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By Root 302 0

It wasn't the first time Cornwall Capital had heard about some big event in the markets to which they hadn't been formally invited and more or less invited themselves, and it wouldn't be the last. "If you just kind of show up at these things," said Jamie, "they almost always let you in." The only people Charlie knew in Vegas were a few members of the subprime mortgage machine at Bear Stearns, and he'd never actually met them in person. Nevertheless, they had sent him an e-mail telling him, after he landed in Las Vegas, to meet them not at the conference but at this indoor shooting range, a few miles from the strip. "We goin' shootin on Sunday...," it began. Charlie was so taken aback, he called to ask them what it meant. "I was like, 'So you're going to go shoot...guns?'"

That Sunday afternoon of January 28, at The Gun Store in Las Vegas, it wasn't hard to spot the Bear Stearns CDO salesmen. They came dressed in khakis and polo shirts and were surrounded by burly men in tight black t-shirts who appeared to be taking the day off from hunting illegal immigrants with the local militia. Behind the cash register, the most sensational array of pistols and shotguns and automatic weapons lined the wall. To the right were the targets: a photograph of Osama bin Laden, a painting of Osama bin Laden as a zombie, various hooded al Qaeda terrorists, a young black kid attacking a pretty white woman, an Asian hoodlum waving a pistol. "They put down the Bear Stearns credit card and started buying rounds of ammunition," said Charlie. "And so I started picking my guns." It was the Uzi that made the biggest impression on him. That, and the giant photograph of Saddam Hussein he selected from the wall of targets. The shotgun kicked and bruised your shoulder, but the Uzi, with far more killing power, was almost gentle; there was a thrilling disconnect between the pain you experienced and the damage you caused. "The Beretta was fun but the Uzi was totally awesome," said Charlie, who left The Gun Store with both a lingering feeling of having broken some law of nature, and an unanswered question: Why had he been invited? The Bear Stearns guys had been great, but no one had uttered a word about subprime mortgages or CDOs. "It was totally weird, because I'd never met the guys before and I'm the only Bear Stearns customer who's there," said Charlie. "They were paying for all this ammo and so I'm like, 'Guys, I can buy a few rounds for myself if you want,' but they insisted on treating me like the customer." Of course, the safest way to expense to one's Wall Street firm a day of playing Full Metal Jacket was to invite some customer along. And, of course, the most painless customer to invite was one whose business was so trivial that his opinion of the festivities didn't actually matter. That these thoughts never occurred to Charlie told you something about him: He was not nearly as cynical as he needed to be. But that would soon change.

The next morning, Charlie and Ben wandered the halls of The Venetian. "Everyone who was trying to sell something was wearing a tie," said Ben. "Everyone who was there to buy wasn't. It was hard to find someone I wanted to talk to. We were just kind of interlopers, walking around." They knew just one person in the entire place--David Burt, the former BlackRock guy whom they were now paying $50,000 a month to evaluate the CDOs they were betting against--but they didn't think that mattered, as their plan was to go to the open sessions, the big speeches and panel discussions. "It was not entirely clear why we were there," said Ben. "We were trying to meet people. Charlie would sneak up on whoever was at the podium after speeches. We were trying to find people who could tell us why we were wrong." They were looking for some persuasive mirror image of themselves. Someone who could tell them why what the market deemed impossible was at least improbable.

Charlie's challenge was to suck unsuspecting market insiders into arguments before they thought to ask him who he was or what he did. "The consistent reaction whenever we