How Donald Trump Made a Stock Analyst Rich by Getting Him Fired

One way to gain monetary success in modern day America may be to somehow get your name attached to Donald Trump, it doesn't matter what the connection---even if you get fired as a result of him  (in real life, not the television show).

The latest attack piece on Trump is coming via Barron's and has to do with an analyst who was fired as a result of warning about some bad Donald Trump Atlantic City bonds.

From Barron's:

Barron’s isn’t going to join the many attempted media takedowns of Trump by unearthing new details about his business and personal life. They, so far, have only seemed to add to his celebrity and popularity.

But we would like to revisit an incident dating back to the early-1990s that, we feel, reflects on his character. That was when he unleashed a brutal personal attack on an obscure gaming-securities analyst, Marvin Roffman, who toiled for a midsize Philadelphia brokerage house, Janney Montgomery Scott, leading to Roffman’s unceremonious sacking. Trump hardly exhibited the grace under pressure that befits someone aspiring to the presidency...

Roffman’s sin was to express skepticism about the financial prospects of Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., to The Wall Street Journal just prior to its opening April 4, 1990.

It wasn’t as if this were the first time Roffman had badmouthed the Taj. He’d been sounding warnings on the giant casino ever since the Trump entity issued $675 million in junk bonds at an interest rate of 14% so construction could be finished. For a time in early-1990, the glitz of the project (Trump’s publicists dubbed it the “Eighth Wonder of the World”) and the magic of the Trump name helped drive the bonds’ price to be valued at 101 cents on the dollar.

But Roffman had been advising investors to sell the bonds virtually from their date of issue all the way up to his firing, when the bonds had sunk to around 80. He reasoned that the Taj couldn’t earn enough revenue to cover the interest.

And he proved right. The Taj defaulted on its first interest payment in October 1990, driving the bonds’ price down into the 20s. This pushed the Taj into filing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization the following spring.

I met with Marvin a couple of years after his getting fired from Janney Montgomery Scott. He had set up a money management firm in Philadelphia. He wasn't really a closer, but he had a partner who was. I guess the prospect spiel went something like this. "Put your money with the financial genius who knew Trump's bonds were going to go bad and stuck to his guns and got fired for it."

Then Marvin would enter the room for a few minutes, sort of as a  minor god, say "Hi," maybe say something about the markets, then leave and the close was made. I remember even back then things were going well for him early on. Once when I met with him in his office, he was buying a $15,000 sub-zero refrigerator, something unheard of in the early 1990s.

Marvin talked to Barron's about the firing, and he is justifiably still pissed off, but he seems to also to know that it was his going up against Trump that made him the successful money manager he became:

We contacted Roffman last week, who in the wake of his firing became quite successful. He founded a financial advisory firm in 1991 that ran more than $500 million by 2007 at his retirement. The 76-year-old now lives in a 15,000-square-foot mansion featuring extensive gardens and 40 rooms in the Delaware resort town of Rehoboth.

“In a way I owe Donald Trump a lot because he forced me into a new career that turned out well,” he mused in a phone interview. “But that doesn’t excuse the hell he subjected me to in 1990, sliming my reputation so much that I got fired and couldn’t find another job as an analyst. He acted viciously towards me because, I guess, he felt that I had personally attacked his brand. His image is all-important to him.”...[Roffman also sued Trump] Says Roffman, “I signed a confidentiality agreement, and if I learned one thing from my dealings with Trump, he’s nobody you want to mess with. He can play rough.”

 -RW