Steve Madden comes off as an improbably effective C-suite manager in his memoir
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New York — At 6am on June 20 2000, police and federal agents in riot gear swarmed into shoe designer Steve Madden’s apartment on Mercer Street in New York with a warrant for his arrest.
Madden, then in his early 40s, had been implicated in the firm Stratton Oakmont’s “pump and dump” financial scandal, which will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. “When they asked, I was happy to flip stocks by buying and selling shares on the day of a company’s [initial public offering] and make a quick twenty to forty grand that I could invest in the business,” Madden writes in his forthcoming memoir The Cobbler: How I Disrupted an Industry, Fell From Grace, & Came Back Stronger Than Ever (Radius Book Group, October 13), which he wrote with Jodi Lipper.
In one of the many serendipitous twists of fate that pepper his book, Madden wasn’t actually in his apartment the day the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came to arrest him. He was a few stories up in a second apartment he was renting in the same building, and slept through the entire drama. “It was probably the best night’s sleep I would get for several more years,” he writes.
The Cobbler, which is actually a nickname that Stratton Oakmont’s founder Jordan Belfort gave to Madden, is an occasionally dissonant combination of a self-help book, a 12-step-style mea culpa, and a triumphant “I built this” narrative.
While many of Madden’s introspective takeaways are unenlightened at best—the lesson from his two-and-a-half years in prison is: “I screwed up, I paid my price, and I guess I had to go down that road to get to where I am now”— the book is a valuable, often riveting play-by-play of one man’s rise to riches. If Horatio Alger were transported to the 1990s and gave his characters an opioid addiction, this could be his story, too.
Madden’s career began inauspiciously. The youngest of three brothers in an unhappy middle-class family, Madden, well on his way to alcoholism when he dropped out of college, got a job as a travelling salesman for a wholesale shoe company called LJ Simone, which had been started by one of his childhood friends. “There was one problem,” he writes. “I had gotten my licence at 16, but I’d lost it right around the time I started working at ...
Madden, then in his early 40s, had been implicated in the firm Stratton Oakmont’s “pump and dump” financial scandal, which will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. “When they asked, I was happy to flip stocks by buying and selling shares on the day of a company’s [initial public offering] and make a quick twenty to forty grand that I could invest in the business,” Madden writes in his forthcoming memoir The Cobbler: How I Disrupted an Industry, Fell From Grace, & Came Back Stronger Than Ever (Radius Book Group, October 13), which he wrote with Jodi Lipper.
In one of the many serendipitous twists of fate that pepper his book, Madden wasn’t actually in his apartment the day the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came to arrest him. He was a few stories up in a second apartment he was renting in the same building, and slept through the entire drama. “It was probably the best night’s sleep I would get for several more years,” he writes.
The Cobbler, which is actually a nickname that Stratton Oakmont’s founder Jordan Belfort gave to Madden, is an occasionally dissonant combination of a self-help book, a 12-step-style mea culpa, and a triumphant “I built this” narrative.
While many of Madden’s introspective takeaways are unenlightened at best—the lesson from his two-and-a-half years in prison is: “I screwed up, I paid my price, and I guess I had to go down that road to get to where I am now”— the book is a valuable, often riveting play-by-play of one man’s rise to riches. If Horatio Alger were transported to the 1990s and gave his characters an opioid addiction, this could be his story, too.
Madden’s career began inauspiciously. The youngest of three brothers in an unhappy middle-class family, Madden, well on his way to alcoholism when he dropped out of college, got a job as a travelling salesman for a wholesale shoe company called LJ Simone, which had been started by one of his childhood friends. “There was one problem,” he writes. “I had gotten my licence at 16, but I’d lost it right around the time I started working at ...