PEOPLE - A Writer’s Gene

A boxer kills a man in the ring, then tries to lead the anonymous life of a security guard, but instead gets swept up in the glamorous world of hedge funds.

A boxer kills a man in the ring, then tries to lead the anonymous life of a security guard, but instead gets swept up in the glamorous world of hedge funds. Before long the former fighter, caught in a conspiracy driven by greed, ends up on a mission to kill Fidel Castro. That’s the plot of The Castro Gene, (Oceanview Publishing; May 2007) penned by Todd Buchholz, 44, former managing partner of New York–based hedge fund Tiger Management and a director of economic policy at the White House from 1989 to 1992. Buchholz says he was inspired to write the novel, his first, while working as a global macro strategist at Tiger in the late 1990s. At the time, the transition to a single European currency hinged on the vision of then–German chancellor Helmut Kohl. “I watched Kohl’s expanding waistline and thought that if he had a heart attack, the spread between German and French bonds would explode. When the stakes are high enough, the incentives for foul play also rocket,” he says. Buchholz insists that the megalomaniacal hedge fund mogul of The Castro Gene in “no way resembles Julian Robertson” of Tiger fame. “He’s a courtly Southern gentleman,” says Buchholz.

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