An unlikely king of capitalism

Hailing from a well known nationalist family, Cillian Ó Brádaigh decided to head stateside and has come a long way from cold-calling prospective brokerage clients on Wall Street for $4.50 an hour, writes NIAMH SWEENEY

CILLIAN Ó Brádaigh might just have the best timing on Wall Street. In May of 2008, the Glenageary gaeilgeoir decided to jump ship from his position as a private wealth manager at Lehman Brothers after 17 years with the company. He left just three days before Lehman’s stock started to plummet and only four months before the Wall Street behemoth collapsed.

Ó Brádaigh says he’s no soothsayer, but admits his extraordinary timing did make him “look good” in front of his clients, whom he brought with him en masse across the street to Morgan Stanley.

“I was bored the other day so I counted the number of days I worked at Lehman Brothers. I believe it was 1,659,” he says, sipping on a glass of Bulmers in the restaurant in which he’s just invested, in New York’s meatpacking district.

“And in light of the fact that this is the 100-year anniversary of the Titanic slamming into an iceberg, I thought it was kinda cool that I was on the Titanic for 1,659 days but hopped onto another ship about 119 days before it hit the iceberg.”

Ó Brádaigh says he was unhappy with Lehman from late 2007, because “they were telling us a lot of stuff that made no practical sense”.

“They took away resources that were mission-critical for us in executing our business … and we were told we’d get them back in six months. That made no sense.

“It was like coming into this restaurant and saying: ‘We’re not gonna serve alcohol here for two weeks, but we will serve it in two weeks and we can’t really explain to you why, but that’s what we’ve decided to do’.”

Not long before, Ó Brádaigh had thought he would see out his entire career at Lehman. It was the first job he took when he moved to New York in the late summer of 1990, fresh from a degree in economics and social studies at Trinity College and the lucky holder of a much-coveted Donnelly visa.

“I liked the can-do attitude of America,” he says, explaining his decision to move to the US for what he originally thought would be a five-year stint. “And between that and watching copious episodes of Hill Street Blues, I said ‘I’ve gotta live in the States’.”

So he bought a plane ticket, and moved into a five-bedroom house with 12 other Irish lads in Queens.

“My first job interview was in a bathroom,” he recalls. “It was one of those so-called boiler shops on Wall Street. They were small brokerage firms that traded in very obscure penny stocks. It was all about churning and burning the client, horrible stuff.”

Sorry, pause there a moment – his first interview in a bathroom?

“Yeah, he stood at the urinal with one thing in his left hand and my resume in the other hand,” he laughs. He turned down the job.

After five interviews and five job offers in two days, there was really only one that stood out for Ó Brádaigh – Lehman Brothers.

And so that’s where he began his career, making cold calls for $4.75 an hour, often going by the name of Kyle Brady when it became obvious that Cillian Ó Brádaigh was too much of a mouthful for American secretaries.

“I probably used that name for about a year when I was cold calling,” he says of his Yankee alter-ego. “But I would never change my name (permanently). It’s part of what I am,” he says, before launching into a James Connolly speech:

The tongue of the conqueror is the badge of slavery upon the lips of the conquered. It is mightier than the fortress or river. It is stronger than the sea.

“I didn’t want the tongue of the conqueror on my business card when I was brought up with Ireland’s language – Irish,” he explains, smiling. This is the first hint that Ó Brádaigh is an unlikely king of capitalism.

Connolly also said:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic, your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you … through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers

Ó Brádaigh’s uncle, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, was Gerry Adams’s predecessor as president of Sinn Féin; his father, Seán Ó Brádaigh, was also involved politically. His maternal grandfather, Seamus Dobbyn, shared a cell with Eamonn de Valera in Lincoln Prison in England and helped Dev to escape in 1919. It seems an odd twist of fate then that led the young Cillian to embrace Wall Street in the way he has.

Recently returned from the Caribbean where he and his wife Nastassja (who is from the French-speaking part of Belgium) brought their twin sons Seán and Oscar to mark their tenth birthday, Ó Brádaigh admits it was a far cry from where he spent his own tenth birthday – saluting the tricolor at Coláiste na bhFiann in Rosmuc in the west of Ireland.

But after 22 years in New York, that all seems far removed from the Ó Brádaigh family’s charmed existence in New York’s West Village (they also recently purchased a large pile in the Hamptons).

His success, he says, was built through “hard work, attention to detail and a commitment to be as helpful as I possibly could” to his clients.

He’s certainly come a long way from the early days of cold-calling prospective brokerage clients, although he will say that that early experience contributed to building his business and his confidence. Reflecting on that time, he says he most remembers being in awe of the people he worked with who were earning a lot of money.

“They were living la dolce vita with the Ferrari and the late nights out on the town and the nice-looking women on their arm and, ya know, making a lot of money at a pretty young age,” he says of the other young brokers at Lehman. “But a few years later, I realised that these guys were just one level above used car salesmen, because that’s all it was. But that’s the business that I grew up in.

“What I do today at Morgan Stanley is way more sophisticated, way more appropriate and way more mature than those days.”

Now an executive director within Morgan Stanley’s Private Wealth Management division – which has $1.7 trillion in assets under supervision – Ó Brádaigh’s job is to guide wealthy individuals, families and other investors through the murky waters of stocks, bonds, private equity and more.

You just have to have a minimum of $10 million to invest to become a client.

“My thinking going into the business was that the skill set I would need as a private wealth adviser would be more academic and maybe more mathematical and stuff. But 90 per cent of it is interpersonal skills,” he says. “It’s all about trust and the relationship.”

Much of that trust in the sector was eroded a few years ago, he admits, although he says it is slowly growing again.

“I saw real financial fear [during the crisis],” he recalls. “From peak to trough, within a relatively short period of time … the [stock] market lost 59 per cent of its value. That’s painful to the guy who’s got a million, fifty million, a hundred million – or the guy who’s got a hundred thousand dollars in his retirement account.”

That’s why Ó Brádaigh makes sure he spends a lot of time talking about risk – and the appetite for it – with his clients, even though people, he says, are already beginning to forget what happened.

“It’s all cyclical. I’m even beginning to see it happening this year. Global equity markets in the first quarter are up 10 per cent. People are getting a little comfortable, maybe a little complacent, when the reality is that they should continue to pay a huge amount of attention to the possible risk they’re taking,” he says, squarely.

That’s not to say that Ó Brádaigh doesn’t have a taste for taking some risk himself. His own latest investment, a French bistro called the Bakehouse, is a first foray into the restaurant business. It’s something he’s wanted to do for a long time, he says.

“I kind of fancied owning part of a restaurant or pub in my own neighbourhood for years as a nice way to have somewhere to walk in and know that you own a piece of it.”

Located at the end of Horatio Street, with a wall of glass that looks out over the Hudson River, the Bakehouse is just four blocks from the Ó Brádaigh family apartment and has become a sort of home away from home as they eat dinner there a few times a week. (Ó Brádaigh jokes that his role in the restaurant is purely passive, except for his expanding waistline.)

“I like the thought that I have an interesting financial interest in a business that I socially get a lot of enjoyment out of and hopefully, in due course, will profit from financially,” he says happily, surveying the wood-finished, hipster-chic surrounds of his new venture.

It’s a long way from the five-bed house in Queens stuffed with 12 smelly Irish lads.

Ó Brádaigh maintains it’s still possible for talented young Irish people to come to the US and do what he did. “I think that the bond between Ireland and America is as strong as ever,” he says – with the caveat that anyone who does come must have their papers in order. “Living in the shadows in America is not good.”

He also says that Wall Street’s view of Irish people – and Ireland itself – is overwhelmingly positive. “I think the Wall Street view is that things have stabilised and that they should improve from now on. My own view is a little less positive,” he admits. “I’m very nervous about rising interest rates and the adverse impact that will have on rising debt servicing costs of the consumer, the Government and corporations.”

Ó Brádaigh describes Ireland’s current predicament as “sad”, but says there’s a better sense of community now – “like the old days” – than there was during the height of the Celtic Tiger. He tries to do his bit by serving on the board of the Ireland-U.S. Council, an organisation that has cultivated business relationships between Ireland and the US since Kennedy’s visit in 1963.

There’s little that’s sad about Ó Brádaigh’s own situation. Happy with his new side-venture and the day job in Morgan Stanley, he still clearly gets a kick out of what he does.

“I’ll talk to some guy who is worth significantly more money than me, give him advice and he’ll take my advice. And that makes me feel good, that I have a billionaire doing what I tell him to do with his money. That’s kinda cool.”

I’ll talk to some guy who is worth significantly more money than me, give him advice and he’ll take my advice. And that makes me feel good, that I have a billionaire doing what I tell him to do with his money

Friday interview

Name: Cillian O'Bradaigh

Age:45

Position:Executive director, Morgan Stanley

Family:Married to Nastassja, with twin sons Seán and Oscar (10)

Something you might expect: He has only ever spoken Irish to his parents

Something that might surprise:His wife is an actress