T A B L E__T A L K Is widening income disparity the real economic crisis we're facing? Weigh in on rich and poor in Table Talk's Business and Personal Finance area   R E C E N T L Y My guilty secret By Heather Chaplin Some people buy porn; I like to buy make-up -- in private (11/20/98) Halloween's hollow spree By Heather Chaplin How the season of candy-eating kiddies has become monstrously lucrative (11/06/98) The greatest gambling hall on earth By Heather Chaplin A view of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (10/23/98) The geology of investing By Dave Zgodzinski What investors can learn from sedimentary rock (10/16/98) Hedging their butts By Heather Chaplin While the world's mega-players bail out a wrecked hedge fund, one befuddled reporter tries to figure out just what these arcane vehicles actually are (10/09/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Money feature archives		The departure of the last of the titans from San Francisco's biggest investment bank was marked by a disastrous frat party that time forgot. BY KEVIN KELLEHER | For three decades, San Francisco quietly toiled to establish itself as a corporate financial center that one day might actually give Wall Street a run for its money. But just as quietly, the whole thing fell apart recently -- even as its long-sought goal was finally coming into sight -- when three titans of the West Coast finance industry all decided to cash in their chips. The central figure in all of this was Thom Weisel, one of the deans of Silicon Valley finance. Weisel, a champion skier and devoted cyclist, had used his athlete's cunning and perseverance to build nearly from scratch the biggest securities house west of the Hudson River. His firm, Montgomery Securities, was the most aggressive, the fastest-growing, and the biggest of the cluster of companies that put San Francisco on the financial map. Along with Hambrecht & Quist and Robertson Stephens, Weisel's firm dug up the capital to finance Silicon Valley's manic growth. And when big banks came shopping for investment banks, it was Weisel's that boasted the biggest price tag -- BankAmerica bought it for $1.2 billion in July 1997 -- and Montgomery was a prize jewel when earlier this year NationsBank gobbled up BankAmerica. Two days after this year's annual Montgomery Securities Growth Conference in September, Weisel suddenly quit. It was a quiet but not entirely noble end, coming amid reports that Hugh McColl, Weisel's new boss in North Carolina, didn't like his way of running an investment bank and didn't like his hardscrabble style, either. Weisel left with a little more dignity intact than ex-BofA chief David Coulter, who had a more public tussle with McColl as he departed the scene. Weisel's exit means that within nine months, the three biggest investment banks outside the Eastern corridor have all lost the leaders who had built them. In January, Bill Hambrecht left Hambrecht & Quist, and this summer, Sandy Robertson left Robertson Stephens. All three men were the victims of their respective success. All three lost control of their company to more powerful interests. More than the others, though, Weisel's resignation marked the end of an era for West Coast finance. While the tech giants and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley are still raising as much capital as ever, they're increasingly turning to East Coast firms and lamenting the loss of a West Coast culture that helped nurture not just the Silicon Valley boom, but what many in the financial world consider an imminent end to the seven-year bull run that has made so many equity millionaires. I attended Weisel's last investment conference in September, and in retrospect, it proved a symbolic end to his reign as a mogul. N E X T+P A G E | A strange frat party featuring Huey Lewis