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| A Tale of a Broker, His Clients
And the End of the Bubble Era |
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| December 27, 2002 |
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By JACOB M. SCHLESINGER and BRYAN GRULEY
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL |
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DALLAS -- When her husband died of a brain tumor in May 1999, Maria Walker,
then 33 years old, was left with a two-year-old daughter, no job and
few marketable skills. But there was hope. The bull market of the 1990s was in full stampede. And Ms.
Walker's money was in the hands of her late husband's friend, a
Merrill Lynch & Co. broker named Brion Randall. Mr.
Randall had promised his pal that he would take care of the widow.

The broker invited her to his office on the top floor of a glass tower in
Dallas. He told her that the stock market would take care of her, just
as it was taking care of his other clients. Through the magic of
high-tech stocks Ms. Walker had never heard of --
Ciena Corp.,
Xilinx Inc. and
ADC Telecommunications Inc. -- her inheritance soared by 50% in
less than a year, exceeding half a million dollars. While the market
roared, she racked up monthly Visa bills that averaged more than
$4,000. "You rock!" she told Mr. Randall again and again.

Then stock prices imploded and so did their friendship. |
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| In the search for what went wrong in the stock boom-gone-bust, debates have
focused on greedy executives, corrupt accountants and lax regulators. But the
bubble never would have inflated without ordinary Americans -- like Mr. Randall
and some of his clients: Ms. Walker, divorce lawyer Robert E. Holmes Jr., and
contractor James Lundy Jr. and his son, J.R. |
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| In the 1990s, the number of Americans owning stock swelled by 30 million to more
than 80 million, a mania unseen since the 1920s. The new national passion
suffused the circle of investors who revolved around Mr. Randall, 40. The native
Texan was a bored banker who joined Merrill Lynch in 1995, just as the boom in
tech and telecom stocks was gathering force. He persuaded friends and family to
join him on the ride to riches. |
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His clients cheered as their accounts ballooned. They went on shopping sprees
and planned for early retirements. But the bull market's end brought
recriminations. Many investors aren't much worse off today than before the
bubble. Yet everything has changed. They're bitter and vindictive about losing
the future they thought was in their grasp. And they're grappling with where to
lay the blame.

"He kept selling us more. And the more he gave us, the more we wanted. Then boom, crash," says Mr. Holmes of his former broker.

At least 10 former clients -- including Mr. Holmes and Ms. Walker -- have filed formal complaints
against Merrill, alleging that Mr. Randall broke various rules in handling their
accounts. He denies these charges. Merrill has so far settled four of the cases,
paying about $1.5 million to the investors.

The firm fired Mr. Randall earlier this year, and Mr. Randall plans to file an
arbitration claim against Merrill. A Merrill spokesman declines to comment on
Mr. Randall's case, except to say, "We take all client complaints very seriously
and, consistent with our policy, review each complaint thoroughly and take what
we believe to be the appropriate action." |
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| THE STORY begins in 1995. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was surging
past 5000 and the Nasdaq was breaking 1000. The initial public
offering of Netscape Communications Corp. shot from $28 to a close of
$58.25 on its first day. Americans who had considered Wall Street a
spectator sport decided to join the action. |
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Rob Holmes wasn't one of them, at first. Eight years earlier, he'd given a
few thousand dollars to a stockbroker who insisted that the lawyer
couldn't lose. Then came the Crash of '87.

Mr. Holmes, 50, cashed out his shrunken account and spent it. At the
time he was a bachelor with a taste for "nice cars and a nice time,"
and few worries about the future. But by 1995, he was starting his own
law firm in Dallas and shopping for a retirement plan when Mr. Randall
called.

"He was pushy in his way, really aggressive, saying, 'I can do this, I
can do that,' " Mr. Holmes recalls. Mr. Randall got the law firm's
business, including Mr. Holmes's own $70,000 retirement account.

The Merrill broker was new to the stock market himself. He had grown
up in Richardson, a thriving Dallas suburb
where his father, an executive at a real-estate development company,
had helped build Telecom Corridor, a stretch of office buildings
occupied by
Cisco, MCI,
Nortel and other tech giants. |
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| Mr.
Randall had been a bank vice president when he decided he wanted
bigger challenges and a chance to make a better life for his wife,
Amy, and their young son. He joined Merrill in April 1995, completed a
two-year training program in 13 months, and established himself as a
whiz at assembling comprehensive financial plans. The selection of
individual stocks played only a small part in these plans, he says. |
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| Mr.
Randall worked in a tidy cubicle surrounded by other Merrill brokers.
Customers met an athletic man, unfailingly upbeat, who compared his
philosophy of diversified investing to a highway. "I'm going to put
you in five lanes," he would say. "If one lane is stopped, the others
are moving." |
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A
few of Mr. Randall's investors had Alcoholics Anonymous in common. He
had been a recovering alcoholic since 1989. His wife, Ms. Walker and
her husband were all recovering alcoholics. After AA meetings, Mr.
Randall would occasionally pick up the tab for dinner. "Everybody
would be howling" at his stories and jokes, Ms. Walker says. |
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| ONE DAY IN 1996, Mr. Randall parked his black Nissan Maxima at an
office building on Black Gold Drive in Dallas. |
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He'd
come to pick up a $1,000 check from his friend and newest client,
25-year-old construction-company employee J.R. Lundy. "I told him,
'Dude, I'm not worth your time,' " Mr. Lundy recalls. Mr. Randall
not only took the check and the account, he took Mr. Lundy to
lunch.

Mr. Randall wanted help landing a more promising client -- Mr.
Lundy's father, James Lundy Jr. The elder Mr. Lundy owned a
drywall and millwork firm that was flourishing thanks to a
tech-driven construction surge.

James Lundy wasn't an easy sell, though. He had left high school
after 11th grade and followed his father and grandfather into
construction work. To the extent he discussed investing with his
family, it was about how Wall Street was rigged against the little
guy. The elder Mr. Lundy declined to be interviewed for this
story.

His son had no such fear of the market. He was comfortable with
the Internet and had come to see it as an equalizer, a powerful
tool to put detailed financial information in the hands of regular
people. When he received a bonus at work, he called Mr. Randall
and said he was ready to start investing. Soon after that, he
introduced the broker to his father. At 45, the elder Mr. Lundy
opened his first brokerage account. |
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| Some
experts, meanwhile, were growing uneasy. At the end of 1996, Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan famously questioned whether
"irrational exuberance" was inflating share values. Stocks briefly
swooned, but rebounded almost immediately. In 1997 and in 1998, the
bull market stumbled under pressure from the Asia crisis, the Russian
debt default, and the collapse of a big hedge fund. Each time, the
bull roared back. At the end of 1998, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
was near 9200 and the Nasdaq was near 2200. |
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| MR. RANDALL HAD BEEN with Merrill three years when he took a call from
an assistant to Dwight Emanuelson Jr., a senior Merrill broker in
Dallas. |
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| Mr. Randall knew of him from the daily "goalpost" listings on his office
bulletin board. They listed individual brokers' "production," or how
much they generated in commissions and fees. Mr. Emanuelson always
seemed to be at the top of the list. |
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| Mr. Emanuelson had noticed Mr. Randall, too. The younger broker was
winning new clients and awards, including a statue of a cowboy riding
a bull; it had been given him by then-Merrill brokerage chief John "Launny"
Steffens. He earned the award for his skill at developing financial
plans. |
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| Over breakfast, Mr. Emanuelson invited Mr. Randall to be his partner and
pool their clients and fees. Mr. Randall couldn't believe his luck.
Mr. Emanuelson's annual production was in the millions of dollars,
while Mr. Randall's was in the hundreds of thousands. |
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| Mr. Randall moved from his first-floor cubicle to a 20th-floor office with
two assistants, a bank of computers and a view of the Dallas skyline.
"I've arrived," he thought. Mr. Emanuelson would handle most of their
biggest clients and receive a larger share of the income. Still, in
his first two years with Mr. Emanuelson, Mr. Randall's annual income
climbed to more than $400,000. |
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At the end of 1999, Mr. Randall and his wife moved with their son, Travis, and
two-year-old daughter, Riley, into a $580,000 brick-and-stucco house in
suburban Plano. He leased a silver Jaguar, and
put his cowboy statue in his new home office. So many referrals poured in that
he had to turn some away. |
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| HE COULDN'T SAY no to Maria Walker. |
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| Her late husband, Tuck, had
been a fellow AA member. They barbecued and watched football together. The
Walkers' little girl, Emily, played with the Randalls' girl, Riley. |
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| After
Mr. Walker died in 1999, Ms. Walker holed up for two days to drink wine and
beer, her first alcohol in more than a decade. When she stopped, Ms. Walker
says, Amy Randall sponsored her at the AA group she and Mr. Randall attended.
When Ms. Walker fell into a depression, the Randalls had her and Emily stay with
them for a week. Ms. Randall helped Ms. Walker learn to make beaded
jewelry. |
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Mr. Randall followed through on his vow to care for Ms. Walker's
finances. Her husband had no life insurance, but he left a retirement account.
Mr. Walker's family paid Ms. Walker for her late husband's share of the family's
medical-equipment business, and gave her more to set up Emily's college fund.
After buying a $156,900 house, she had about $350,000. |
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| THE FIRST STOCKS Mr. Randall bought Ms. Walker were blue chips
including
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and
International Business Machines Corp. Over time, though, he
advised her to dump those in favor of hotter issues. The account she
used for household expenses remained invested in conservative bonds,
but by August 2000 her retirement account was composed entirely of
tech stocks. |
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| Ms. Walker delighted in hearing from Mr. Randall how much money she
was making. When she heard that another AA member had profited from
IPO shares, she called the broker and asked, "What's an IPO? If that's
making a lot of money, I want one, too." |
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| Rob Holmes, the lawyer, understood that envy. He had watched the dot-commers
divvy up lucrative stock options in divorces. And he'd seen new wealth
blossom in the Preston Hollow neighborhood where he lived. One day,
Mark Cuban moved in. Mr. Cuban now owns the National Basketball
Association's Dallas Mavericks and co-founded Broadcast.com, which he
sold to
Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion. "His fountain makes mine look like
a water faucet," Mr. Holmes says. |
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| By 2000, Mr. Holmes's $70,000 investment with Mr. Randall had more
than doubled. The income from his law practice began to seem
inadequate. "All of these young guys were coming along going crazy
making money," Mr. Holmes says, "making us little service-industry
people look like fools." |
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| That was enough to wipe away the reticence caused by his earlier
misadventure in the markets. He turned the bulk of his savings, about
$100,000, over to Mr. Randall for another account. Mr. Randall put
nearly all of it in tech stocks. |
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| Mr. Holmes, himself a certified financial planner, says he joked with
co-workers that he was going to become "an AOL millionaire." He
bookmarked his stocks on his computer. "If I needed a little boost,"
he says, "I'd check and go 'Woo-hoo!' " |
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| On Black Gold Drive, stock gossip joined fishing and hunting in
coffee-break conversations at Lundy Services Inc., James Lundy's firm.
His son, J.R., stayed up late scrolling Web sites such as Motley Fool
and watching stock shows. "I loved Lou Dobbs," says the
community-college dropout of the host of CNN's "Moneyline" program.
"It was the first time I started thinking I wished I'd gone to school
so I could understand better." James Lundy was pleased enough with Mr.
Randall's handling of his money that he referred two construction
clients to the broker. |
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| Mr. Randall says most of his clients maintained conservative,
well-balanced portfolios. But for some, he set aside the "five-lane
highway" and concentrated almost entirely in the fast lane of
high-tech stocks. |
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| The broker says clients pressured him to do so. "I'd get calls from
people saying, 'My buddy's making more money and I'm going to move
this account -- my 8% mutual fund is a dog,' " he says. He steered
others in that direction himself, he says, because tech stocks "were
where the growth was." |
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| Network Peripherals Inc. -- a Fremont, Calif., maker of ethernet
switches so obscure that Merrill analysts didn't follow it -- became a
favorite pick. Mr. Randall once told a friend he might put the
company's stock symbol, NPIX, on his Jaguar's license plate. |
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| By March 1999, the Dow had cracked 10000, the Nasdaq was threatening 2500, and
online brokerage firm Ameritrade
was running ads starring Stuart, a red-headed slacker who goaded his boss into
trading stocks online. |
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Mr. Randall's clients didn't think of themselves
as quite so wacky. "Merrill Lynch seemed safe," Mr. Holmes says. |
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| ANALYZING THE ANALYSTS |
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But rather than counseling against high-tech hysteria, Merrill got caught up,
too. The brokerage firm had lagged behind rivals in peddling stocks and winning
investment banking in the fast-growing sector. As the Nasdaq neared its peak in
the first months of 2000, Merrill launched an Internet Strategies fund with more
than $1 billion in investor money. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer later
alleged that Merrill's rosy research on tech stocks had been intended to boost
its banking business. Merrill has denied wrongdoing, but it paid $100 million
this past May to settle the charges and issued an apology to investors. Last
week Merrill agreed to pay an additional $100 million for investor education and
research as part of a separate settlement between regulators and 10 securities
firms.

Mr. Randall says Merrill also encouraged brokers to raise as much
money as possible in fees charged to investors by making more trades and opening
more accounts. He says that didn't necessarily conflict with the interest of
investors -- as long as the market was rising.

"There's no question that
my investment philosophy changed, or was changed for me, when I entered the
inner sanctum," Mr. Randall says. "The more production you do, the more
accolades you receive."

Not all Merrill accounts are charged commissions.
Some of Mr. Randall's clients -- Ms. Walker, for example -- paid only a flat fee
equivalent to 1% of the accounts' assets.

But one lucrative account was James Lundy's. Trading was so heavy that the
account was turned over, on average, every 12 days, according to a complaint Mr.
Lundy has filed with the National Association of Securities Dealers, the
self-regulatory organization that hears most investor complaints. Mr. Lundy's
tab on trading commissions alone ran to $369,050 from December 1998 through July
2001.

Merrill, which regularly monitors accounts, noticed the activity.
The firm says it called and wrote Mr. Lundy on several occasions, and he
repeatedly characterized himself as an aggressive trader who was pleased with
Mr. Randall's service.

In February 2000, through a combination of
successful trades and cash infusions, Mr. Lundy's account -- worth $65,000 in
the summer of 1998 -- hit $791,879. That was as high as it would get. The Dow
had hit its high and the Nasdaq was soon to peak. The bull market was at an
end. |
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| STOCK PRICES HAD CLIMBED for years on assumptions that the economy would
keep thriving and, indeed, that stock prices would keep climbing. In
the spring of 2000, small tremors began to disturb those assumptions. |
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| In late March, Goldman Sachs's influential bull, Abby Joseph Cohen,
urged investors to trim holdings a bit. One week in April, the Nasdaq
dropped 1125 points, or 25%, due in part to disappointing tech-company
earnings and inflation news. The market looked vulnerable. |
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| In May, the Federal Reserve, worried that the stock market was
overheating the economy, cranked up its primary rate target by half a
point. Over the summer, the economy's overall growth slowed, hurting
traditional stocks as well. The dead-heat presidential election
created more uncertainty. A week after the Supreme Court finally threw
the contest to George W. Bush, the Nasdaq closed below 2500 for the
first time in more than a year. |
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| That's when the exuberance surrounding Mr. Randall began to subside.
In late 2000, one investor, a nurse, filed a formal complaint against
the broker and Merrill, accusing them, among other things, of churning
her account, or trading heavily to generate commissions, according to
NASD records. Mr. Randall says the complaint took him by surprise.
Only that summer, the investor had given him high grades in a chat
with a Merrill official in Dallas, according to Merrill documents. |
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In the spring of 2001, Merrill paid $410,000 to settle the claim. Then
a second Randall client filed an arbitration claim for $522,000 in
damages. Nervous, Mr. Randall told his wife, "The sharks are circling
and there's chum in the water." |
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| "IT MUST BE TOUGH being you right now," Mr. Holmes told Mr. Randall
one day as the market continued its fall. |
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| "Yeah," Mr. Randall joked. "I've got a bungee chord and I jump off the
side of the building periodically to see what it feels like." |
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| Stocks that once made clients thousands of dollars in a matter of days
or hours were now in free fall. Some clients cashed out. Others
refused, even when Mr. Randall advised them to sell, he says. But
there were some in the middle, anxious but unsure. When they sought
Mr. Randall's expert advice, he often counseled: Hang in there. |
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| Mr. Randall says he, in turn, relied on Merrill strategists,
economists and analysts, many of whom remained bullish well into the
bear market. Amid 2001's summer swoon, Christine Callies, Merrill's
chief U.S. investment strategist, appeared on CNNfn, CNN's financial
channel. "It's days like this that we like to encourage investors to
step up and buy the dip," she said. |
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| As the market fell, Mr. Holmes says he frequently suggested selling,
and Mr. Randall talked him out of it. "I kept hanging on until I was
hung," Mr. Holmes says. |
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| On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists slammed jets into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. Stock trading was halted. When markets reopened, the
Dow fell nearly 700 points, beginning its worst week since the Great
Depression. Shudders rippled through an economy that, it turns out,
was already in recession. The public's mood further darkened as the
U.S. government launched war in Afghanistan and searched for an
anthrax killer at home. By the end of 2001, $4.7 trillion of
stock-market value had disappeared since the peak. |
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| When Maria Walker opened her year-end Merrill statement, she saw that
her accounts, once worth more than $500,000, were now valued at
$75,813. Some of the loss was the result of her shopping. Her cash
account, which had been invested conservatively, was down by $66,460
since the summer of 2000. But she also had big losses resulting from
investment decisions. Her retirement account, now invested almost
entirely in
BEA Systems, had fallen by $400,000. BEA, a San Jose maker of
e-commerce software, was trading at $15.40 a share, or less than
one-fourth the $64.88 she had paid in January, according to the
statement. |
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| Mr. Randall invited her to meet in his office. He told her, as he says
he had several times before, to cut her monthly spending. He said she
would be OK until the market bounced back. |
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"OK, Brion, I totally trust you," she recalls saying. |
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|
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| SPECIAL PAGE |
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| For continuing coverage of corporate-accounting issues go to
Called to Account. |
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But Americans' trust in financial markets was dwindling. Enron Corp. had tumbled
into bankruptcy amid revelations that its earnings had flowed from dicey
accounting. That touched off allegations of bookkeeping shenanigans at other
corporate leaders, from Global Crossing Ltd. to WorldCom Inc. With investors
losing faith in earnings reports, a brief market rally sputtered and died in the
spring of 2002. |
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| AS HER PORTFOLIO dropped, Ms. Walker began to feel resentful. "I was
losing all my money and Amy was still shopping," she says of the
broker's wife. She also thought Ms. Randall was growing distant. "I'd
ask "What's wrong?'" Ms. Walker says. "She'd never say." |
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| Ms. Randall was fretting about her husband. |
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| Merrill officials had been calling Mr. Randall's clients -- including
his father -- and asking if they were happy with him. He'd heard that
other clients might file complaints and had begun to doubt that
Merrill was sincere about defending him. He wondered if the firm was
using him to shield his senior partner, Mr. Emanuelson. |
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| e finally went to see the manager of his office, Cecil "Cap" Chesser.
He says he told Mr. Chesser that he had hired Roger Evans, a Dallas
attorney who specializes in employment law, because he didn't trust
Merrill to defend his reputation. |
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| A few weeks later, Merrill moved Mr. Randall from the 20th floor to
the first floor. On March 11, Merrill fired him because of "several
customer complaints alleging unsuitability, discretion and churning,"
Merrill says. |
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| The NASD "currently has an investigation under way" into the conduct
of both Mr. Randall and Mr. Emanuelson, an NASD official says. Mr.
Randall's attorney, Mr. Evans, says that his client "is voluntarily
assisting the NASD in its investigation," adding that "Mr. Randall
unequivocally and categorically denies any part whatsoever ... in any
inappropriate or illegal activity by his former employer." A Merrill
spokesman declined to comment or make Mr. Emanuelson or Mr. Chesser
available for interviews. |
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| THE NIGHT HER HUSBAND was fired, Ms. Randall, Ms. Walker and
two other friends gathered in Ms. Walker's living room. As they sipped
coffee, Ms. Randall talked about her husband's travails. |
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| She said it looked liked any investors could allege most anything, and
Merrill would pay without a fight. "Oh my God," Ms. Walker said at the
time, according to Ms. Randall. "Maybe I could get back some of the
money I lost." |
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| After her friends left, Ms. Walker says she grew angry and depressed.
She had trusted Mr. Randall, she says, but now she was hearing
second-hand that he might have mishandled her money. She spent hours
searching the Internet for information on investor rights, she says,
"just printing, printing, printing." |
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| Mr. Randall called her the next day. They discussed the possibility
that she would sue. Mr. Randall told her he had done nothing wrong. |
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Then Ms. Randall called Ms. Walker and accused her of abusing their
friendship. "I can't believe you would do this," Ms. Randall said.
They haven't spoken since. |
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| TWO DAYS LATER, Ms. Walker dialed an attorney whose name she had seen on a Web site called "investorfraud.com." |
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Tracy Pride Stoneman took the call at her sprawling home near
Colorado Springs, Colo. Friends jokingly call it "Prudential
Palace" because Ms. Stoneman and her husband, an expert witness
for investors, had won millions of dollars suing Prudential
Securities Inc. in the early 1990s for peddling risky limited
partnerships.

Today's bear market has been a bull for Ms. Stoneman. She's
handling 38 cases, triple her caseload three years ago. "Many
brokers led clients to believe that it's the market's fault," her
voiceover said in a TV commercial during a recent Dallas broadcast
of "Divorce Court." "The good news is, you don't need to remain a
victim."

When Rob Holmes first started losing money, "I was blaming the
market," he says. "I thought I should take my losses." Then he
heard Mr. Randall had been fired over customer complaints. He saw
one of Ms. Stoneman's ads in the Dallas Morning News, calling on
investors who lost money on tech stocks with Merrill Lynch. That
described Mr. Holmes. His two accounts, once valued at about
$300,000, were now, combined, worth less than $20,000. |
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| The news had been filled with reports of insider trading,
sweetheart loans for executives, and stock recommendations made to
win investment banking. It got Mr. Holmes to thinking: "Maybe
there's something going on out there I didn't know about." |
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He called Ms. Stoneman on May 2. "Another Brion Randall client?"
Ms. Stoneman said. She filed a claim against Merrill with the New
York Stock Exchange on behalf of Mr. Holmes, Ms. Walker and two
other clients of Mr. Randall. |
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DESPITE THE LITIGATION, these investors have wrestled over what or whom
they should blame: Mr. Randall? Merrill Lynch? Big companies?
Themselves?

"Did I let it happen? Absolutely," says Mr. Holmes. He says he lost
sight of his values and came to believe he could make money without
"grinding it out." When his stocks were soaring, he boasted to
colleagues about his plans for early retirement. "I'm so out of here,"
he would say.

Now, he says, he walks down the halls with his empty pockets turned
out, pleading mock poverty. He complains about the lost dreams as much
as the money.

In choosing to lodge a complaint, Mr. Holmes concluded: "Somebody
should have hosed us down and said, 'OK, let's have a point at which
you stop.' That's what we were paying Brion Randall for."

James Lundy confronted the question of blame as well. Last year, the
two construction-industry associates he'd sent to Mr. Randall in 1997
decided to file complaints, and asked Mr. Lundy to join them.

He didn't at first. Mr. Randall says Mr. Lundy even warned him about
the pending complaints one day over a Tex-Mex lunch. As Mr. Randall
recalls it, Mr. Lundy said he had discouraged the men, telling them,
"'Brion might've made some different calls, but at the end of the day
you're the one making the final decisions.' "

But Mr. Lundy eventually chose to file a complaint with the NASD. The
market plunge had wiped out his account. He came to realize his losses
were much steeper than in the market overall, says his son. Robert
Crotty, one of James Lundy's lawyers, says "there are substantial
inaccuracies" in statements made by Mr. Randall and Merrill about his
client. He declined to cite specific examples.

J.R. Lundy also was wiped out, but decided against filing a complaint.
He says his account, which never reached $100,000, was too small. He
owns no stocks now, but periodically checks his old ones -- at least
those that survived. "I tap a few symbols into my computer and
snicker."

The vast majority of Mr. Randall's clients haven't taken any action
against him. Scott Jessen, 45, is one. The Telecom Corridor
real-estate executive says he lost a lot of money, but filing a
complaint never crossed his mind.

"If you're going to trust somebody with your money and you don't take
their advice, what are you paying them for?" Of those who did take
action, Mr. Jessen has this to say: "These people need to look in the
mirror. If they didn't like where it was going, why didn't they just
fire him?" |
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WHEN MR. RANDALL LOOKS in the mirror, he sees a victim, betrayed by his
employer, his former clients and his dead friend's widow. Once
relentlessly optimistic, Mr. Randall now shows flashes of anger.

He didn't lose his own money trading stocks because he didn't trade
stocks for himself. Merrill restrictions designed to prevent insider
trading make it complicated for brokers to do so. But he says he has
suffered nonetheless. He lost his job, and says his family has been
through emotional hell.

Mr. Randall refuses to accept blame for his clients' shrunken
fortunes, except to say he was naive to trust Merrill's research. He
now works at a two-man firm linking clients with providers of estate
planning and other financial services. He charges flat fees -- no
commissions.

He's preparing his own arbitration claim against Merrill, charging
slander, libel, shoddy representation and wrongful firing. But he
still displays his Merrill cowboy statue in his new office.

Ms. Walker, meanwhile, recently had her Merrill Lynch debit card
refused by a grocery store. She and her daughter are living off of
$2,668 in monthly Social Security checks, and what she can earn
selling the beaded jewelry that Ms. Randall encouraged her to make.

AA friends have upbraided Ms. Walker for violating a crucial tenet of
the group, anonymity, by exposing the Randalls as members in her
complaint. She says it pained her, but she needed to show why she had
trusted Mr. Randall so much.

The boom brought Ms. Walker closer to Mr. Randall. They made money.
Then they lost it. She faced a choice: Eat her losses and take the rap
for believing in the bubble. Or challenge her friend to try to get her
money. |
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