As a child, Henry Wojecoski develops an insatiable appetite for money while working with his plumber father in a working class town near the wealthy village of Southampton, New York. After glimpsing the good life, the street-smart Henry decides that one day good fortune will be his too. Fate and a lofty dream soon lead Henry to nurture a healthy addiction to money. Henry has always been taught to count his blessings, but he knows he will never follow in his father's footsteps. At fourteen, he starts his own company with five employees, but three years later, Wojo Services is broke. Not deterred by failure, Henry shuns college, joins the marines, and fights in Vietnam. When he finally returns home-alive but emotionally shattered-Henry becomes the office boy at an accounting firm. Little does he know that he has just taken the first step down a path into the arcane worlds of high finance and politics. As Henry's life epitomizes the excesses and financially crazed period at the turn of the twenty-first century, he soon discovers that the instruments he has developed to create his own personal wealth have also helped to create the greatest recession ever known to man.