What with Tom Perkins and the rest worrying about a populist uprising against America’s oligarchs or plutocrats or whatever, UD thought she might do a service by featuring particular people among this otherwise undifferentiated and therefore easy to stereotype mass.
Today’s guy is F. Perkins Hixon. “Perk,” as he’s known, grew up in Tennessee.
As a boy in Tennessee, F. Perkins Hixon said he “grew up listening to recordings of Maria Callas.” So after he moved to New York, he subscribed to box seats at the Metropolitan Opera, gradually upgrading to the top class, a parterre center box of eight seats, at more than $16,400 a season.
But love of opera was only part of the reason for subscribing, said Mr. Hixon, a senior managing director at Evercore Partners, an investment banking and strategic advisory firm. Even the ability to entertain far-flung friends was not the deciding factor.
The real issue was legroom. The chairs in a Met box, unlike the regular tiered seats, can be moved around.
“I’m six-foot-seven,” Mr. Hixon explained. “An opera lasts three to four hours, so if you don’t fit into your seat, it’s not very comfortable.”
Perk has trouble recognizing his own father.
[Last year, Evercore, the investment firm for which Hixon worked] received alerts from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an industry regulator, and the company confronted Mr. Hixon about trading in accounts belonging to [his ex-girlfriend] and his father, according to the SEC.
At the time, Mr. Hixon said he didn’t know either of them, according to the SEC complaint.
“When confronted by Evercore with the fact that he claimed not to know his father, Hixon Jr. said that although he saw ‘Frank P. Hixon of Duluth, Georgia’ on the list and recognized him as having the same name as his father, he did not identify him to Evercore as someone he knew because ‘Hixon’ is a common name in the South and his father did not live in Duluth,” the SEC complaint said.
Perk, a Harvard MBA, is currently out of work.
Mr. Hixon, 56, was arrested in Manhattan on Friday morning by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged with seven counts of securities fraud and one count of making false statements.
February 22nd, 2014 at 12:42PM
Perk was no stranger to perquisites,
Surrounded himself with exquisites.
If he broke a few rules
Then his victims were fools,
Deserving of all their deficits.
February 22nd, 2014 at 12:52PM
adam: Yes, I also thought the name “Perk” was fantastically appropriate.