excerpt
“Do that, if you don’t mind. We have a few juniors who would
love to take part in a good deal, and don’t forget there are a few brokers
here who follow what you do and would love a piece of this new
baby of yours,” Bradley said, then added with a smile, “Great name,
by the way, Nostra Ventures. Makes me think of the Mafia. Italians, I
guess?”
Eteo had always admired Bradley’s down-to earth-attitude and
practical point of view. He remembered a few years back getting involved
in financing a cultured marble company run by a Greek fellow,
and how smoothly Bradley had handled the situation when Eteo
placed the stock in his clients’ accounts, all half a million shares, most
of it on credit, and they had faced an unexpected situation when the
police walked into the offices of the marble company two days before
the listing and seized all their records for some taxation issue.
Bradley had stepped in and managed to arrange things so that
Pacific Trends passed that month end with most of the IPO shares
of the company held on credit over the month and into the new one
until the taxation affair had been cleared up and the company got
their approval for listing on the exchange. Eteo had then scrambled
to collect all the outstanding moneys through sales of shares on the
open market. To this day Eteo had never learned what accounting
trick Bradley had pulled out of his hat to save the day, but the end
result had been positive, which was all that mattered.
Eteo knew that Bradley also came from humble beginnings and
had done all kinds of work in his younger days. He had driven a tow
truck for a few years and had also been a taxi driver like Eteo, but
had still found the way to educate himself, start as a broker, build his
clientele, and eventually found Pacific Trends, which now had more
than two hundred people working for it.
Eteo also knew how downtown Vancouver worked. Most of the
other brokerage bosses were university-educated WASPs from old money
families who looked down on anyone without the same credentials,
Bradley being one of these “upstarts.” Eteo had watched the
way they condescended to Bradley when they gathered at the annual…
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