An outsider's view of Wall Street's wild side

Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy
A Novel, by Doug Stumpf.
HarperCollins, $24.95

The 28-year old Brazilian whose experiences are fictionalized in the novel "Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy" says traders at the bank where he plies his trade have been treating him better since the book was published.

"They're respecting me a lot more," he said in an interview. "They think I'm like a celebrity." But he still declined to give his real name for fear of reprisals.

The book, written by Doug Stumpf, an editor at Vanity Fair magazine, paints a racy picture of a trading floor where sex, drugs, and insider trading run rampant.

Did the real shoeshine boy sleep with one of the bank's senior partners even as she employed his girlfriend as a nanny, snort cocaine alongside interns at nightclubs, and travel first class to the Bahamas as a courier for a hedge fund manager?

The book's title character, Gil, does all those things, telling his story in a patois that dramatizes his lack of formal education -- neither the real nor the fictional shoeshine boy finished high school.

"Thanks God, this guys don't take me serious because they see me doing the job that I do," the fictional Gil says of the traders. "They probably think I'm not intelligent at all. They just have me as a kid."

The book has drawn comparisons with "Liar's Poker," Michael Lewis's insider portrait of the frat-house culture at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. But Stumpf insists that his book, although based on real experiences, is fiction.

The shoeshine boy is a keen observer and a good listener who draws confessions from traders about wild bachelor parties and witnesses bizarre pranks.

Street-smart but understanding little of the minutiae of finance, Gil tends to view things through a different lens, Stumpf said .

"He strips away all of that stuff and has only this human view," he said .

The novel, film rights to which have been optioned by Warner Brothers, also draws on Stumpf's own experiences. The book is alternately narrated by Gil and by a journalist at a magazine with more than a passing resemblance to Vanity Fair.

At the core of the book is the friendship between two very different people: the shoeshine boy who stumbles upon a burgeoning scandal and Greg, the journalist who pursues the story to help Gil's friend get his job back.

By the book's closing chapters, though, it is Greg who needs a big scoop to keep his own job even as Gil fears his role in exposing the scandal could get him fired -- or worse.

Fiction though it may be, its depiction of the seamy side of Wall Street life rings true, according to a trader at the bank where the real shoeshine boy works.

"It's completely entertaining, but it's spot on at the same time," said the trader, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There are some scenes in there that you experience every day."

The novel has many at the bank curious about whether the characters are modeled after them. "There's definitely a buzz, they're wondering," he said. "Yes, it's fictional, but because it's so accurate, they want to know more."