Marvin McIntyre, Washington’s invisible ‘broker king,’ finds outlet as an author

The Three Billion Dollar Man has something to say.

Always has.

(Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) - Marvin McIntyre’s book, “Inside Out,” is a political thriller.

When Marvin H. McIntyre III came back from Vietnam, tooling around in a convertible Corvette he won in a poker game, he tried to say it in song. He drove down to Nashville to become a star. 

The radio DJs played ­anti-establishment anthems, screeds against the war, songs about love-ins and peace-ins and hippie picnics. But McIntyre was having none of that. He penned patriotic melodies, with titles such as “In the Face of a Child” and “A Soldier’s Story.” And he flopped.

The Corvette is long gone. It has been replaced by the sleek car-service sedans that collect McIntyre each weekday morning at his Potomac home and squire him to his downtown Washington brokerage office. There, he invests $3 billion for an astounding array of wealthy clients that has included best-selling authors and nearly 100 professional athletes, such as basketball stars Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing and Joakim Noah, and tennis legends Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith.

McIntyre’s friend and client Kitty Kelley, the celebrity biographer, calls him “Wizard.” Business types have called him the “Broker King.”

Yet in the back seat of those comfy sedans, a convenience that he’s enjoyed for the past three decades but is bashful about discussing, he’s still working through those same creative urges that drove him to Nashville. Scribbling in longhand on legal pads, he conjures thrillers set in the darker recesses of the financial and regulatory worlds, the latest of which, a page turner called “Inside Out,” came out in late January.

McIntyre embodies a kind of Washington archetype. In a town preternaturally attuned to the men and women who occupy a single building on Capitol Hill and another on Pennsylvania Avenue, he represents a sort of durable power impervious to the vagaries of election cycles. Inside all those shapeless downtown office buildings are masters of various universes, business powerhouses who make millions of dollars, discreetly control industries and move markets but hardly draw any notice.

“You can be a rock star in this industry and be unknown here except to your family and friends,” McIntyre says one afternoon in the conference room of his tastefully appointed suite of Pennsylvania Avenue offices, a short walk from the White House.

McIntyre, a ruddy 69-year-old with an informal manner and a master pitchman’s quick, rascally wit, springs from a family with Washington bona fides to spare. His grandfather Marvin H. McIntyre, a onetime newspaperman who did a stint as The Washington Post’s city editor in the early 1900s, served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal secretary. The Navy named a World War II attack transport ship after him. McIntyre’s father, later an IBM executive, used to splash around in the White House pool.

As a young man, McIntyre thought it might be fun to go by his middle name, Hunter, but opted for his stodgier full name because he thought it would stand out more. He followed his father’s footsteps to the Citadel, a “brutal” place he despised but has come to appreciate now as a member of its business school advisory board. He became a first lieutenant in the 1st Infantry Division and ran night patrols in Vietnam, but he figures he never managed to hit anyone with the shots he fired. “My main goal was to hide,” he cracks.