eight-figure net worth easy.
Per its company profile—try not to roll your eyes too far back into your head: “It is the brand the most successful people rely on to discover the ideas, opinions, products, and experiences that will matter most to them. Robb Report is synonymous with affluence, luxury, and the best of the best. Robb Report: Luxury Without Compromise.”
If you flip through the magazine’s glossy pages, you’ll spot capitalistic ideals of perfection throughout: airbrushed models on yachts, listings of vintage wines with price tags in the five figures, socialite reports that would put Vanity Fair to shame. Headlines from the Report include gems like “How to Spec Your Jet,” “What to Collect Next: Expert Insights on the Latest Luxury Investments,” and “Investment Cigars.”
Which is exactly why VTR’s brokers shoved the magazine into cold callers’ hands and encouraged us to pick something out from the magazine that we couldn’t afford and tape the page to our desks as a reminder of all that could be possible if we just worked hard enough. If we stuck with their program, they would assuredly sponsor us and we could all become brokers so that we could then buy that villa, that car, have those women orthose men, achieve that perfect, and perfectly bought, life. The only thing standing in your way is you, we were told.
Some people stuck two or even three pages from the magazine on their desks. One caller cut out a picture of a woman in a bikini on a yacht as his dream object, a tidy sum-up of how the men of VTR viewed women and their roles.
It would be a great story if I told you that I rejected the shiny allure of materialism, but I didn’t. I freely admit that I gave up my soul for this green dream of things, of want, of more. I taped a cutout of a Mercedes to my desk and stared at it each time I dialed, motivated by my hunger to have what the brokers had, to have what they were.
I wanted the cars, the houses in the Hamptons, the Gucci and the Versace. Most of all, I wanted a permanent front-row seat to see my beloved Yankees. Don’t get me wrong — I loved my fellow bleacher creatures — we were in it together, a tight-knit family in the nosebleeds, cheering with each other until we’d seared our lungs from screaming on our team. But I was tired of the hard seats and the sun’s relentless rays and the mile-long walk to the bathroom.
I wanted to be a VIP, escorted to a padded seat, assigned someone to take my food and drink order. I wanted to be close enough to the field to see the beads of sweat on the players’ foreheads drip into their eyes, see them spit on the ground before making a play. I wanted to reach over the fence to grab a ball with ease if it came my way.
Most of all, if our archenemies, the Boston Red Sox, visited, I wanted their players to hear me heckling them mercilessly. This nod to our desires was how they trained us callers — they fed us just enough hope for us to continue on, but not enough for us ultimately to be successful and to rise to their level. Here’s how it worked.
More than ninety percent of the cold callers hired by VTR were Black or Latinx, all from marginalized communities.
When I first set up shop at VTR, I’d look at the cold callers’ side of the room and be filled with pride — so many talented people here using their skills to get ahead. There were even three women in my section. One was a Black woman named Fran McNeil whose calls I’d sometimes listen in on in between dials. She was never aggressive but she was firm, and she flirted over the phone if she thought it could help — it often did. I was so excited for us. I couldn’t wait for my Pit crew to overtake the brokers’ side of the room one day. I was confident beyond the shadow of a doubt that once we all passed our Series 7 exams, we’d be doing rings around these brokers, smoking their numbers. But as time passed, I grew more confused and then miffed—with so many talented cold callers on our side, how had none of them moved on to the other side? Why was every single broker still so alarmingly white and male?
When I asked around, I was given a medley of responses ranging from “Oh, they haven’t gotten their books yet” to “He’s not ready yet” to “She hasn’t had time to study.” Some callers had been waiting six months or more for their books, but their brokers refused to sponsor them, which was the only path forward to getting your books, passing the exam, and becoming a broker.
The minimum amount of time before you could get your books, as Brad Ambrosi had shared with me, was three months, so this was clearly a roadblock. Meanwhile, incoming employees with connections — that is, white guys—were somehow able to skip the line, get their books, and become brokers, high-fiving their fellow bros on the way up. A number of callers sensed the inequality present and even changed their names on the phone to try not to tip off investors as to their identities. They would choose Jewish last names because they saw how investors — for better or worse—perked up when they got a call from someone with a “Jewish-sounding” name.
So Jesus Castillo became Jacob Feinberg. Alex Navarro became Alex Newman, just like Newman from Seinfeld. And it often worked; at least, it worked a lot better than their own last names they’d been forced to discard.
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Some of the partners and brokers whose licenses in certain states had been suspended might make an exception with the occasional gullible Latinx or Black caller, supplying that person their books so that they could get licensed. Why? Not so that they could trade on their own, but so that the white brokers could make these people of colour their account openers to register trades in their names.
The brokers would close trades with clients on unrecorded lines, then pass off the client to their opener, who they made sure to get on a recorded line. In this way, the brokers could continue to steal money and make bad trades in the states in which they were suspended, and if anyone got in trouble, they could point to their opener who had officially made the sale, having them take the fall for their dirty deeds.
If I had been a little more cynical when I started, I would have likely seen that VTR was taking a chance on me because they took a chance on everyone like me, and that chance wasn’t much of one. Nobody was supposed to graduate from their programme. Anyone coming in cold, with real knowledge of Wall Street, with a college degree? They were never hired as callers. It was young kids of colour who filled the caller positions because they were only supposed to feed the brokers with leads.
They were supposed to labour tirelessly, day after day, collecting leads, passing them on for paydays that they would never see, before being ground down by the system, quitting, and being replaced with someone else who looked like them. We were disposable, and anyone with a connection to a broker or a partner at VTR flew through the program at a speed that my fellow cold callers simply could never catch up to.
I grew to understand all this after only a short while working at VTR. I knew they thought I wouldn’t make it. But I’m not one to shy away from a challenge. I narrowed my eyes at the bastards, smiled, and thought, Fuck it, I’ll show them. Like I said, don’t underestimate me.
Cin Fabré is a New Yorker born and raised in the South Bronx and Queens. At the age of nineteen, she joined a brokerage house on Wall Street, eventually becoming a high-earning broker at a top firm, before leaving in search of a more meaningful life. Today, she divides her time between New York City and Europe and enjoys spending time with her wife and four children. Wolf Hustle (published by Dialogue Books and distributed locally by Jonathan Ball) is her first book. It's available at all good bookstores.
