How the hell did Colvin get this stuff?! Did he somehow get his hands on a copy of my DD-201 service record?
When asked where his initial funding came from, Buckman looked surprisingly sheepish and John Steiner, the Chairman of the Buckman Group laughed. Most of the other principals were laughing at this as well. According to Buckman and Steiner, it all started after a schoolyard fight on his 13th birthday, when three bullies tried to take his lunch money. When the fight was over, Buckman had a black eye, but the bullies were crippled and in the hospital. The laughter was over two related items, that either Carl Buckman could be intimidated or that the three attackers thought they could beat him up. Among his friends, Buckman is considered both fearless and lethal. He has multiple black belts in the martial arts.
Buckman escaped the fight with a black eye, but it didn’t end there. He was arrested and expelled from school. That was when he met Steiner, then his father’s attorney. Between the two of them, and each gives the other the credit, they got the police to investigate, the charges to be dropped, Buckman to be reinstated in school, the three bullies to be arrested, and then capped it all off by suing them for damages. He got $15,000 for his efforts, and immediately began investing in the market. He was a millionaire by the time he turned 18.
There was a section recounting our lunchtime conversation about how we set up the company.
Buckman built the Buckman Group around what he refers to as his ‘brain trust.’ The first member of the group was his lawyer, John Steiner, who had helped him get his seed money originally. The second and third members were Melissa Talmadge, his stockbroker, and Jake Eisenstein, Sr., who was his accountant. The newest member is Eisenstein’s son, Jake Eisenstein, Jr., a tax lawyer who had recently graduated from law school and was working at his father’s accounting firm.
“None of us had a clue what we were doing,” commented Buckman, over lunch with the group at a local eatery. “Jake Junior was green and ambitious, I was just out of the Army and clueless, the grownups had never done anything like this either. I think we succeeded because we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to.”
“Carl is really loyal, and that’s a very nice feeling. It makes you want to justify that faith,” said Talmadge. “By all rights, I was a mistake. I was a stockbroker, basically a salesman, and what Carl needed was really a stock analyst. He thought I could do the job.” The others all nodded at this, including Buckman, but they also commented that Talmadge earned her paycheck from Day One. Certainly the Group’s latest effort, creating and marketing investment pools, owes much of its success to her efforts.
A lot of the story was puffery. I am nowhere near as interesting as Colvin must have found me. Still, portions were surprisingly painful.
If Carl Buckman’s public life is an unending stream of successes, first academic, then military, and now financial, his personal life has been anything but. It wasn’t supposed to be like that.
The oldest son of upper middle class professionals in Baltimore’s wealthy northern suburbs, Carl Buckman was destined for a similar future. That was only the surface picture. His mother was a cold and abusive perfectionist who doted on his younger brother. His father was a weak man who loved his wife more than his children. His younger brother, Hamilton, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was fixated on destroying Carl. Only his younger sister, Suzanna, was at all normal, and her only goal was surviving the family and escaping.
Buckman’s mother had an idealized dream of her eldest son as a corporate drone, with detailed plans for him. Carl’s life was planned from the moment he was born — the schools he would attend, the Ivy League college he would graduate from, the type of girl he would marry, the job he would take, the home he would live in. Buckman’s successes meant nothing to his parents, since they were not the successes they had planned for him. He rebelled by becoming even more successful.
Worst of all was his psychotic brother, the favored child. The older Hamilton got, the more aggressive and dangerous he became towards Carl. By 16 Carl was living with his possessions under lock and key, and sleeping in a locked room, just to survive. At that point his parents solved the problem by evicting the troublesome son — Carl! He moved into an apartment that he paid for himself with his trading profits.
If there is one constant to Carl Buckman’s life, it seems to be his wife Marilyn. They met freshman year at a fraternity party, where various accounts have him winning her in a drinking contest. Regardless, they have been together ever since. They were married in 1978 shortly after she graduated from college. Unfortunately, Marilyn was not the woman his parents wanted him to marry. A few weeks after the wedding they secretly disowned him.
In 1983 it all came to a head. Now out of the army and living back in Maryland, he had begun the Buckman Group. Suddenly his wife was being stalked, and her car was vandalized and then burned. Following an attempted firebombing at their rural home, Buckman brought in bodyguards for his family and flew them to a secret location. He stayed at home and kept his service pistol handy. The police investigated and questioned close to a hundred people, friends, family and business associates, even going back as far as high school and quizzing his old girlfriends. Nothing turned up.
It turned out to be his brother. Hamilton broke into Carl’s home armed with a 14" long Bowie knife, essentially a short sword, with the announced intention of killing Marilyn and their son. Instead he found Carl and attacked him. Carl was forced to shoot and kill his own brother in his kitchen. Forensics tied Hamilton to the earlier attacks. It was ruled self defense, but that wasn’t the end of it. His mother was hospitalized briefly herself. His parents divorced and tried to play their daughter Suzanna off against each other and against Carl. Suzanna, a nurse at nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital, was forced to leave and run away from both of them, and is now working in California at an undisclosed hospital.
I had told Colvin Suzie was working in San Francisco. No need to let him chase her down. I kept tabs on her through the security company, but she was living her own life now. She was reportedly telling people she was an orphan.
I read the story twice, groaning each time. My afternoon was totally shot! I packed my briefcase and headed out the door. If I got lucky, Marilyn wouldn’t have been down to the post office box to pick up the mail, and she wouldn’t see the magazine. I had been subscribing to Fortune since I was a teen. She never read it, but I figured she might read this one.
I was delayed getting out of the office when half a dozen people asked me to sign their copies of the magazine. Most of them I signed, “Get back to work! Carl Buckman”, which elicited considerable laughter. John really made my day when he announced he was going to buy a picture frame and frame the cover. Just what I needed!
When I got home, everything looked normal, but the post office box had already been emptied. Charlie was running around the back yard, jumping in and out of the swimming pool, and Dum-Dum was barking and chasing him and jumping in herself. I didn’t see Marilyn, which was unusual, but I found her inside the house, sitting at the kitchen table, watching our son through the patio door and drinking a cup of coffee. The twins were napping in jail.
My copy of Fortune magazine was on the kitchen table, and open to the cover article. The article had opened with a group picture of the five of us grouped around the front of my desk and laughing. Marilyn looked up at me and smiled. “You’re famous!”