Street Freak

Now in paperback, Jared Dillian’s Street Freak is a “candid look at the demise of a corporate behemoth” ( Publishers Weekly )—and the author’s own descent into mental illness. Street Freak takes readers behind the scenes of the legendary Lehman Brothers, exposing its outrageous and often ridiculous corporate culture. At Lehman, Dillian was an outsider as an ex-military, working-class guy in a Men’s Wearhouse suit. But he was scrappy and determined; in interviews he told potential managers that, “Nobody can work harder than me. Nobody is willing to put in the hours I will put in. I am insane .” As it turned out, on Wall Street, insanity is not an undesirable quality. Dillian rose from green associate, checking IDs at the entrance to the trading floor in the paranoid days following 9/11, to become an integral part of Lehman’s culture in its final years as the firm’s head Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) trader. Yet, the extreme highs and lows of the trading floor both masked and exacerbated the symptoms of Dillian’s undiagnosed bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorders, leading to a downward spiral that eventually landed him in a psychiatric ward. Dillian put his life back together, returning to work healthier than ever before, but Lehman itself had seemingly gone mad, having made outrageous bets on commercial real estate, and was quickly headed for self-destruction.