Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy — Doug Stumpf

Brazilian-born Gil shines the shoes of the richest, most powerful men on the face of the earth--Wall Street traders and execs, uninhibited as they are ruthless. To most of these money mandarins, shoeshine boys are usually invisible, as are Gil's friends--the secretaries, janitors, copy-machine clerks, and trash collectors. But Gil is different. As he puts it, "I go there more to socialize. To talk, see how they doing. I'm more like an entertainer. They treat me like sometimes I'm the Kid."

Gil knows their wild stories--thousand-dollar bottles of wine and hundred-thousand-dollar antiques, cocaine-fueled club hopping and hooker-filled bachelor parties--and he has quite a few of his own, Brazilian style. But when his best friend, a janitor, gets fired unfairly, Gil starts talking to a reporter from Glossy magazine about the wildest story of all--an insider-trading scam bigger than Boesky's that could blow the lid off the Street--and he is catapulted into a danger zone darker than anything he or the journalist could ever have imagined. According to Gil, "When you come from the top and you lose everything, it's really hard. People that have it never thought that thing going to happen. . . . They just go crazy."

The story, while entirely fictional, is infused with the ring of truth, and in Gil we meet a fresh and captivating original, a latter-day Huckleberry Finn. After you share his perspective, you may never look at Wall Street--or America--in quite the same way.