Former top performing broker becomes head cop on state stock beat

Gary Abraham has seen a dead man sit up while assisting a coroner.

He has experienced further excitement as a stock broker, teacher of stock brokers and manager of stock brokers.

And he has found satisfaction counseling financial clients during market sell-offs.

A high-performing broker, Abraham ended his first career as the top executive for Morgan Stanley in Las Vegas.

Recently, he started a new career as securities administrator -- the head cop -- on the stock brokerage beat in Nevada.

He works for Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller and is responsible for regulating stock brokers, investment advisers and broker-dealer firms. He also pursues criminal cases involving the sale of unregistered securities, securities sales by unregistered brokers and various kinds of fraud.

Question: What did you do after serving as a Navy corpsman?

Answer: I wanted to be a doctor. So while I was going to college, I worked for a path- ologist at Glendale (Calif.) Memorial Hospital. I'd come in and section the bodies, take the organs and put them on the table.

Question: How many autopsies did you help with?

Answer: 250.

Question: Would the doctor show how he was determining the cause of death?

Answer: He would show me black material from a dead man's lung. He would say, "Now see, this fellow here smoked himself to death." One night he called me to (prepare a body of a man who died during brain surgery). I'm sure this would play right into "The Munsters" if they put this on TV.

I reach in to pull the brain out, and this man sits up. I called the doctor. I said, "He's moving. He's moving."

He was laughing on the phone. I didn't think it was at all funny.

Question: But he was dead?

Answer: Yes. That was just a nervous reaction (of the body). The operation had happened just an hour earlier.

Question: You probably lived through some nightmares as a stock broker when the market collapsed.

Answer: (In the early 1980s), the interest rate for prime went from 11 percent to 22 percent.

They had 18 percent (certificates of deposit).

I had a client who put half a million dollars in corporate bonds (yielding 7.5 percent) before all this happened. Those bonds within 12 months were worth one-half what he paid for them.

How do you know that's going to happen? I was sick, absolutely sick.

I will never forget that couple. They were so kind to me in the face of that tragedy. He hung in there and (the bond prices) all came back.

Question: So that goes back to your basic rules of investing.

Answer: Yes, stick with quality (stocks and bonds). Diversification (among stocks and bonds). Long-term horizons for performance. If everybody follows those principles from when they invest at 18 until they retire, they'll be very happy people.

Question: You quit college after getting married. What did you do then?

Answer: I worked for the securities industry for 10 years in Los Angeles, and, when I left, I was operations manager for the largest securities brokerage on the West Coast, Mitchum, Jones & Templeton. I had 250 employees, seventeen departments, and I was the youngest operations manager on the Street, as they referred to it.

Paine Webber bought Mitchum Jones, and they invited me to move to New York and be their operations manager nationally, but it wasn't a move that we wanted to make.

Question: What did you do?

Answer: I agreed to manage a brokerage called Harvey Associates that was part of Alexander Dawson Inc. in Las Vegas.

The man that established Alexander Dawson was one of the founders of Avon. You've heard of the Alexander Dawson building on Flamingo Road (and Spencer Street). There's a house across the street that's underground. Girard Henderson, the chairman of Alexander Dawson, built that home.

Mr. Henderson sold Harvey Associates, and I became Mr. Henderson's personal secretary.

My responsibilities were managing his portfolio, handling his investments, managing his human resources, writing his personnel policy manuals.

In February 1976, I went to work (as a stock broker) for the downtown office of Paine Webber. After just a few years I was in the top 10 percent in the region of new customer accounts, value of customer accounts and revenues. I spent hours in the office and saw very little of my family. Those were rough years.

Question: What are the keys to being a successful stock broker?

Answer: Tenacity and resilience. You cannot give up. You have to hang in there, pick up the phone, make presentations and establish relationships. If you were to contact 100 new people, you might open one new account. I would say that the top 20 percent of the financial advisers in the industry generate 80 percent of the revenues.

Question: What about your career?

Answer: I went to work for Dean Witter. I became a member of the Chairman's Club within two years. The Chairman's Club is the top 5 percent of financial advisers in the firm.

Question: Tell me about your friend at Dean Witter: Chris Gardner, the subject of the 2006 movie, "The Pursuit of Happyness." (Actor Will Smith plays Gardner, who was homeless when he got a chance to be a stock broker at Dean Witter.)

Answer: I was on the permanent teaching staff of Morgan Stanley. Chris Gardner was a member of one of (my) classes, and we became friends. Generally, when he called me it was associated with some downturn and he was looking for some inspiration.

Nobody knew, of course, at Morgan Stanley or Dean Witter, that he was (homeless). I would have liked to think that his associates would have held out their hand and tried to help him. His pride didn't let him (tell us about the problems). He later opened a business in Chicago with $1 billion in sales.

Question: What happened next in your career?

Answer: In January 1985, I became manager of the Dean Witter office. Just five years later, we were No. 1 (for Las Vegas) in terms of revenues, the value of client assets that we managed and the number of new account holders.

Question: What happened after that?

Answer: We moved to Howard Hughes Parkway into larger space, and I hired more financial advisers. Our revenues went from $1 million a year in 1995 to $25 million a year when I retired (in 2004).

My first two children, I'm sorry to say, I didn't spend much time with.

I decided this was a good time to spend some time with my daughter and son in high school.