Inside the Boom Boom Room

By DAVID USBORNE

The mud that has been cascading down Wall St has taken on a more lurid hue since the United States publication of a book detailing years of abuse and intimidation of female brokers by their groping and sex-obsessed male colleagues.

While Tales from the Boom Boom Room: Women vs Wall St (Bloomberg Press) expands mostly on a legal case filed by former employees of Smith Barney that was settled four years ago, it includes shocking new details.

Many of the pages, describing everything from foul language to lap-dancing in the workplace, are not family reading.

Author Susan Antilla, a Bloomberg News reporter, worked on the case as it headed for court.

She also explores the misery of women who worked during the boom of the 1990s at other small brokerages and at Merrill Lynch, which was similarly sued.

At the centre of the action is a branch of Smith Barney, now a unit of Citigroup, in Garden City, a Long Island suburb of New York.

The protagonist is its former manager, Nicholas Cuneo, depicted as a boor who encouraged a locker-room atmosphere while gleefully denigrating women in the office.

One of them, Pam Martens, finally snapped and gathered evidence to sue the firm for discrimination.

Martens emerges as a kind of Erin Brockovich, whose triumph over a California energy company that poisoned a city's water supply inspired a film starring Julia Roberts.

The book's title refers to a basement room opened by Cuneo at the Garden City office as a place for his male staff to "unwind".

A lavatory bowl was hung from the ceiling, and a happy hour, with cocktails and beer, was sometimes declared at 10am.

Lap-dancers were invited, and male brokers showed off guns and exposed themselves.

Although there are claims of attempted rape and of women leaving in despair or considering suicide, most of what emerges is a pattern of verbal abuse and humiliation.

Women were regularly paid less than their male counterparts, and excluded from lunches.

They entered the Boom Boom Room at their peril. A stripper once performed in the main trading room.



One woman came to work to find herself praised on a message board for her alleged skill at sexual favours.

Another overheard a colleague say: "As soon as a woman squeezes out a kid, you stamp 'a million dollars' on the kid's forehead and 'stretched goods' on the woman's."

The book is published at a time when Citigroup and Merrill Lynch are under federal investigation for conflict of interest violations, mostly by researchers boosting companies of dubious worth to build business.

For the public to be reminded of their history of sexual discrimination is far from welcome.

But Smith Barney, which settled with the women plaintiffs and has dedicated NZ$30 million to revamping its equal opportunity policies, insists that it's all in the past.

- INDEPENDENT