Charlie Gasparino, chronicler of Wall Street and champion television reporter of its downfall, is in his element. He is sitting at a prime window-side table at San Pietro, his favourite lunch-time restaurant in Manhattan, ruminating on the financial crisis, when a familiar face appears.
It is David Komansky, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, who has been lunching with another veteran Wall Street executive. He and Gasparino exchange warm words, and before Komansky leaves, he traces a circle on his left palm with his right forefinger. “Call me,” he mouths.
“He’s such a nice guy, and I wrote so many nasty stories about him,” says Gasparino. “I did this story about how Stan O’Neal [Komansky’s successor] took him out. O’Neal went to the board and arranged for everyone to report to him instead. Dave went ballistic about my story. He was very pissed and he told a lot of people I was an ass.”
That memory seems to gratify Gasparino, a 46-year-old veteran of the newspaper trade who has found an unlikely niche on CNBC, the financial cable channel, whose best-known stars have been glossy female anchors such as Maria Bartiromo. Gasparino, with his close-cropped hair and broken nose, hardly looks the part. Yet the financial crisis brought out a different CNBC, one its bosses began to fashion after the network sagged in the wake of the 1990s internet boom. Instead of waiting for newspapers or wire services to break stories and then getting a chief executive or an analyst to comment, CNBC strove to produce scoops of its own – and hired seasoned reporters to find them.
The network also encouraged staff to express their opinions onscreen and even to contradict one another. Where tussles over markets and investments used to be left to guests, with anchors as referees, now CNBC journalists are in the ring themselves. “We think the viewer welcomes the intellectual tussle and the engagement of our team with each other,” says Tyler Mathisen, CNBC’s managing editor. “That is part of the magic sauce.” That sauce has also brought in viewers and profits and, with ratings further boosted by the financial crisis, helped it to crush Fox Business News, launched by Rupert Murdoch in October 2007. Fox had its eye on CNBC’s viewers, who have among the highest incomes of any US cable channel – a fact not lost on advertisers.
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Gasparino embodies this change of tone. Not only has he broken many stories about Wall Street’s troubles live on air during the financial crisis, but he picks fights with other CNBC figures with enthusiasm, sometimes venom. During one heated on-air confrontation about Citigroup with Dennis Kneale, a CNBC anchor, Gasparino said: “I’m doing what maybe you should do, Dennis, which is be a reporter and talk to people.” Kneale responded indignantly: “You know, it’s really bad for the CNBC brand to impugn the reporting skills of your colleagues.” On another occasion, Gasparino seemed openly contemptuous of a group of CNBC anchors, who asked him, television-style: “What have you got?” Instead of answering, he mused: “What have you got? Now that is almost Zen-like … I have many things in my arsenal, but what I have is not what I got.” After some tense sparring, they cut away in confusion.
Gasparino thrives on being awkward, even on being disliked, within CNBC. It burnishes his image as a tough outsider willing to go to battle with anyone – colleague or contact – in pursuit of the story. “People at CNBC will tell you that I’m a pain in the ass, hard to manage, that kind of thing, but they benefit from me being that way,” he says.
If anything, the onscreen Gasparino is a toned-down version of the off-air one. One morning, he upset Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, by asking him pointedly on CNBC about drug use in sports (Armstrong faced rumours of taking drugs, although he was cleared by inquiries). That evening, Gasparino bumped into Armstrong by chance at Campagnola, another favourite Manhattan haunt.
“He looked at me and he goes: ‘You’re an asshole,’” recalls Gasparino. So I was like: ‘Mr Armstrong, I want you to know that you answered all the questions perfectly.’ He says: ‘No, no, no, fuck you!’ I said: ‘Listen, we had to ask you one tough question.’ He said: ‘I am never doing your show again. Stick it in your ear.’ Then he got me pissed because he just kept on going. I said: ‘Listen, I am going to give you a little insight into something. If you don’t sit in that chair, we’ll get some other asshole to do it.’ He said: ‘Really?’ I said: ‘Really.’ He said: ‘You can leave now.’ I said: ‘No, this is my restaurant.’”
That line – “This is my restaurant” – is quintessential Gasparino. It contains all of his swagger and self-possession, his defiance when challenged by others, his sharp-elbowed marking out of territory. He still has the air of a tough, old-fashioned newspaper man, digging up stories in the big city, preferably over a martini.
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| With Tom Constance of the Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel law firm at San Pietro; ‘This is my restaurant’ |
The slack trade reflects the state of Wall Street since the crisis broke out in earnest last autumn. It has taken down several of Gasparino’s old contacts, among them Jimmy Cayne, former chairman and chief executive of Bear Stearns, and Dick Fuld, former head of Lehman Brothers. Their ghosts linger as he discusses the restaurant’s seating plan. “Guys like me who he [Gerardo Bruno, one of the brothers who own the restaurant] likes, get to sit up front. This here is chairmen’s row. This is reserved for Sandy Weill [the former head of Citigroup] and Larry Fink [of BlackRock]. This is the most sought-after table,” he says proudly, of our corner spot.
It should be a sweet moment, but he is wistful as he compares this crash to covering Wall Street after the dotcom bubble. “It was great to catch them, and make them look greedy and stupid – they were not going out of business. This time, you are doing it to wounded animals. I tell you, I am not having much fun.”
Gasparino’s rise mimics that of Robert Peston, the BBC business editor, whose run of scoops on the financial crisis in the UK, including his revelation in September 2007 that the Bank of England was considering intervening to support Northern Rock, have been both praised and criticised. Peston has been accused of going beyond simply reporting facts, getting emotional and causing a run on Northern Rock’s deposits.
Like Gasparino, Peston is a former newspaper reporter (on the Financial Times and elsewhere) who brought to television a scoop-hungry attitude that, when mixed with the power of the medium, produced unpredictable results. But Gasparino is given a freer rein by CNBC, not only to report stories but to deliver opinions, and to take on anyone who challenges him. This includes people on Wall Street whom Gasparino thinks have misled him. One example was Lucas van Praag, the Goldman Sachs partner in charge of the bank’s public relations. After van Praag denounced one of Gasparino’s stories about Goldman as “completely wrong”, Gasparino hit back with further on-air revelations. Yet van Praag admits to a grudging respect for Gasparino. “Most trading floors have CNBC on with the sound turned down, but when Charlie comes on, they listen. People tend to discount what he says because he is such a blowhard, but he does move stock prices.”
In the week after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the bail-out of AIG, the stock market was very volatile and would move sharply as Gasparino gave details of the financial health of banks, or changes in government policy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average twice jumped hundreds of points as he was predicting fresh bail-outs. This impresses many of his fellow professionals. John Carney, a blogger at Clusterstock, a financial news website, says: “I think Charlie is one of the best reporters CNBC has. He actually goes out and shakes down sources for real information, which is why he breaks stories.”
Similarly, Larry Kudlow, a CNBC host, credits Gasparino with giving CNBC an edge in the crisis: “He broke some great stories. I give Charlie a lot of credit for having great sources and, to tell you the truth, most of his steers have been good. He has got us ahead of the game.”
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However, CNBC’s more aggressive editorial strategy has also drawn controversy and criticism. The most stinging attack came from Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central cable television network, who pilloried CNBC for failing to warn its viewers of the housing bubble and accused it of irresponsibly mixing up news and entertainment.
Meanwhile, some Wall Street executives claim that CNBC, and Gasparino in particular, added to the problems of banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman last autumn by speculating about their condition. Stephen Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone, rang Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, CNBC’s parent, during the turmoil and accused Zucker of allowing his cable network to foment fear among investors. Similarly, an article in Vanity Fair about Bear’s collapse quoted one of the bank’s executives complaining: “At CNBC, there is simply no adult supervision.”
“The point of editors is to take a force of nature like Gasparino and turn it into something reliable,” says Felix Salmon, a blogger for Reuters. “But CNBC has no incentive to do it because it is not really about news, it is about creating conflict and cacophony.”
Gasparino insists that his stories were both correct and responsible. “Just so you know, I am really protective of my reputation. That was not a threat. I am not threatening you – I have never sued anyone. But if someone writes that I caused a run on Bear, I will not let them get away with it.”
However, he comes closer to admitting to another accusation against him – that he plays favourites to get stories. “Gasparino is very good at stitching up the people he doesn’t like, which is why people try to stay on his good side,” says Salmon. “It’s not a pleasant way of doing business.” Gasparino concedes that he certainly felt less inhibited about chasing negative stories on Bear Stearns when, following his disclosure that Jimmy Cayne was likely to lose his job, Cayne refused to deal with him. “Jimmy made himself easy to write about because he stopped talking to me – so why do I care any more?” he says.
Yet it is hard to accuse Gasparino of going soft on Wall Street executives in return for information, given his track record of upsetting them. For all his pride at his closeness to figures such as Komansky and Cayne, he did not hold back when the chips were down. “How close do you get? You do not really get that close,” he says. “You want to get close to them because you want them to trust you so they tell you stuff, but there is a line. When it comes down to it, if you don’t report the bad stuff when it does happen, that is a problem.”
Mark Hoffman, CNBC’s president, points out that the channel is accused by some Wall Street figures of being overly negative and by Jon Stewart and others of financial boosterism. He says that it has received an equal number of complaints from either side, which indicates that it has done its job fairly. “Could business journalists have done more to predict the financial crisis?” asks Hoffman rhetorically. “Possibly so. But are they at the top of the list of those who ought to be held accountable for the unravelling of the international financial system? In my view, absolutely not. There is a long list of folks who ought to go before journalists.”
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| Gasparino at work in the CNBC studio; even his critics concede that, ‘When Charlie comes on, people listen’ |
Being out of the studio adds to the sense that he is an outsider. To make his appearances, known as “hits”, he must thread his way through the warren-like NBC offices to a small studio. He does not sit companionably around a desk with the anchors in New Jersey, and he sometimes butts into discussions awkwardly as a result.
Indeed, Gasparino did not take easily to the demands of television. He recalls one early appearance when he had been out drinking the night before and arrived at the New York studio on a summer morning with a hangover, to find that the air conditioning was not yet on. “I went on air and I did my hit and I thought I did it really well, but I noticed a pool of sweat here on my lip. I guess I was half detoxing and half reacting to the fact that there was no AC. Then my phone rings and it was Claudine, [CNBC president] Mark Hoffman’s secretary. She says: ‘Can you please hold for Mark?’ And I was, ‘Oh God, what did I do?’
“He says: ‘Hey Charlie, how are you doing? You’re doing a great job, but I need to ask you a question.’ I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘Have you ever seen the Nixon-Kennedy debates?’ I said: ‘Yeah.’ He says: ‘Well, you’re not Kennedy. Get some make-up! What are they doing over there? Don’t they have any powder?’”
Gasparino’s father, a construction worker, was not happy at him becoming a journalist. “My dad hated journalists because he liked Richard Nixon,” he says. “He was a patriotic guy and when he saw what was going on in the country in the 1960s, like a lot of blue-collar Democrats, he voted for Nixon and blamed the liberal media for chasing Nixon out.” Gasparino, whose great-grandparents emigrated from Italy to New York in the early 1900s, was brought up first in the Bronx and later in the more salubrious surroundings of Westchester County, a swathe of suburbs north of the city. But even there, he kept a streak of the streetwise Bronx kid, training in his teens as a boxer.
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It still pains him that he did not enter the Golden Gloves, an amateur boxing contest. “The biggest regret of my life was not going through with it. One day I was sitting in a bar, and I was watching this guy that I used to spar with in the semi-finals of the Golden Gloves. I was sitting there with a beer and I said to myself: ‘What did I do?’” Instead, he had studied at Pace University on Long Island, before taking a postgraduate degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. After college, he honed his skills at papers including Newsday, the Long Island paper famous for its investigations into the Mafia and government corruption during the 1970s and 1980s, before turning to financial journalism, ending up as a banking correspondent on The Wall Street Journal in 1995.
His sharp elbows came in handy at the Journal. During his nine years there, he broke a series of stories on Henry Blodget, a former Merrill Lynch analyst who was investigated and fined $4m by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 for issuing misleading reports on internet companies to obtain business. (Blodget now runs a group of news websites, including Clusterstock.) After a brief spell at Newsweek, Gasparino arrived as an on-air editor at CNBC in 2005.
In his own way, Gasparino has come to embody what is known in the media as “convergence” – the way in which the old boundaries between television, print and online journalism have been falling. Despite his pride in being a blue-collar traditionalist, he is also a new media pioneer.
His brand extends from television to online, in the form of articles for The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s news site; print, in commentaries for the New York Post; and books. Gasparino’s account of the Wall Street crisis, The Sellout, is to be published by Harper Collins later this year. “This job has worked out better than my parents thought, and I guess I was more opportunistic than a lot of my colleagues in trying to understand how the business was changing. It is becoming more television-oriented, more online, less print,” he says.
He attributes that opportunism to the memory of how it felt to throw away his chance to be a teenage boxing contender. “Going into television relates to it. I never wanted to say ‘What if?’ again. Here’s the thing about journalism, and most stuff. If you make a bad move, shit happens, you move on. The worst you can do is screw it up.”
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