BLIND SPOTS

An ambitious young entrepreneur tells of his experience with white-collar crime in this memoir.

“Starting from my very first day of work as a useless pissant, I always felt like I was lucky to be given each and every opportunity that came my way,” writes Blotnick at one point in this revealing remembrance. After graduating from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University with poor grades during the depths of the Great Recession of 2007-2009, he landed an internship with a hedge fund, he writes. Later, he was accepted to Columbia University’s esteemed business school. He thrived in financial services, he says, as he loved the fast-paced work, and after a decade, in 2019, he went into business for himself. His firm, Brattle Street Capital, promised massive returns for a small group of investors—mostly Blotnick’s friends and family members. However, when the Covid-19 pandemic turned global markets upside down, his fledgling business struggled. Desperate to fulfill his promises to his investors, the author sought out lines of credit elsewhere—and found it in millions of dollars of fraudulent loans, he says. In this memoir, which was written largely in jail, Blotnick effectively details his rise to wealth, success, and prominence—and shows how easily it all fell apart. As an author, he’s alternately funny and wise, easily shifting between self-deprecating monologues about grades to frank discussions of privilege, money, and an American criminal justice system that’s “custom-built to turn your warm heart cold.” His vivid descriptions of the violence, filth, and neglect that he and others experienced at Rikers Island will evoke sympathy, but he admirably stresses repeatedly that he isn’t writing to make excuses for himself or garner readers’ pity. Instead, he writes to expose his own mistakes.

A raw, self-aware, and earnest remembrance.