Big fish, small fish.
By Nick Lyons
It’s hard not to feel the excitement of a great deal. Futures change, people become wealthy beyond dreams, others lose their jobs, big fish swallow their smaller brethren, the world shifts a little, great corporations merge, and much may be lost while others gain great new powers. Books like Barbarians at the Gate, that crackling chronicle of the RJR Nabisco deal, make memorable business thrillers.
My friend Marshall did deals. They animated his life. At lunch or on a fishing trip, sparing none of the most intimate details, he taught me everything. None of his schemes carried less than the promise of millions.
He was a tall man, with gray-white hair always brushed back without a part, thin, his head long, a weathered face and honest eyes. His hands were large and his handshake was so disarmingly warm and reassuring that you might agree to invest in any deal he proposed, which many did. I knew him for 30 years and he shared stories about dozens of his deals.
I was a quarter-century younger, but we had become close pals on our many long drives upstate to fish. He talked vividly for most of each trip about deals past and present, deals that seemed to have no beginning or conclusion. Marshall always calculated the expected results in lifetime payments of so many dollars per week.
I loved his tales and secretly dreamed of playing in that game. He told me that at 19 he had brought a large herd of prime cattle in from Mexico, the sale of which would make him a teenage millionaire. But the herd was met just beyond the border by some guys from the Department of Agriculture, who merely said, “hoof and mouth,” found a ravine, set up machine guns, and buried his dreams.
He told me that he had backed a young inventor who’d developed unbreakable glass. He was on the verge of two gargantuan deals: selling grass-making machines to the Saudis, cement to Nigeria. He mentioned a gold mine in Arizona, new paper that could not be torn, plastic pellets that still wanted a destiny but could not possibly fail. The mine in Arizona could wait; he had just put together a syndicate to leach abandoned gold mines in Ghana. He took the pellets out of a vest pocket one day on a river and showed me a handful. “You can see the potential, can’t you?” I looked carefully but my dull mind could not see how such pellets could possibly earn him $600 a week for the rest of his life.
Each time we drove upcountry he talked about an old deal that was coming closer to completion, or two new ones that had risen to the surface or drifted away, like one of the pellets I once dropped accidentally into the water, which glided slowly downstream, finally out of sight. Did I realize how much gold was just lying in heaps in those Ghana mines, left by the primitive methods of mining used 50 or 100 years earlier? I had no equipment with which to calibrate an answer. Did I know how easily the new chemicals, new technology, and machines could leach or extract gold from slag? Just the first of the four mines he would control would yield, very specifically, $650 a week, minimum. He liked the words “very specifically.”
Several of the deals sounded so promising that, even when I could least afford it, I craved a piece of one of them. The cement to Nigeria deal sounded best. The cement was already at sea. It would pay seven times my investment less than three years out, before the first of my four kids went to college.
Then, without looking for it, I was suddenly offered a great deal of my own. A wealthy friend asked if I could find someone to buy his remarkable property in Montana. I had been there, seen it. He owned three miles of a superb river that ran through 9,000 isolated acres filled with deer, bald eagles, antelope, and huge wild brown trout. He stressed that if I found a buyer he would pay a hefty commission.
I knew half a dozen folks who might be interested and could afford it, but there was a problem: I had never sold a property or done any deal. I thought about this, and I thought of my four kids headed for college soon, and I thought about the fact that Marshall was the only deal-maker I knew. So I asked him if he’d take it over; we would split the hefty fee down the middle. He agreed and I was finally in league with the great deal-maker.
I called Marshall several times soon thereafter but he had made no progress. Then, to my great delight, a few months later I found a wealthy family that loved the property. There was little enough left for Marshall to do. I had supplied the seller and a buyer and the next thing I knew my new partner and I were at a festive celebratory lunch at the “21” Club with the buyer and his wife. Marshall gave me a thumbs-up when I whispered to him about the commission. My first deal! I smiled the whole time.
After a silent four months I called Marshall, asking about my share.
He’d had disappointments. Nigeria had suffered a coup and all the cement had been dumped into the bay. He had hired a pitch man to push his unbreakable glass on The Jack Paar Show, Paar dropped the glass on the floor, and before his millions of watchers it shattered. The Saudis tested his grass-making machine and it made no grass. There had been real hope for the sale of a valuable property in Florida that had progressed to a promise of a signing date but the son, a crucial part owner, had disappeared. A searcher found him on an ashram in New Mexico but the father screamed when he saw his son in robes and his son refused to sign. To make it all worse, Ferguson, one of his partners, had stolen most of the company’s few assets and disappeared.
Marshall was done. He had closed his office and had no cash to pay me my share. Instead, he offered me any piece of his office furniture, in storage. Even all of it, if I wished. I took a desk.
A few months later Marshall went West to work his abandoned mine. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer but his enthusiasm never flagged, even when the disease spread to his brain. He’d raised the money to open the mine and in his last months visited the site every day. He’d been told to prepare for the end. But he was positive that the old mine, which had produced not 23 ounces of gold, would yet yield, very specifically, a thousand a week.
The day he died, he whispered to his wife that he was absolutely sure the mine held great veins of gold.
“I know it’s there,” he said. “Just dig a little bit farther.”
I write every day at Marshall’s large desk. It’s solid and nifty, with four drawers, a filing compartment, and a side extension for my computer. It has been the site of a thousand adventures with words, bringing me much satisfaction and joy for three decades—the happy fruit of my first, best, and only deal.
Nick Lyons W’53 is a longtime Gazette contributor.
