Red Sky At Warning

By Joshua Lakhamraju

Pat Brodland is a Wall Street yuppie who moves to post-Soviet Russia to create his own financial firm. As his success grows, he befriends Vladimir Putin, only to learn later that Putin values him for more than his friendship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joshua Lakhamraju
• Release date: May 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201288549

Joshua Lakhamraju

Joshua Lakhamraju resides in Gwinnett County, GA

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

As far back as I could remember, I always wanted to be a billionaire. I was born on November 8, 1960, in Boston. My mother was of Irish descent, my father was of French-Canadian descent. The day of my birth was the same day that John F. Kennedy was elected President. This was a monumental moment for Catholics across the country, let alone the world, and my parents were no exception. They named me Patrick Francis Brodland, after my mother Patricia and my father Francis.

The 60s and 70s were some of the wildest times in our nation’s, and possibly even the world’s, history. The deaths of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr, the Vietnam conflict, the hippie and peace movements, feminism, Watergate, busing, and so on. But hardly any of it mattered to me. None of these things affected me. I only had my mind on one thing and one thing only: get rich quickly.

After graduating high school in the late 70s, I was accepted into Harvard School of Business. One day, I happened to com across an announcement for a lecture by the dean of the school. This seemed like a godsend, so I signed up eagerly. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I had a feeling that it would probably be the answer to my desire of getting into business quickly.

The dean told us that the best way to get hired after graduation was to sign up for a two-year pre-MBA program at one of the large Wall Street firms, such as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, or Enron. As soon as the lecture ended, I wasted no time bombarding all the firms I could come across with letters and phone calls, asking them for a job or to sign up for their programs. It was a tedious task, especially in the days before the Internet when information was at your fingertips and you could send and receive communication in the blink of an eye. For me, I had to spend countless hours on hold whenever I called. Worse, I had to wait for several days for a reply to my letters, if I was lucky to get a letter in the first place.

Each day bled into the next, and each passing day accumulated into weeks and months before I final got accepted for a job at Salamander Brothers, one of the largest firms of that time. I could not believe my incredible stroke of luck. What made this even more amazing was that I received this offer on my 20th birthday, which just happened to be the day that Ronald Reagan was elected President. Think about it, the day I was born was monumental for Catholics, and now this day was monumental for capitalists. This job offer could not have come at a better time. Wall Street was happiest in decades, and they were eager to expand themselves in new ways.

Of course, once I arrived at my place of work, I had expected to find a quiet office where I could perhaps do my work with an attractive secretary who would answer my every beck and call. But once I set foot in the building, I was greeted not by trumpets and red carpets, but by a well-dressed vice president who was just a few years older than me. He was a little rude, perhaps because he hated the task of having to greet me and show me to my place of work, which was a noisy, open office, where all the other young stockbrokers worked.

My task was simple, at least on paper. Generate ten times my salary by the end of the year, or else I was fired. And so I set to work immediately, although at first I was not comfortable with my environment. The guys sitting at the desks would be shouting over the phones, and to each other, almost all the time. They would be running in and out of the room, making lots of noise whenever they entered or exited. But before long, I became one of the guys. I would be shouting constantly at the other guys in the room while still talking on the phone with clients and other traders. I would be running out of the room to tell my bosses that I had just made a large sale, exceeding my goals.

Working at Salamander Brothers was like joining a fraternity. The employee makeup was a diverse melting pot of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Canadian and WASP guys.  At that time us guys ruled the market place, just like we always did. Wall Street was a place of both unrestrained capitalism and testosterone. The guys and I would bring in hookers and fuck them in the bathrooms. We would use the office phones to call phone sex lines and broadcast our conversations over the intercom. The few female employees there were not spared from us either. We would put our hands on them whenever we wished, hit on them like we were in a strip club, and call them whatever we wanted. Many of these women sued the company for sexual harassment.

For a devout Catholic, this was jarring, as I was always taught that sex outside of marriage was a sin. Even lusting after a woman who was not your wife was a serious offense in the eyes of God. And if I was still living in Boston, I would have taken these sins seriously, as that place was full of devout Catholics like me. But I wasn’t in Boston anymore. I was in Wall Street. This place made Boston look like a small town my comparison. In Boston, almost everyone knew each other.  And over here, it did not matter if you were a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist. All that mattered was that you could allow your heart’s strongest lusts to be fulfilled without any fear or guilt or retribution. And if you still somehow did fell guilt, then there was always a church you could go to for confession.

I always took the time out on Sundays to attend church. And New York City had no shortage of Catholic churches. Every time I attended service, I would always go to confession. I would lay out all the lusts of my heart and all the bad things I did, from inappropriately groping women to banging hookers to committing pump-and-dump schemes on my clients.

No matter what I did, or what I confessed to, I knew that I should never tell my family or my friends back in Boston about it. They would all disown me if they found out about all of this. So I felt that weekly confessions were a way to clear my consciences.  But after a while I stopped doing confessions. As time went on, I began to make tons of money. My annual income, excluding bonuses, was in the six figures. I would always send money back to my parents, and to the little church that I attended there since I was a child.  No one ever bothered to ask for the full details of how I made this money. They felt that this was all God’s blessing upon me. And I saw it the same way. I figured that if God was indeed blessing me with all this money, then there was no reason to feel guilty about myself any longer.

The 80s were a great time. A time that I enjoyed so much that I