Cin Fabré and her investment partner Aldano were walking briskly through the halls of a Times Square hotel one evening. Key in hand, they opened the door to a room they had booked — and found themselves staring at the bare behind of one of their clients, caught in the middle of the act with a sex worker. Wordlessly, the pair closed the door while their client, oblivious, continued what he was doing.
This was par for the course for Fabré. While she and Aldano had walked in to ensure the hotel room was clean and client-ready, she was unfazed by her clients actions. As a stockbroker on Wall Street in the late 1990s, she often found herself enticing clients to stay with her firm by offering them drinks, dinner, and “dessert” — dessert being the services of a sex worker. As a broker, Fabré considered it part of her job to make sure that clients were satisfied. That meant checking to make sure hotel rooms were up to standard for whatever was being offered.
Fabré was in her mid-twenties at the time, the daughter of Haitian immigrants. She had no college degree. But she was handling millions of dollars, including the portfolio of an owner of a prestigious UK football team, working at one of the oldest firms on the New York Stock Exchange.
How she got there is the subject of her memoir, “Wolf Hustle: A Black Woman on Wall Street” (Henry Holt, out now) which chronicles the racism, sexism, and hedonism that ran Wall Street until the dot-com crash — and which Fabré believes still runs Wall Street today.
Fabré had always had the ‘hustle’ mentality. As a teenager in a Long Island City high school, Fabré would steal lunch tickets from the school office and sell them for their $1 face value, using sales skills to get students to buy from her rather than the school. She also worked part-time in a Cohen’s Fashion Optical outlet, taking in $50,000 a year before high school graduation. And when a friend offered her an interview with his investment company, Fabré jumped at the chance.
“I knew I could be a stockbroker,” Fabré says to the Post. “There was no doubt in my head I could do it. I never had this question, ‘Oh my God, I’m a woman and I’m black. I actually thought that was my advantage. I could be the dark horse that no one sees coming.”
The reality was different. The firm where she was interviewing, VTR, was an offshoot of Stratton Oakmont, the firm made famous in the 2013 film “Wolf of Wall Street.” Like Stratton Oakmont, it was known in Wall Street parlance as a “chop shop” or “boiler room” — a firm selling securities by pumping up stock shares of certain house stocks and companies. And she wasn’t interviewing for a broker job — she was interviewing to be a cold caller. The expectation was that she commit to working 12 hour days, making at least 500 phone calls a day in order to generate ten leads to give to her broker. If she was able to manage this for at least three months, she might be able to receive the books to study for a Series 7 license— the entrance bar to become a stockbroker.
The brokers insulted the cold callers, plied them with cocaine to keep up with the hours, and occasionally threw lavish Hamptons parties with strippers as guests to keep them coming back to work. Wives were never seen at these parties. Through it all, Fabré observed everything and kept her head down. “I’d have a cocktail, but I didn’t want the distraction,” she says. “I would look at the brokers and they were the best reason to never do drugs. They looked like fools every day. And I was on my own high. I had a passion for what I was doing.”
Fabré knew the cold calls were a means to an end — there was no doubt in her mind she would move to the other side of the room and be a stockbroker.
Once Fabré passed her Series 7, she moved to the other side of the room — and respect for her increased.
As the only woman — and the only Black person — who worked as a broker, her colleagues were unsure how to relate to her. They joked about the size of her breasts; her boss often asked her to compare her breast size to different fruit sizes. She would mumble a response. “It just wasn’t worth it to show the men you were bothered by their lewd comments or hooting jokes,” she writes. “There was simply no way to respond to every inappropriate act. I never would have gotten my work done if I tried.”
Brokers would ceremoniously have their tie clipped when they opened their first account. But, since Fabré wasn’t wearing a tie, the brokers jeered for her bra to be cut. Eventually, they settled for shaking her hand.
‘I could be the dark horse that no one sees coming.’
Cin Fabré, on never viewing her minority status as a barrier to success
While Fabré felt she had earned the respect of the brokers, she began to realize that what the firm was selling wasn’t necessarily making investors money. “I’m 20 years old. I didn’t have any education. What I knew was sales. And the information we were getting was rigged. But there was barely any internet, I didn’t think to pick up the newspaper and analyze the stocks, so I bought into the hype.”
Fabré didn’t realize VTR was in trouble, but a broker who had left the firm explained what was going on and invited her to interview at his firm. His firm, a respected Wall Street company, was where Fabré began her legitimate financial education. But overall, Fabré felt her clients respected her.
“I would answer the phone by barking, ‘Fabré!’” Fabré says. “You better be calling me to give me more money. Don’t call me for any other reason. I wasn’t here to babysit anyone. I wasn’t here to have these hour-long conversations about your partners or your wife or whatever it is that you were going through. I was here to make you money. And if you weren’t going to pay me for my time, as far as investing, then we had nothing to talk about.”
At one point, Fabré flew to the UK to meet some of her high-net worth clients. She writes about how one of her UK clients, who owned almost all the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in England, was taken aback when he saw her.
“I didn’t know you were Black,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t know you were white,” Fabré threw back at him.
Moments like these forged Fabré’s backbone, but they also left a mark on her psyche.
“I always walked in like I owned the room. You know what I mean?,” says Fabre. “And if you’re a good guest, we can hang out. But if you’re going to come at me, then you’ve got to go.”
Even at the more respected firm, Fabré felt her clients were always testing her, trying to see if she would sleep with them. “It was something all my clients hinted at,” she says. “But they also immediately saw how tough I was. So I feel like I scared and excited my clients at the same time. But I would have to say, ‘If you wouldn’t talk like this to a man, don’t talk to me like that. Don’t treat me any different. Don’t expect me to comfort you and hold your hand more because I am a woman. I’m not your mother. You know what I mean? I’m nothing like her.’ So I think there was a lot of respect that came with that.”
Fabré’s stockbroker career ended in early January 2002, shortly after her mother and her brother passed away. She was successful, but her entire life was wrapped up in work. The aftermath of September 11 had caused market turmoil, and she felt herself pondering her purpose. “I thought of everyone who had been lost on 9/11 and all the words the families didn’t get to share with their loved ones who died,” Fabré writes. “No amount of money could have brought back those cherished sentences.” She passed her book of business to her partner, took her Gucci purse and left. “I had given everything I had to fight and stay and be respected in the business, and I had won,” Fabré writes.
Today, Fabré lives with her wife and her four children in Paris. She invests privately, but has spend the last several decades primarily focused on her family.
“If I had to do it over again, I would,” says Fabré. “At the end of the day, it’s a New York story. We’re the type of place where we’re like, “Hey, if you have a dream, you can make it.” That’s why everyone comes to America, right? The American Dream. And my parents believed in that. And whether it’s an immigrant mentality, I believe in it. And it’s what I teach my kids.”