'Dark Genius of Wall Street'

By JOSEPH NOCERA
Published: July 31, 2005

AND here we've thought, all these many years, that Jay Gould, the fabled robber baron of the mid- to late-1800's, was, well, a robber baron. A stock manipulator. A briber of judges and politicians. A man who would short the stocks of his own railroads -- and then run them back up again once he'd inflicted enough pain on his rivals. A magician at turning bonds into stock, and stock into cash for himself. A Wall Street sharpie the likes of whom have probably never been seen, certainly not in this less flamboyant time -- ''an incarnate fiend of a Machiavelli in his calculations, his schemes and ambushes, his plots and counterplots,'' to quote a 1909 history.