When Salomon Brothers bond trader John LeFevre received his first bonus on the job in 2002, he thought he’d save and invest the $75,000 windfall. That is, until he revealed his plans to his rabbi (that’s finance speak for mentor).
After getting his first bonus in 2002, LeFevre’s boss advised him to spend his $75,000 windfall. He did so on a
five-day spree in Saint- Tropez.AlamyHis boss balked.
“ ‘Why the f - - k are you going to worry about trying to save money now? . . . Spend that cash,’ ” LeFevre recounts him saying in
,
(out July 14), which documents his years working on the Wall Street investment bank’s fixed-income desk.
He dutifully complied, dropping his entire bonus in St-Tropez in five days.
“When you get into that world, they sort of mold you and shape you. And if you don’t embrace that culture, you’re not going to get promoted,” LeFevre tells The Post.
Like his fellow masters of the universe, LeFevre was soon consumed by excess — he got pleasured at lunch and crashed a brand-new cherry-red Maserati convertible while wasted a week after purchasing it — during his years working in NYC, London and Hong Kong. He quickly learned the buddy-check system for bloody noses (midday cocaine sessions weren’t uncommon). During one jaunt to Singapore, he even woke up in a hotel next to a prostitute, with no cash and no memory of how he ended up there, paying her $150 fee entirely with mini-bar provisions.
#1: ‘Do what you love’ is great advice for making 30k a year.
— GSElevator (@GSElevator) June 29, 2014
The tawdry tome is the follow-up to LeFevre’s infamous Twitter account, @GSElevator, which he started anonymously in 2011 to provide a satirical look at Goldman Sachs and banking’s general excess and bravado. It caused an uproar in the finance community.
Tweets included “Every year, children learn a valuable life lesson: Santa loves rich kids more,” and “Each comma in your bank account adds an inch to your d–k.”
#1: Hooking up with an ex is like a dog eating its vomit.
— GSElevator (@GSElevator) December 9, 2014
“It was about illuminating the soul and culture of banking,” LeFevre, now 36, tells The Post of @GSElevator, which still boasts more than 700,000 followers.
“Goldman is typically held up as public enemy number one,” he says.
But to financiers, it’s the golden ticket.
“Goldman Sachs employees tend to be a little bit smarter, a little bit better, and that’s why people want to go there,” LeFevre writes.
LeFevre, who grew up in Houston, Texas, was gunning for Wall Street ever since his high-school days at the posh Connecticut boarding school Choate Rosemary Hall.
LeFevre joined Salomon
Brothers in 2001, after it had already merged with Citigroup. He says fratty behavior was rewarded during his tenure there.Arty Pomerantz“The Wall Street dads [who visited] were the cool dads with sports cars and a propensity for profanity,” LeFevre writes in the book. “They’d tell our dean we were spending the weekend with them in Connecticut, only to let us disappear into New York City, where we’d take down a suite at the Waldorf Astoria and go to Scores and Au Bar.”
His dreams came true when he joined Salomon Brothers immediately after graduating from Babson College in 2001. After a summer spent training in New York City, where he skipped lectures for a steady stream of Bloody Marys at Windows on the World atop the North Tower of the World Trade Center, LeFevre was placed in the firm’s London office.
He stayed there for three years, finally agreeing to move to Asia after his superior assured him that “chicks there love white dudes with cash.”
In 2004 LeFevre dumped his girlfriend (he bought her a pastry first, to lessen the blow, he writes) and moved across the world into the five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel.
In 2004, LeFevre moved to Hong Kong, where he lived in the fivestar Mandarin Oriental hotel. On his first day, his married superior had sex with two hookers, paid for by LeFevre.HandoutIt was a whole different level in Hong Kong: the maids gave oral sex, lunches were three hours long and included $300 bottles of wine, and white expats basically got away with murder.
In the book, LeFevre recounts meeting with the head of hedge-fund sales at Salomon Brothers, “Dennis Lipton” (names in the book were changed), on his first day on the job there.
Lipton was on his way out of Hong Kong for a new gig in NYC and wanted to introduce the newbie to his key clients before leaving town. After pounding drinks at the Shangri-La hotel for three hours and getting properly “lit,” LeFevre joined Lipton at a nondescript office building.
LeFevre’s life as a trader was straight out of “The Wolf of Wall Street.”Paramount Pictures“Lipton is sitting on the couch. His pants are around his ankles. Some chick is on her knees, b–wing him. And another chick is standing on the couch, completely naked, with her knees slightly pressed against his shoulders,” LeFevre writes. “And there he is, our head of hedge fund sales, who makes more than a million bucks a year, married with kids, sitting there, [with] some prostitute . . . ”
After they partied, Lipton left LeFevre with the bill so his wife wouldn’t see the receipt.
Schoolboy pranks were as integral to the job as one’s Bloomberg terminal.
#1: I start every cell conversation with ‘my phone’s about to die’ so people don’t waste my time.
— GSElevator (@GSElevator) January 20, 2015
During a dinner at an Italian restaurant in Hong Kong’s Soho district, LeFevre and a table of raucous clients started a game where each time an individual went to the bathroom, he had to return with something. “So it started with a couple rolls of toilet paper . . . and then someone came back with a tissue box and a plunger, and it . . . culminated with me effectively getting a lifetime ban,” LeFevre tells The Post.
Often, women were the target of LeFevre and his colleagues’ antics.
“When I was in London there was a group of analysts who would make bets in the banking pool, and the loser would have to ask out the most unattractive female analyst the pool decided on to go out for dinner and a movie . . . It was a running joke,” LeFevre says.
But the former financier says he doesn’t regret his role in a locker-room culture that is undeniably disadvantageous to his female peers.
“And I never really thought of it like that because I was having so much fun at the time.”
I still remember the first time my boss told me a racist joke … part of me was like, “Wow, I’ve made it.”
- John LefevrePlus, LeFevre says, “That was how you got promoted.”
“I still remember the first time my boss told me a racist joke when I was a first-year analyst in London,” he recollects. “It was pretty offensive. But part of me was like, ‘Wow, I made it. He trusts me and is including me in this culture.’ ”
LeFevre admits that banking changed him. And not necessarily for the better.
“In banking, you gradually sort of learn a new way of looking at honesty and fidelity, and your behavior shapes and shifts over time,” he says.
The business also started to shift. In 2007, the credit markets were going haywire, and LeFevre started thinking about making his exit. “It was just becoming so dysfunctional . . . There were just way, way more bad days than good.”
Today, John LeFevre lives in Woodlands, Texas, with his wife and two children.Shannoun FaulkHe left Salomon Brothers to do private equity in 2008, then a year later joined a new boutique firm started by two of his former bosses. In 2010, LeFevre was offered a job as head of debt syndication in Asia at Goldman Sachs’ Hong Kong office, but the job offer fell through due to contractual issues. He spent the next year in Hong Kong, continuing to rage while working as a partner and adviser for a think-tank startup. By the end of 2011, he was officially burnt out. “I said, ‘This isn’t for me anymore. I’m just not that into it,’ ” LeFevre recalls.
He flew back to the States, bid farewell to his million-dollar salary, and settled down in Texas.
He now lives in Woodlands, just north of Houston. He’s married to a 22-year-old he met at a bar, has two kids — a 6-month-old daughter and an 18-month-old son — and spends his days playing golf and writing. LeFevre says he hasn’t touched a drug since leaving Hong Kong.
“I don’t really have that many regrets,” he tells The Post. “There are some times when I could have been . . . less embracive of the culture. But everything leads you to where you are now. And I’m happy here.”



