The Fraud and Drug Binges That Helped Create a Billion-Dollar Shoe Company

At 6 a.m. on June 20, 2000, police and federal agents in riot gear swarmed into shoe designer Steve Madden’s apartment on Mercer Street in New York with a warrant for his arrest.

Madden, then in his early 40s, had been implicated in the firm Stratton Oakmont’s “pump and dump” financial scandal, which will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. “When they asked, I was happy to flip stocks by buying and selling shares on the day of a company’s [initial public offering] and make a quick twenty to forty grand that I could invest in the business,” Madden writes in his forthcoming memoir The Cobbler: How I Disrupted an Industry, Fell From Grace, & Came Back Stronger Than Ever (Radius Book Group, $27; Oct. 13), which he wrote with Jodi Lipper.