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By Jared Siskin/PatrickMcMullan.com.
There was Gary Cohn, whose dyslexia had forced one teacher to confess to his parents that they'd be really lucky if he should grow up to be a truck driver, standing outside the commodities exchange at Four World Trade Center on a Friday afternoon. It was the early 1980s, and Cohn had convinced his boss at an Ohio steel company to let him take a day off from selling window frames so he could visit New York for the first time and land a job on Wall Street. So how did he do it? Like many men who went on to become titans at big banks: he lied.
Cohn's story is one of legends, told to inspire incoming interns each summer and even spelled out in a Malcolm Gladwell book. He followed a well-dressed guy shouting about being late to get to LaGuardia into an elevator, and told him he, too, was headed to the airport. He offered to share a cab. Stuck in traffic, he fibbed about how much he knew about options trading (nothing) and a week and a half later, he started working for him. Cohn became known as the "gum guy," because his job, in part, included holding out sticks of chewing gum to shouting traders who needed to wet their throats. He made enough money to start trading silver soon after, until Goldman Sachs swooped him up in its commodities trading unit in 1990. Cohn has been there ever since.
As the investment bank's president and chief operating officer, he is second-in-command to C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein. And while heavy is the head that wears the crown of one of the most influential investment banks in the world, heavier, perhaps, is the head who's been waiting decades to wear it himself. As the king-in-wait rests impatiently, as some have suggested, the two have reportedly remained close friends. The Blankfein and Cohn families had long vacationed together, despite them living on opposite poles of Central Park (Cohn to the East, Blankfein to the West).
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