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'Confessions Of A Street Addict' by James J. Cramer

Author humbled in the money game

Sunday, June 16, 2002

By David Guo, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Confessions Of A Street Addict By James J. Cramer Simon & Schuster $26.00

Last but not least, Cramer is plenty full of himself. Here’s a 40-something whose self-acknowledged arrogance can make him impervious to his own folly.

This is the “it” in his body chemistry that nearly caused him to lose everything that his money, guile and candor had helped him to gain.

The best example, he tells us, is how a control-freak like himself could let his pet project, The Street.com financial news Web site, be commandeered by venture capitalists and an absentee alcoholic manager. In a Kafkaesque stroke, The Street.com became off-limits to its own creator, to the point where Cramer literally could not set foot into its offices.

In other crises it is left to his wife, Karen Cramer -- a k a The Trading Goddess -- to save his sorry you-know-what when the cash cow cache, the Cramer hedge fund, nears empty. Cramer is too busy fussing with his other projects -- writing columns for Smart Money magazine, appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” angling to host his own Fox TV talk show, etc. etc.

What is it that man craves after making a fortune? He wants fame of his own, and in interest-bearing, good-for-life installments.

In Cramer’s case, the man who looks, moves and snarls like Joe Cocker wants to be a Wall Street media star, someone with less gray hair than Louis Rukeyser, more snap and pop than Lou Dobbs, and -- here’s the hard part -- as much credibility as Woodward and Bernstein.

Like many money managers, Cramer outwrestled the 1990s’ raging bull. Unlike many of them, he also got his kicks being a real-time journalist from the trading pit, writing about deals that many suspected -- but with little proof -- he also was profiting from.

Therein lay the peril of Cramer’s pursuits, which he painfully and candidly explores here.

Just ask Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky or Gordon Gekko. Wall Street is a dirty place to live, and

few know the jungle better than someone like Cramer. He’s swung from the high vines as a hedge-fund manager, journalist, publisher and dot.com entrepreneur.

As someone who started out as a police beat reporter in Tallahassee -- his first big story was stalking serial killer Ted Bundy -- Cramer never stopped loving journalism. He just learned that he was probably better at making money somewhere else.

The place where people who write about Wall Street meet those who make money on it, he writes, is a curious intersection. It’s also one that’s become rush-hour crowded and ethically hazardous thanks to wheeler-dealers like Cramer.

While the SEC never found evidence of any wrongdoing, the pump-and-dump questions never stopped -- was he talking up stocks on television only to sell them once they hit an unsustainable high?

His book may not have hit the best-seller list, but it is the subject of a clever marketing play a la Tyson vs. Lewis. Amazon.com recently was promoting it as a two-for-one package deal with “Trading With the Enemy: Seduction and Betrayal on Jim Cramer's Wall Street,” written by Nicholas W. Maier, a former Cramer employee.

Cramer got out of Wall Street last year, and his calmer afterlife is centered on his family and his co-hosting of a new talk show with Lawrence Kudlow, “Kudlow and Cramer,” on CNBC. Numbers will always be a way to keep tabs on Cramer, though the ones of relevance no longer track a pre-tax, year-to-date gain or a pro-forma, pre-acquisition growth target.

Then there are the numbers that give an account of the latest greatest passion in his life: 4-3-3, which means that as a soccer dad and coach in Summit, N.J., he ended the year a winner.