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Of Mania and Maniacs

A look back at the Atlanta “Day-Trader Shootings” a decade later

By Jack J. Calhoun, Jr.

Atlanta, Ga.July 29, 2009

It is Thursday, July 29, 1999, a little before three in the afternoon. I am in my office in a

mid-rise building in the Buckhead business district of North Atlanta. I am on my way to a

meeting in an interior conference room when I hear a curious sound.

There is a siren that has come to a stop in front of my building, but that is not the curious

part of the sound; it is the sound of squealing brakes, Kojak-style, that gets my attention.

I look out the window that faces busy Piedmont Road and find that a police paddy wagonhas bailed out on the sidewalk in front of my building. I see the police officer tearing into

the building across the street from me, gun drawn. Besides being alarmed that a cop is

running around my area with a drawn gun, I also find it odd that a paddy wagon is the

response vehicle. Why not a cruiser? I do not know that a tactical alert has been issued

for all available law-enforcement officers.

Within a few minutes there are maybe thirty police vehicles clogging the road right in

front of my eyes. It is unlike anything I have ever seen; it looks like a Clint Eastwood

movie. Police cars, sheriff cars, undercover cars, marshals, paddy wagons – all

disgorging officers who are frantically running into the building across the street, guns in

hand. I wonder if maybe a high-speed pursuit has terminated and they’ve cornered theguy in the building.

Suddenly, without warning, the entire army of law-enforcement officers comes flying out

of the building. They sprint across the street and head directly toward me, guns still

drawn. They run right under my fourth-floor window, onto the breezeway that leads to

the entrance to my building. They are so close I can see their faces. They look panicked.

My business partner is watching with me. Inexplicably, he announces that he’s going

downstairs to “see what’s going on”. I don’t argue with him. Neither of us is processing

the gravity of what we’re observing.

Two, maybe three minutes later, my partner walks back into the office. He is pale, very

pale, and there is a glassy, distant look in his eyes. I don’t know it but he’s in shock.

“Somebody just shot up the day-trading firm downstairs,” he says. “He shot, like, a

dozen people. There’re bodies everywhere. I walked right up to it.”



He plops down in the chair across from me, expressionless. Suddenly I am feeling an odd,

distinctly male need to find a remote control. What he said, cannot be. It cannot. I want

to rewind. I want to back up. I want to make him say something else.

We stand around not saying much, unsure what to do, watching police officers running

around frantically in the courtyard below us. After a few minutes our phone lines begin tolight up, slowly at first, then faster. Word is getting around town quickly. My wife calls

me; she wants to know what’s going on. I tell her what I know, and she falls silent. She is

two months pregnant with our first child.

A visitor to our company, the one I was supposed to meet with, is doing the same thing,

talking to his wife, trying to reassure her, when he stops talking abruptly. He listens

intently for a few moments, then says “alright”, and hangs up the phone.

“The police just cut into my line,” he tells me. “They said to barricade ourselves in the

office and wait until they come to get us. They don’t want anyone to leave. They think the

shooter might still be in the building.”

I feel my stomach pitch, but there is no time for contemplation. We drag a mahogany desk

across the front door to try to do what the police have told us, but it seems silly. There is

a four-foot-wide, eight-foot-tall plate glass window right next to the door. We don’t have

an answer for that.

Someone turns on an AM radio, and it is buzzing with news about the shootings. We learn

that there are two shooting sites, one across the street and the one two floors below us.

Every few minutes the body count goes up…first two…then six…then nine. A dozen more

are shot but survive. All told there are more than twenty casualties. The lunatic who did

the shooting was a day trader, they say; a forty-ish white guy wearing a polo shirt and

khaki pants. This fits the description of about 70% of our office complex. Other than that,

they don’t know who he is or where he is.

We begin to get calls from associates in other parts of the country wanting to know

what’s going on. Naively, I wonder how they heard about it so fast. Being in the middle of

it, it doesn’t occur to me that this is a huge national news story. It’s only been an hour

since I heard the first siren.

Nothing left to do, I sit down at my computer and call up the CNN web site to see if they

are following the story. A giant red banner with white text dominates the top of the

screen. It says: “DOZENS TRAPPED IN ATLANTA OFFICE MASSACRE.”

Below the banner is a large photo of an office building – my building. I can see my

window in the picture. I crane my neck to see if maybe I can see myself, but I cannot. I

look out the window at the half-dozen helicopters hovering above us, wondering which

one took the picture. It is a surreal moment.



Hours go by and we sit and wait. We are all climbing the walls, desperate to get away

from this place, but nothing happens. We call 911 occasionally and they tell us each time

to stay put. They are sweeping all four buildings in our quad floor-by-floor, they tell us.

They’ll get to us eventually.

A little after six o’clock we hear a knock on the door, and through the window we can seeit’s a lone Atlanta police officer. He doesn’t even have his gun drawn. I find it strange

that they made us stay in our offices all this time and then send only one cop to come get

us out. I figure it’s all over.

He asks us to identify ourselves and then escorts us single-file around the corner of the

hallway to the stairwell. As soon as I turn the corner I realize it is not over. There are

around 50 commandos wearing full combat gear – shields, helmets, Kevlar suits. They

line the length of the hall and circle the stairs going up the stairwell as far as I can see.

Their shields say “FBI” and “ATF”. Their automatic weapons are all pointed at us, and

it occurs to me that I fit the description of the perpetrator. I resolve not to make any

sudden moves.

They escort us down to the street level, and for the first time I can see the indescribable

carnage that was wrought literally within a stone’s throw of our office. The survivors are

long gone, but the bodies of the dead are still there, hidden beneath blue sheets. I look

away, not wanting to have it etched in my memory. But it is too late.

Led to our cars, we return to our families, something that nine other people that went to

work in our complex like me that day won’t get to do. A few hours later the police pull the

shooter over at a gas station north of town.

Just like madmen usually do, he blows his head off.

* * * * *

It is a bizarre thing, being an eyewitness to an act of massive, insane violence that

becomes part of the American pop consciousness. It is an experience equal parts abject

horror and Warholian awe. It is a kind of grim celebrity – infamy, really – that no right-

minded person would ever want to be a part of.

While I am loathe to find a teaching point in an event as awful as the one I witnessed – it

seems a disservice to the victims and their families, for whom there was no “moral” tothe story, only a lunatic who destroyed their lives – I have never really stopped

ruminating about that awful day. It informed my perspective on life and, in a strange way,

investing. That may sound callous given the magnitude of the horror that was visited oninnocent people that day, but I have come to believe it’s all tied up together in the big

picture.



Beginning in the autumn of 1998, we entered a period of time when logic and reasonbecame utterly detached from investing. It has been aptly described as a period of mania.

Over the next year-and-a-half, a sort of desperate greed swept across this country,

enticing otherwise sane individuals into reckless behavior they would not have dreamedof only a year before. People mortgaged their houses to buy dot.com stocks, tripled their

money in a month and then margined their accounts to buy more of the same. It wasliterally as if people thought they had found a way to mint money.

I had more than a few friends during that time – lawyers and MBA-types, mostly – who

almost overnight watched their net worth grow from a few hundred thousand dollars to

many millions of dollars, thanks to stock options at the technology firms they worked for.It didn’t seem to concern them that they weren’t yet able to exercise those options; they

figured they’d be worth five or six times that in a few more years when the options

matured.

The July 5, 1999 cover of Newsweek magazine – just a few weeks before the shootings –

captured this period of time perfectly. It featured a comic-book style illustration of a man,distressed and dismayed, with the headline under him reading: “Everyone’s getting rich

BUT ME !!!”

"The economy's booming," the article began. "So why do so many of us feel we're

missing out on the party? More than ever, achieving the American Dream is a game of

chance – and picking the right stock."

Strange days, indeed. I still remember when that ill-fated day-trading firm opened its

doors a year or so before the shootings. I walked by them everyday, those traders, at anygiven time a few dozen of them jammed into cubicles in the big, open trading room that

lined the breezeway into our building. They sat hunched over their terminals, an array of bizarre charts and graphs flashing across their screens in constant motion, like patients inthe ICU wired up to their lifelines. They had been given a crash course by the firm about

how to read those charts, set up with an account, given margin, and turned lose to begin

clicking their way to riches in the stock market.

For those of us in my investment firm, it was our first realization that cosmic forces were

sweeping through the investing universe. The notion that people could sit at a computer

and flip stocks every few minutes all day long and expect to succeed at it wasinconceivable. The fact that many of them were succeeding at it was, in our minds, a sure

sign that the apocalypse was upon us. We had no way of knowing how prescient we

really were.

The scene in that firm always reminded me of the slot machine section of a casino. And

they were gambling, alright, but they weren’t playing nickel slots. Most of them had theirlife savings and more on the table, margined to the hilt and flush with the allure of easy

money. Only it was not easy money; it was a house of cards. In a harbinger of things to

come, technology stocks experienced an unexpected and significant decline in the days

leading up to the shootings, dropping almost 10% in just a few trading sessions.



Thus did an unstable man of modest means – quiet in demeanor, normal in appearance –

suddenly find himself with six-figure investment losses. He was a homicidal lunatic, no

doubt. It would be crass to somehow blame the day-trading firm or society for his violentbloodletting. Had he not opened fire on that trading room, he might well have opened fire

some other time down the road, on a mall or a school or God knows where else.

Then again, maybe not.

History is full of examples of people who found themselves facing sudden financial ruin

who reacted in a wild and unexpected manner. How many stories have we all heard of murders for insurance money? Of suicides over financial loss? Of families estranged and

embittered over the division of inheritances? Money can and does incite people to

commit acts of depravity they would not otherwise have committed. So it is no smallirony to me that a firm that was promoting a method of investing that stood in stark

contravention to everything I believe to be true and right about how to prudently manage

money brought a madman into our midst.

At the root of all this, I believe, lies a fundamental lack of understanding and appreciation

for the sheer cosmic power of money. It is a story as old as time immemorial, and yet one

that goes largely unheeded. Money is not just currency; it is a life force, an energy field.It is fissile material. Properly handled, it can be a tool of great construction; in the wrong

hands, it is a tool of personal destruction with a half-life that spans generations. Far too

often, people become slavishly devoted to the accumulation of money and give nothought as to what they are going to do when they get there, the place where they have

money and lots of it. And that is where the trouble begins, for managing money is not arote exercise like doing your taxes or writing a letter or changing your oil. It is infused

with every human emotion. Think of the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride. Lust. Greed. Wrath.

Envy. Sloth. Gluttony. In many respects, money touches them all.

We lost that perspective in the late 1990s in the mania of the tech stock bubble. And it is

interesting to me now to look at that word – “mania” – and realize how close it is to itsvariant that visited us that warm summer day in 1999 in Atlanta:

“Maniac.”

As we learned when that bubble burst just a few months later, perhaps it was all wrapped

up together a lot more tightly than any of us realized.

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