BOOK REVIEW : When Art of Deal Is Art of the Scam : RAINMAKER: The Saga of Jeff Beck, Wall Street’s Mad Dog <i> by Anthony Bianco</i> ; Random House $25, 512 pages

To hear Wall Street deal maker Jeff Beck tell it, he earned the nom de guerre of “Mad Dog” as a Green Beret in Vietnam. He was a college football star who played in the Orange Bowl. He stood to inherit a billion-dollar family fortune, but that did not stop him from building a vast business empire of his own. The name of his secret holding company, according to Beck, was Rosebud.

The truth is that Beck was a hype artist who fashioned an identity for himself as a hot young Wall Street mergers-and-acquisition man in an era when fast talk was worth real money.

“The Jeff Beck I thought I knew turned out to be as wholly invented as any Hollywood hero,” writes business reporter Anthony Bianco in “Rainmaker.”

“In the end, though, I would realize as well that this compulsive liar’s excruciating fate was to be a man more honest than the times in which he lived.”

As Bianco reveals in “Rainmaker,” the real Jeff Beck dodged the war in Vietnam by pulling strings to get into the National Guard. His father was a penny-ante numbers man in Pittsburgh, and his relationship with his wealthy stepfather was so poisonous that the old man locked him out of the family apartment.

Young Jeff Beck learned to scam when he was still in prep school, and he made it through business school at Columbia on a daily regimen consisting of “a cigarette, a Coke, a Snickers bar (occasionally eaten in the shower) and a couple of prescription pain pills.”

But Beck showed authentic genius for the smoke-and-mirrors game of mergers and acquisitions: “As generation after generation of small-town American misfits has flocked to Hollywood seeking to reinvent themselves in grander form,” Bianco writes, “so Beck escaped to Wall Street, where he made himself into the business-world equivalent of the Star: the M & A Man.”

Along the way, Beck carefully cultivated an intentionally eccentric persona: “Imagine a Jewish John Belushi wearing a thousand-dollar suit,” Bianco writes, “a tour guide to a carnival funhouse known as Wall Street.” Beck was prone to bay like a hound at moments of triumph. He led war dances around the boardroom. He pulled “Animal House” stunts of a particularly repulsive kind at elegant dinner parties. “Normal is overrated,” he liked to say. “Wackos make the best deal men.”

But the trickster dropped hints, some broad and some subtle, about the fraudulence of his own calculated image-making. Beck’s favorite item of decor was antique duck decoys. “Welcome to the Bates Motel” is how he would greet visitors to his apartment. He played himself in a cameo role in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.” Even using Rosebud as the title of his wholly imaginary business empire was a subtle invitation to dig into his past and reveal the truth.

That’s exactly what Bianco, an experienced business reporter, has accomplished in “Rainmaker.” He signed up to be the co-writer of Beck’s autobiography, but the book project soon fell apart--and Bianco set out on his own to find out what makes Jeffrey run. And he soon discovered that Jeffrey Beck was the most peculiar of con artists.

Unlike the more notorious deal makers of his generation, most of whom appear in the pages of “Rainmaker,” Beck was not a crook: “In an era of lawlessness in high finance,” Bianco insists, “Beck was never so much as accused of a crime.”

And “Rainmaker” is not really an expose; it’s more nearly a morality tale about the excesses of what Bianco characterizes as the “Nouvelle Society” of a second Gilded Age. The fact is that “Rainmaker” belongs to the same genre of American letters that starts with Melville’s “The Confidence Man” and runs through “The Great Gatsby” and “Death of a Salesman.”

Still, Bianco devotes too much time and attention to the plodding details of Beck’s deal making, a decision that speaks well of the author’s expertise and integrity but hardly produces a page-turner.

To the reader for whom a well-executed leveraged buyout is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, “Rainmaker” offers a compelling read. The rest of us will have to content ourselves with the flashes of insight and color that burst like star-shells over the corpse-strewn battlefields of Wall Street that Bianco describes so well.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “The Good Republic” by William Palmer (Viking).