Exercising can be detrimental to your health—just ask Stuart Sugarman, fund manager and investment banker at Sunrise Financial Group. Last August, in spin class, Sugarman, 48, was quite vocal about the “burn.” One of his classmates, apparently, did not appreciate it. Christopher Carter, 44, a broker at Maxim Investments Group, "tilted the grunting hedge-fund manager's Schwinn exercise bike up off its front wheel and into a wall out of sheer frustration" after allegedly trying to get Stuart to pipe down by telling him to do so—which I'm guessing didn't work. Today, in Manhattan Criminal Court, the two will be in the same room once again—sans bikes. Oh, and by the way, Carter says Sugarman provoked him.
Remember "Nails"—Lenny Dysktra, the hustling outfielder who helped bring a championship to the New York Mets in 1986? Well, he’s a successful entrepreneur who wants to help athletes manage their money better. In partnership with Doubledown Media (publishers of Trader Monthly, the glossy mag for the hedge fund set), Nails launched The Players Club, a controlled-circ magazine covering personal finance and aimed at professional athletes. (Dykstra also pens a subscription newsletter on options trading for TheStreet.com called, “Nails on the Numbers.”)
According to the New York Post, Dykstra is in a dispute with Doubledown. Also, a group of freelancers claim they have yet to see a paycheck for the second and third issues of Dykstra's magazine. The Post reports, "…issues No. 2 and 3 have been a source of heated disputes that have left freelancers unpaid as Doubledown and Dykstra wage a nasty legal feud over whether Dykstra was ripped off by Doubledown, as he claims, or whether the former baseball great stole the second issue of the magazine from Doubledown, as the publisher claims." You think Dykstra will be able to '86 his way out of this?
Larry Silverstein, the billionaire real estate mogul who held the lease on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is considering trying to "woo" Merrill Lynch into moving across the street and into the Ground Zero site, as reported by The New York Times. Perhaps he can convince Merrill CEO John Thain that the 2.5 million square-foot building, which will cost nearly $2 billion to construct, is worth the investment. Will Thain think Merrill can afford it? After all, Merrill lost about $8.6 billion in fiscal 2007 on the back of losses in mortgage-related securities. In fact, the firm has written off more than $30 billion in asset-backed securities and was forced to raise $16 billion in new capital to shore up its balance sheet.
Wall Street is continuing to lose face … and faces. According to yesterday’s Bloomberg report, the job cuts in the financial sector continue, with New York City at the top of the pink-slip pile. New York stands to lose more than 45,000 Big Apple bankers (about 7.7 percent of the Wall Street workforce) over the coming months, says the article, citing estimates from a Moodys.com analyst. On the bright side? It’s not as bad as the cuts that followed the tech wreck of 2000-2002, when New York lost about 10 percent of its headcount.
