The New York Stock Exchange held its first-ever Columbus Day tribute Monday morning with a reception featuring some of the great Italian-American financiers of my generation.
On The Money was lucky enough to score an invite to the event — which included the guests of honor ringing the opening bell — and not just to celebrate the ethnic pride of your humble correspondent. I also learned something valuable about the Italian-American experience that the faux controversy over the explorer’s alleged misdeeds obfuscates.
That reminder came through loud and clear during a private reception and some opening remarks by Frank Bisignano, a long-time Wall Street heavyweight who is now working for the Trump administration as head of the Social Security Administration and the IRS.
Bisignano — himself from an Italian immigrant family in Brooklyn — was the event’s organizer. He’s had quite a career on Wall Street, working at major banks Citigroup and JPM, then bringing tech companies public. He now finds himself at the top of government because of his financial acumen.
But as Bisignano explained, up until relatively recently, Italian Americans were shunted to the lowest confines of Wall Street — the so-called back office where trades and deals were processed.
Even those who went to college weren’t expected to do much more than graduate to being floor brokers at the NYSE. After all, this was a race stereotyped as organ grinders and mobsters. Who would trust them handling the public’s money?
Through grit and intelligence, Italian Americans persevered, or as Bisignano put it: “They put us in the back and somehow we got to the front.”
Who put us at the front? Bisignano then pointed to the crowd, and a group of men he called the “1927 Yankees of Wall Street” who defied the stereotypes and became business leaders and much more.
That would include Dick Grasso, the former head of the Big Board, who made an appearance after a long absence from the institution he ran, and thank God he did.
Grasso in many ways created the modern NYSE and epitomizes the Italian-American experience on Wall Street. He came from humble beginnings, grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and was raised by a single mother. He flunked the eye test to become a NYPD cop, took a back-office job at the NYSE and rose to the top of the organization.
During his long tenure as its chief, Grasso built the NYSE into one of the great American brands, where a stock listing to trade on its platform conferred on the company the highest accolade of corporate America.
Also in attendance was Vincent Viola, another working-class kid. “Vinny,” as his friends call him, came from Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s Italian enclave before the old neighborhood was known for its hipster vibe. His dad was a truck driver while Viola worked his way to West Point, then the military in the 101st Airborne. That was followed by law school and a successful career as a commodities trader.
He didn’t stop there. Eventually, he ran the New York Mercantile Exchange, and that was all before starting the venerable high-speed trading firm, Virtu Financial and then buying the Florida Panther hockey team.
Hitting cleanup in Bisignano’s version of the Yankees Murderers’ Row was Ken Langone. There’s not enough space in this column to chronicle all of Langone’s achievements. At 91, Langone still likes to refer to himself as a “kid from Roslyn Heights,” the working-class enclave on Long Island where he grew up. His dad was a plumber, and while the family eked out a working-class existence, Langone worked odd jobs from an early age — even construction in his teens.
He went to college, earned an MBA and in the 1960s broke into Wall Street as a stock analyst at a place called R.W. Pressprich & Co. Langone became a legend when he elbowed his way past bankers at white shoe firms to emerge as the lead underwriter of the era’s biggest IPO for tech pioneer Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems in 1968.
That would wrap up a career for most people, but Langone didn’t stop there. He started his own firm, Invemed, and partnered with the late Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank to create another great American corporate success story, the Home Depot Corp. Langone is still as sharp as ever and now dedicates most of his time to philanthropy, including a first-class hospital system he helped create, NYU’s Langone’s Medical Center, along with NYU’s Langone MBA program.
Full disclosure: I am a recipient of excellent care at NYU Langone, and my wife is a graduate of the Langone MBA program.
I thank Ken for both whenever I see him, including at Monday’s event. I also thanked him and the rest of the lineup for making Italian Americans proud.