Up & Down with Gus

For 21 years, friendly, pot-bellied Gus Fusaro was an elevator man in Manhattan's Equitable Building, only a block from the New York Stock Exchange. Financial bigwigs rode up & down in Gus's car. When the elevator was not too crowded, Gus obligingly provided a chair and chatted about the market. After he was promoted to assistant starter, some of his car riders occasionally gave him market tips to help him get ahead faster

He began to play the market in a small way, talked about it in a big way. Around lower Manhattan's Italian neighborhood, where Gus lived with his wife and five children in a fifth-floor walkup, the legend spread that Gus had an inside track. Some of the neighbors called him "Du Pont," because Gus liked to remark that he "worked with Du Pont, Morgan and those fellows." Some of the neighbors gave him their money to buy securities for them.

In time, Gus's account grew so active at Laird, Bissell & Meeds, a brokerage house in the Equitable Building, that his brokers fixed him up with desk space in the office, as brokers do with any big customer. At lunchtime and other odd moments, Gus would go to the brokerage office, hang his uniform coat in a closet and don a dark alpaca jacket such as Wall Street clerks wear. Then he would sit down at his desk to watch the Board and place his orders.

No one ever seemed to wonder how a $50-a-week elevator man could be such a big trader; In Wall Street strange things happen. In 1946 alone, Gus bought and sold at least $750,000 in stocks. In the first six months of 1946, he netted some $50,000. A broker asked Gus why he went on working at the elevators. Gus said he liked the job, it gave him contacts.

But in the long run his luck ran out, and one of his friends went to see the District Attorney. Last week a detective came around and arrested Gus on a charge of grand larcency: some $247,000 which his neighbors had given him to place on his "inside track" had vanished in the bear market. Said Gus: "I never guaranteed a profit, because Wall Street is too big a risk."

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