By Cristina Pastor

Bringing down an obnoxious Wall Street hedge fund honcho is the motivation behind the unusual partnership between a down-on-his-luck journalist and an immigrant shoeshine boy. Greg, the glossy journalist, conspires with Gil, the shoe cleaner from Brazil, to rake the dirt on fund manager Jeff Steed 1) to avenge the firing of Gil’s janitor-friend by Steed, and 2) to get a scoop so that Greg can keep his job.

Eventually, the pair uncover a tapestry of insider trading and blackmail—with Russian strippers and masturbating execs thrown in as accessories.

That may be the paper-thin plot behind Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy, but Doug Stumpf’s thriller—using the first-person narrative—incorporates the immigrant looking-glass. This is Wall Street from the point of view of the small people: the cleaners, the mailroom guys, the secretaries, the nannies. Through Gil, we glimpse how New York’s immigrant class views the moguls and the poobahs with a conflicted sense of awe and contempt. They gossip about the cheap tippers and reward with almost canine-like devotion the nice, friendly executives who call them by their first names, giving them a feeling of self-worth.

Except for the immigrant perspective, there are no new insights about Wall Street from this first novel that you haven’t gleaned from Wall Street, the movie, (with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas) and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s all there: the greed, the cheating, the fornicating, the stepping-on-toes-to-get-to-the-top ethics, including the journalist character who chronicles an iconic downfall.

The book is a slow read but races to suspense toward Chapter 59. Stumpf, a deputy editor at Vanity Fair, answers a few questions about the book, below:

NYPress: This is probably one of those rare Wall Street novels where the main protagonist is one of the little guys. What inspired it?

STUMPF: The story of how the journalist and the shoeshine boy met in Greg’s intro is pretty true-to-life about me and “Flamenguista.” I met an actual shoeshine boy 11 years ago, and he subsequently got a job at a big Manhattan financial firm. This inspired the novel.

How long did you immerse yourself in Gil’s world?
I interviewed many people, but also went on the trading floor with “Flamenguista.” The book took three years to write.

How much of the story is fiction?
The story and characters are all made up, but many of the little anecdotes that make up the novel actually happened, with the details changed for the novel. Gil’s voice is painstakingly based on Flamenguista’s musical English.