DANA Giacchetto parties with Cameron Diaz, vacations with Alanis Morissette, dines regularly with Matt Damon and Helena Christensen. Courteney Cox invites him to family get-togethers.
Leonardo DiCaprio crashes at his SoHo apartment when he’s in New York. Mike Ovitz calls him ‘my life adviser.” His frequent loft parties are crammed wall-to-wall with the cream of the A-list.
Yet, you’ve never heard of him. You’ve never glimpsed him in the gossip columns. Why? Because this unassuming 36-year-old is a suit. A money manager. The all-important, invisible middle man – with a difference.
Last week, Giacchetto signed Tim Roth, Martin Scorsese, Chris Kattan and Robert Downey Jr., bringing the numbers of his exclusive celebrity clientele to 400 – and the amount under his control to more than $400 million.
‘That was a pretty typical week,” says Giacchetto nonchalantly, turning away from scanning the market on a wafer-thin laptop which, apart from an abstract sculpture by ultra-hip SoHo artist Karen Davie, is the desk’s sole occupant.
One glance around his minimalist downtown office, with its casual ambience and groovy, contemporary artwork – a Jon Imber nude, abstracts by Richard Serra and Claes Oldenburg – is enough to tell you why this slender, bespectacled money man, dressed in a denim shirt and casual black pants, appeals to the stellar set.
Obviously, young Hollywood hotshots and the rock ‘n’ roll crowd feel more comfortable with someone well-versed in the dude-speak of pop culture – his drawl is peppered with words like ‘cool” and ‘amazing” – who loves live music and throws fabulous parties.
As one client of his boutique firm, the Cassandra Group, says, only half-jokingly: if Giacchetto’s not handling your money, your social life suffers.
I put this to Giacchetto, and he answers with a self-satisfied grin.
‘I like to introduce a lot of people to each other – writers to directors, artists to collectors, actors to each other,” he says. ‘It’s cool.”
But, he adds seriously: ‘There’s no socializing when the market’s open – I’m managing their money and that’s it.
‘Only after that do I go to dinner with clients, visit movie sets, go to see bands, hang out in recording studios . . . The more you’re involved in anyone’s life at a personal level, the better it helps you make investment decisions well because you can see where they are in their life.”
Giacchetto’s links to the entertainment industry can be traced to his late teen years in Boston.
He sang and played keyboards for struggling indie bands like Breakfast in Bed and Waterworld at night, while managing client portfolios by day at the ultra-conservative Boston Safe Deposit & Trust. His clients at first included straight-up professionals, but he soon started seeking out those in the arts and music.
Following the stock market crash of 1987 – Giacchetto got out in time – he moved to New York, founded his own firm and discovered a way to pursue both his financial and showbiz interests.
‘I found there were lots of creative people who weren’t really being taken care of by the big institutions,” he says.
‘An actor would go in and say, ‘I’ve just made my first million’ and the traditional firms would give them the same investment advice as they would a lawyer who was bringing in a regular paycheck.
‘I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to create a bank that would empower the creative community and cater specifically to them.’ Everyone thought I was crazy.”
He’s proved the naysayers wrong: Since its inception in 1988, the Cassandra Group has made money every year save one.
Despite his flamboyant social life, Giacchetto is a finance whiz with an instinctive flare for reading the stock market.
Courteney Cox says he has her complete trust.
‘Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing well for me,” she says from L.A,, where she’s filming ‘The Shrink Is In” with fiance David Arquette. ‘Every time everyone’s panicking about the stock market going down, I just say, ‘Go, Dana.’ ”
She continues: ‘I heard about Dana a long time ago through my agent, but I always had a put-it-under-the-mattress approach to money. But I kept hearing about him, how good he was, and I changed my mind.”
Cox is not the party type, so her social dealings with Giacchetto are a little tamer. ‘He comes over to my house and gives lessons on stock brokering,” she says. ‘My whole family comes over and he entertains them – they’re all fascinated by that sort of thing.
‘A lot of numbers make me nervous, but Dana really cares about helping me understand how it works. I’m sure I’m not one of his biggest clients, but it’s not about how much money you give him.”
Indeed, Giacchetto doesn’t stipulate an account minimum, hand-picking his clients based on referrals, and many of them only became A-list after they joined.
Rising star Tobey Maguire, for example, came to him with just a few hundred dollars; the band Phish, one of the hottest touring acts in America, had only a couple of thousand to invest.
On the other end of the scale are people like Mike Ovitz, whom Giacchetto is preparing to meet, and hotelier Andre Balasz.
Last year, Giacchetto added a venture capital fund to his business – Cassandra Chase Entertainment Partners – in partnership with two other well-connected movers and shakers: Jeffrey Sachs, former political adviser to ex-New York Govs. Carey and Cuomo, and Samuel Holdsworth, former publisher of Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter.
It was a sensible decision by a sensible man. Despite outward appearances, Giacchetto is remarkably conservative in his business dealings. His investment advice, for example, steers clients toward blue-chip stocks and corporate bonds.
‘Usually creative people take so many risks in all the things they do in their life that when they go to an investment adviser they don’t want to take a lot of risk,” he explains.
I note that his eclectic group of creative friends and clients resembles a modern-day version of the Factory, Andy Warhol’s famous art collective.
‘Yeah, that’s a really cool analogy,” Giacchetto enthuses. ‘Kind of like the financial version of the Factory.” He pauses, before breaking into a wide grin. ‘Only a little less decadent.”