Raj Rajaratnam, the former Galleon head who was convicted of insider trading, headed off to jail yesterday. But at least he’ll eventually have some interesting reading to keep him entertained: Turney Duff, the 42-year-old hemp-necklace-wearing former Galleon and Morgan Stanley employee pictured at left, just inked a deal, reportedly in the quarter-million-dollar range, to write a tell-all memoir about his time on Wall Street.
It’s called The Buy Side, and his publisher, Crown, calls it “a journey through the trading underworld as well as a look at after-hours Wall Street, where sex and drugs are the quid pro quo in a culture in which a billion isn’t enough.” Here’s the thing, though: No one knows who Turney Duff is (although! He’s got a great name for marketing a finance-jerk persona!) and no one is surprised that sex and drugs are a part of Wall Street culture. So it seems as if Duff is mostly going to write about his two years at Galleon, where he was a health-care trader, but not exactly Rajaratnam’s right-hand man. Couldn’t we have saved the big advance for Rajaratnam’s assistant? His nanny?
