Product Description

...I was enthralled with Giacchetto. "You must meet him, he is inspired," I told a successful friend. "Oh, if you have any money you should invest it with him." Now this friend says to me, "Emily, I'm glad I didn't listen to you." I knew Dana before the time of the celebrities and I watched as the celebrities transformed his life. I met him in 1992 when he came to Seattle to begin work on what would be one of his most famous deals: the selling of Nirvana's first record label, Sub Pop. My husband was Sub Pop's general manager. He owned a 1 percent share of the company, and he made enough money from the deal to buy a house and give Dana $100,000 to put into a "safe bond." Rich ended up losing $80,000 of the investment, but that was later, after the nineties boom had imploded and Dana had become just another felon. Because of my entanglement with Dana, this is not an objective book about his life; and although he initially cooperated with it, it could hardly be called an authorized biography. He agreed to a rule of "no editorial control" -- that the story I wrote would be the one I remembered and uncovered. Yet as the story unfolded for me, he became furious that he couldn't control it. We parted ways before I finished the manuscript. Throughout the process of writing about him I have grappled with my memory of him in the nineties, when I thought he was some kind of rescuer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92397 in eBooks
• Published on: 2007-06-19
• Released on: 2007-06-19
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
Reporter White (Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut) was a longtime friend of Dana Giacchetto, a smooth-talking, A-list financial adviser who counted David Copperfield, Michael Ovitz, Tobey Maguire and Phish among his clients, and famously partied with Leonardo DiCaprio at Moomba and other high-profile clubs. When Giacchetto was arrested for money laundering and other financial improprieties in April 2000, White stuck by him, visiting him in prison and collaborating with him on his memoir, until she discovered that she, too, had been taken in by the Scammer to the Stars. Of the $100K that White and her husband entrusted to Giachetto, $80K disappeared for good. White paints a vivid picture of Giaccheto's family, but readers looking for salacious celebrity dish will be disappointed. White spends too much time exploring his childhood in depressed Medford, Mass., instead of the story of his rise and sensational fall. Her alternately sympathetic and angry tones are distracting, and she's too much of a character in her own story. Finally, her uncertainty about whether Giacchetto's a con man or a misunderstood, charismatic fame-chaser who got in over his head keeps her story balanced but unsatisfying. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Dana Giacchetto, a young rocker turned investment banker, became a quintessential figure of the late nineties, managing investments for Leonardo DiCaprio, Phish, and other glitterati and attracting a large show-business and fashion clientele. But when Giacchetto’s high profile triggered an S.E.C. investigation, it emerged that the four hundred million he claimed to be managing was grossly exaggerated, and that much of his star clients’ returns were really just deposits redistributed from other accounts. White and her husband knew Giacchetto from the beginning and considered him a friend, though they later discovered that they had lost a substantial sum. This personal connection is the book’s strength and its weakness. White’s memories of nineties excess and her close-up observation of Giacchetto are compelling, but her grasp of the New York-Hollywood nexus in which he operated lacks investigative rigor.
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Review
"Riveting story of celebrity financial adviser Dana Giacchetto...a cautionary tale of the American lust for easy fame and fortune." -- Kirkus Reviews

Customer Reviews

No Nostalgia
I always wondered what happened when the dudes at subpop started rolling in cash after Nirvana broke. When you are so NOT ABOUT THE MONEY, and suddenly you are wallowing in it. I had no idea that the indie execs were sucked into a larger scam by a fame-obsessed scammer to the stars. Great storytelling and great stripped down prose. Keeps you from getting too nostalgic.

a guided tour of a crazy, alien world
This is not the sort of book I would typically read. I had never heard of Dana Giacchetto and could care less about his world of decadent wealth and "A-list" people. But I do know the author and her husband and some of the people mentioned in the story, so for that reason it interested me and I ended up reading the whole thing in a weekend. (It also resonated with my own family history; my grandfather was a charming, lovable sociopath who went to prison for fraud.)

One reviewer here criticizes the book for not being objective, but the author's direct personal involvement is precisely what pulled me into the story and held me there. White's first-hand experience guides the reader into a world that most of us will never know, making both the excitement and the anxiety palpable. She was at once friend and victim of her subject, and the tension between those two poles - her efforts to reconcile her positive feelings for him against her negative experience - kept me engaged. I found her ability to tell the story with both compassion and anger remarkable, the thing that takes this beyond being just another true crime exposé or scathing portrait of a greedy jerk. There is genuine feeling behind the facts, and for me this is far more compelling than (supposedly) "objective" reportage.

Another reviewer complained that the book paints a negative portrait of Medford and of Giacchetto's family. As someone outside of that community, I did not feel the town was portrayed in a particularly bad light, and in fact some of the neighborhood "fun" of suburbia in the 60s comes through. But as David Lynch has shown us, the 'burbs have their dark side and White was right to acknowledge that. She clearly cares about the family and appreciates their eccentricities without denying their problems. Some of their essentially harmless quirks - the father's grandiosity and embellishment of reality, the mother's love of gambling and deal-making, their occasional reckless spending in order to impress others - resurface in their son in a more sinister form. And I was fascinated by the good boy/bad boy contrast between the golden boy Dana and his petty criminal brother that is woven throughout the book. It's a reminder that people are far more complex and multi-layered than we realize, that outward appearances tell only a small part of their story.

It's easy to look back on such scenarios or to read about them second-hand and see all the red flags, to wonder how these otherwise intelligent people were taken in by someone so obviously not trustworthy. But real life isn't that simple. There are all kinds of factors that color our perception of any given situation or person, and plenty of delusion to go around. It takes a certain amount of guts to not only admit you were taken in, but to also make all of the gory details public, and to do so with a fair amount of sympathy and humor. I admire White's courage in telling her/Giacchetto's story without demonizing her subject or spinning it as a simplistic tale of Bad Person/Poor Victims.

Fascinating topic, dissappointing book
The author (who lost what was a substantial sum of money relative to her not-so-large net worth) of this book is too close to the subject for it to be considered even remotely objective. Throughout the book, there were continual reminders that this book was written with too much passion and not enough solid research. The book demonstrated only the most elementary understanding of investments, risks, and returns - and, while focusing on one player (Giacchetto) who was probably a bad apple, did not explore the supporting cast of advisors, lawyers, and banks that enabled him to be successful. Instead, the author chose an extended exploration of the flaws of Giacchetto's family - certainly somewhat relevant in explaining his actions but not deserving of the degree of focus and emotion it received.