The Hustle

by Doug Merlino

  A key to managing money and dealing with the stock market is keeping an even keel, not letting the daily turmoil get to you, Dino tells me. “You can’t get emotional, you can’t get caught up in what the markets want you to do, because they’ll try to stir your emotions,” he says. “No, just be steady, live your life, enjoy your family, enjoy the team that’s around you, and collaborate and work together and row the boat.”

  I mention to Dino an article I’ve recently read that traced the series of booms and busts that have rocked the world economy since the early 1980s, including financial crises in Latin America, Russia, and Asia; the stock market crash of 1987; the savings and loan bust in the United States; the dotcom bubble; and the housing bust and global financial meltdown. The authors, a pair of economists, argue that the cycle of pumping money into the financial system after a bust has become a disastrous pattern sure to generate more booms and busts. They predict that the next bubble and bust will come in emerging markets.

  Dino listens and shrugs. “That’s how this world is run,” he says. “Envy and greed. Those are cycles. Those all show up at certain parts of the cycle. So those are things I’m cognizant of, you just gotta be aware of them. Fear’s another one. We see fear, envy, greed.”

  I tell Dino that while most people experience a financial bust and call for the government or some authority to do something to stop the next one, it sounds like he sees them as an inevitable part of human economic existence, something to be incorporated into his models.

  He nods. “It’s been going on for centuries, whenever there’s countries growing, you’re going to have these. When there’s money being circulated, it’s going to gravitate toward wherever the easiest way to go is—the point of least resistance is where the dollars are going. It’s cheap money, and if you can get into emerging markets, it’s going to go there. If it’s the housing deal, you’re giving money there, it’s going to be houses. It’s boom, bust.”

  Later in the day, after Dino and I part, I think about the boom-and-bust cycle he laid out. A part of me resists his depiction of relentless surge and contraction, though when I look at the record, I can’t disagree with Dino—economic existence in market societies has for centuries followed that pattern. Some people have made fortunes, and others have been broken; in Dino’s words, every trade has two sides. There’s no reason to think that this cycle is going to stop. Regulation can work for a time, but the historic pattern is that the lessons of a crash are always forgotten. Greed comes to the fore, people find ways around the rules, and the next bubble begins.

  Technology has simply sped the process. Two booms in roughly the past century had centers in Seattle. For the Yukon Gold Rush, you generally had to pack up and get yourself physically to Alaska before you found that you’d wasted all your money. This limited the amount of people who could take part, and at least those who did could say they had a costly adventure. For the dotcom boom, one hundred years later, you didn’t even need to get out of your underwear. You could sit at your computer anywhere in the world and invest your life’s savings in soon-to-be nearly-worthless stocks such as Webvan and InfoSpace—financial devastation from the comfort of your own home. Now, when we can watch our portfolios fluctuate up and down on our cell-phone screens in real time, it makes life seems ever more lashed to the gyrations of the world markets—mercurial beasts that favor or obliterate 401(k) plans as their owners pray for mercy.

  Dino seems born for his work. There is no sense he’s in the hedge fund business just to get rich, but more that he loves the analysis, the adrenaline, and the decision-making. He also has an astounding gift for understanding financial markets and an ability to look at economic life unemotionally. In the same way, some people have a great aptitude and love for basketball, and others don’t. Unfortunately, in our modern economic system, few of us have the skills of a Dino.

  …

  One morning at seven thirty, I arrive at Terminal 30, about a mile south of downtown Seattle. I turn off the road into a vast, empty parking lot. To the west, four white cranes rise over Elliott Bay. To the north, I see the side-by-side stadiums of the Seattle Mariners and the Seattle Seahawks. A little bit past them, in the heart of the downtown office district, the black surface of the Columbia Center office tower mirrors the morning sun. The Rainier Tower, where Dino works, juts up nearby. It is at least a hundred yards across the parking lot, which abuts a canal where ships dock. At the far end there are nine white, rusty shipping containers stacked three across and three high on the concrete lot. Past the containers, I park in a line of cars.

  A few minutes later, JT pulls up in a white Pontiac sedan. There is a blue baseball cap on the ledge above the backseat. On its front, facing out of the back window, are the silver numbers “206”—the Seattle area code.

  JT springs out of the car. He wears a gray sweatshirt with SEATTLE SEAHAWKS written on the front, loose blue jeans, a blue knit cap, and chunky work boots. The thick, black beard he usually wears has been shaved down to a goatee—he thinks it makes him look younger, he tells me later. He walks with a jaunty step and almost reaches me before he stops, pivots around, rushes back to his car, and then comes back smiling, holding up for explanation a pair of blue gloves lined with rubber on the palms for grip.

  “I just got off the phone with my mom,” JT tells me. “She wanted to make sure I made it down here, that there was no problem with traffic or anything. I told her everything was fine. No way I was going to be late for this.”

  We walk over to a trailer parked on the lot. About twenty-five people stand outside, some talking in low voices, others keeping to themselves. Several hold cardboard cups of coffee and drink through the plastic lids. All are dressed in similar fashion to JT, in jeans, sweatshirts, and boots, and they range in age from about eighteen to fifty. A couple of the younger kids, with their buzzed hair and eager faces, look like they just walked off the high school football field. Some of the men look like they’re coming off hard nights. Four men, including JT, are black. One man looks like he might be Native American. Everyone else, including the two women in the group, is white.

  This is an important day for JT. For several years, at the urging of an older family friend who works as a longshoreman, he’s been trying to get on with the union. There is more demand than work, so positions go by lottery. JT’s number recently came up, and he got called to attend an orientation. A few days before today, he’d gone to a doctor, taken a physical, and peed in a cup for a drug test.

  A job on the docks starts at $21 an hour, with benefits. For JT, that’s way more than he can make anywhere else he can think of. As he sees it, his other options consist of low-paying work such as detailing cars. “I’m thirty-five effing years old,” he’d told me a few days earlier. “I really need this.”

  The door into the trailer swings open, and we file into a narrow room with several rows, four-across, of plastic folding chairs. At the front, there’s a TV on a wheeled cart and a whiteboard upon which the word LASHING is written and underlined. This is another test for everyone in the room, to see if they can handle the physical exertion it takes to lock down—“lash”—cargo containers.

  After everyone settles into a seat, a white man in his forties, wearing jeans, a golf shirt, and a mustache, comes out and tells us to write our names on the clipboard he’s holding. Then we’ll watch a training video before going out to practice.

  Later, everyone in the group dons orange reflective vests and white hard hats and files outside to stand around a stack of white cargo containers. They need to use a metal pole to pick up and secure each container with a long bolt. They have thirteen minutes to do all nine containers. JT does his in eight, but he is huffing and puffing by the end. Though the men cheer them on, neither of the two women can manage it.

  After everyone is released, JT tells me that he was most excited by something the man with the clipboard had said before the test: “This is a way you can support your family.”

  “That’s what I want
ed to hear,” JT says.

  A few days after we meet on the docks, on a Saturday morning, I drive down with JT and his family to a Boys and Girls Club about twenty miles south of Seattle to watch Kiera, the daughter of JT’s girlfriend, play in a tournament. As we enter the gym, we’re greeted by the sound of basketballs hitting the floor and bouncing off the red walls as the two teams of eighth-grade girls warm up.

  I sit to the left of JT on the aluminum bleachers, which are only four rows high. The gym is crowded with the parents and brothers and sisters of the players. Kiera’s team is almost all African American, except for a few girls who look like Filipinas and a white girl. The opposing team is all white. JT wears jeans, Nikes, a baggy white T-shirt, and a thick green rubber band, like the Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” bracelets, around his left wrist. When I ask him what it’s for, he tells me, “So I don’t get pinched!” I had forgotten that it was St. Patrick’s Day.

  JT’s eleven-year-old daughter, Kamari, sits one row below us, next to JT’s right leg. She wears jeans and a pink jacket, has her hair braided in cornrows, and listens to Lil Wayne on the pink iPod Mini she holds in her right hand. On the bottom row of the bleachers, JT’s girlfriend, a dental assistant, sits and talks with another mother. JT’s seven-year-old godson, Dajon, wears the blue-and-green jersey of the Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander, and hangs on JT’s neck.

  “God-Dad, do you know where Milwaukee is?” Dajon asks.

  “You mean what state?” JT asks. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know where Kalamazoo is?”

  JT shakes his head.

  “Do you know where Austin is?”

  “No.”

  “What about Fort Worth?”

  “No, I don’t know where it is! Tell me!” JT says, laughing.

  “Texas!”

  “This one’s really smart. He does really well in school,” JT says to me. “He’s really good at basketball, too.”

  He turns to Dajon. “How many points did you score in your last game? Thirty-two?”

  Dajon looks down bashfully. “Thirty-five,” he says.

  After the game starts, Dajon goes to play on the other side of the club, where there are foosball tables and lots of kids running around. A little while later, I look over and see that Kamari has climbed up and is sitting on the other side of JT. She is leaning over and resting her head on his shoulder.

  JT has three daughters in total: Kamari lives in Seattle with her mother; his two other daughters, four and two, live in Pasco in Eastern Washington with their mother, but come over to visit often. “Growing up without a father, you know how it feels, so you’re not going to do that to something you love, and something, you know, that’s very important in your life,” JT has told me. “I wanna be there so they don’t let another man abuse them once they get out there on their own. Some guys can be really just ugly with a female, you know?”

  In the gym, Kiera’s team takes a big lead but eventually falls apart in the fourth quarter and loses. JT, who had been cheering enthusiastically—“That’s what I’m talking about!” he shouted when a girl made a good play—falls silent, shaking his head at the implosion.

  “I’ve got to get this longshoreman thing right,” he tells me as we sit in the stands. “I’ve got to support these kids.”

  The streets, which had seemed exciting when he was fifteen, JT says, have gotten really old. You get tired of seeing the same people doing the same hustles day after day, year after year. The flush times of the crack era, JT tells me, are long gone—now it’s nothing but a grind.

  As far as the longshoreman job, even though he has passed all the tests, it could be years before he qualifies for a full-time job. Junior members of the union have to work up the ladder, filling in on call when there’s a need. Because of that, the friend of JT’s mom who hooked him up with the union has recommended he also take a course on how to be a flagger on construction projects—one of the guys who holds signs telling oncoming traffic to stop or slow down.

  “When people ask my daughters, ‘What does your father do?’ ” JT says to me, “I want them to be able to say, ‘He’s a longshoreman,’ not, ‘He’s a drug dealer.’

  “This is what I want my future to be. I want to make good money, man, take care of my kids. As long as I can take care of my kids and the woman in my life, if I get blessed with anything after that, cool.

  “I’m sitting there looking at my girls and I’m like, man, it’s up to you to get them out of the situation that they’re growing up in. That I’m putting them in. You know what I’m saying? A lot has to with your parents, what position they put you in, they play a big role. If I can’t get my kids in a better situation they’re going to turn out like me. I look at my girls and I’m like, man, I gotta do something to change the situation or they’ll be stuck in it. Just like me, James Credit, Tyrell.”

  Gentrified

  For years, the Reverend Samuel McKinney gave a clear message to the members of his congregation at Mount Zion Baptist Church: Resist selling your homes to the influx of white folks looking to buy into the Central Area. Mount Zion, founded in 1890, had become a venerable institution under the stewardship of McKinney, a Cleveland native who arrived in 1958 to head the church. It was McKinney, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr. from their days at Morehouse College, who had arranged King’s only visit to Seattle, in 1961. In the following years, McKinney had been at the front of Seattle’s civil rights movement, leading protests for open housing and school integration. As whites began to move into the Central Area in increasing numbers in the 1980s and 1990s, McKinney had been vocal about the need for the neighborhood to retain its African-American character.

  So the congregation was astonished when he announced in 2001 that he was selling the home he’d owned for more than forty years and moving to one in the South End, ten miles from the church. Even today, says McKinney, who still keeps a post office box in the Central Area, someone approaches him every week and asks why he left. He tells them, “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” He bought his Central Area house in 1958 for less than $20,000; he sold it for $500,000. Like much of the congregation, McKinney now commutes in on Sundays.

  McKinney’s exit was simply the highest profile among thousands of African-American departures from Central Seattle. In 1980, with movement south into the Rainier Valley already under way, the Central Area was about 60 percent black (though some pockets were close to 90 percent black). It’s now estimated to be less than 30 percent black and more than 50 percent white. Two-bedroom homes that sold for a few thousand dollars in the 1960s now regularly fetch more than $400,000. Over the past two decades, many older African-American residents of the Central Area, retired and on fixed incomes, found that they couldn’t afford the property-tax increases on their homes. They sold, took their profits, and moved south. In the meantime, younger blacks without large incomes were priced out.

  The result has been a swelling black population in the suburbs south of Seattle, while the number of African Americans in the city dwindles. In 2008, blacks made up an estimated 107,600 of King County’s total population of 1.9 million. Of those, 46,000 African Americans lived in Seattle, while 51,700 were in south King County. (Seattle proper’s overall population, in the meantime, climbed from 516,000 in 1990 to an estimated 602,000 in 2009.)

  The black players from our team haven’t been immune to this movement—all of them spent at least part if not all of their childhoods in the Central Area; all of them now live in the South End. In 1998, Coach McClain sold the home he’d bought for $5,000 in 1976 for nearly $300,000. The change in the Central Area only completely sank in for him a few years later when his church—at Twenty-first and Jefferson, really the center of the Central Area—decided to throw a block party. As they walked around to distribute flyers, McClain was shocked at the number of whites who answered their doorbelling. “We really found the makeup of the community had changed, almost like overnight, because no one had taken notice,”
he says. “Almost every house, I was like, ‘Whoah.’ There were very few blacks.”

  The process of gentrification—in which middle- and upper-class people move into a dilapidated neighborhood and rebuild it, often displacing the poor who were there before them—is a global phenomenon hardly unique to Seattle. In Beijing and Shanghai, it’s been led by the government, which has bulldozed many of those city’s ramshackle old neighborhoods to make way for high-rises. In Harlem, both white and African-American professionals have bought and remodeled the neighborhood’s stately old brownstones. Even Finland has seen poorer residents pushed out of its city centers to make way for wealthier residents.

  As cities have seen traditional manufacturing industries decline, those businesses have been succeeded by postindustrial ones such as media, finance, and technology. To be plugged into the world economy, companies locate in cities that are transport and communication hubs. While whites fled the city during the 1960s and 1970s, many have been lured back by new restaurants, cafés, art galleries, boutiques, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and the frisson of multiculturalism. Every spike in gas prices and minute spent stuck in traffic makes proximity to work more attractive. Private schools have multiplied to serve the needs of those who don’t want to put their kids in the public system. As this process ramped up in Seattle in the late 1980s, the Central Area—ideally situated and with dramatically undervalued property—seemed to be crying out for redevelopment.

  No neighborhood goes back farther for black Seattle than the one at the northern end of the Central Area, where Twenty-third Avenue cuts through East Madison Street, about halfway between downtown and Lake Washington. It’s the location of the twelve acres that black pioneer William Grose bought in 1882. The house he built there, which is now a private residence, still stands on Twenty-fourth Street. As Grose sold off pieces of the twelve original acres to other African Americans, the neighborhood became the city’s first black residential community—the aforementioned “Coon Hollow.” Black-owned businesses followed along the commercial strip on Madison, west of Twenty-third, which was home to a succession of black-owned bars, barbershops, a fuel-supply business, beauty salons, grocery stores, nightclubs, and pool halls. When Ray Charles arrived in Seattle in 1948, he rented a room in the neighborhood and gigged at the Savoy Ballroom on Twenty-second and Madison, which was next door to the Mardi Gras, another club. Balancing out the sin, Mount Zion Baptist Church moved to its current location at Nineteenth and Madison in 1920.