In the real world, it's so much more likely to be "he's a cool guy, we went to the same prep school, why not?" Which renders the same result, but in less of a movie-script dramatic way.
Wrong. It's extremely common, but it's also subtle.
It's best if the target doesn't know what you have on him. That's the beauty of business school. You were out drinking with him 25 times and he doesn't remember half of them, so you don't have to mention "the dirt". (Also: you shouldn't. Explicit extortion will put you in jail.) He has no memory of what specific episodes you have on him, and there might not even be any. He just knows that if you say, "introduce me to <Y>" or "invite me to your winter party" that he has no choice.
(I was there in that capstone project where you had a bug in the excel spreadsheet and we just pasted value over it!)
There are apartments selling for $100 million. Who lives in those? How did they get there? What are their stories? The answers are not what middle-class Americans think (hard work! pure luck!) but you don't exactly have to become one of them (almost impossible) to learn how they do things. They don't even bother to hide it anymore.
After about 5 years, you'll realize that most of the "effortless" rises are cases of people who learn something damning about a powerful person and leverage it into all kinds of social currencies.
Stupid extortion: "Give me $10 million or I'll reveal <X>." That's far too direct and really dumb. You go to jail for that.
Smarter (if still evil) extortion: "Hi. You may not remember me but I was with you on January 24, 2007 in New York when <X>. Those were fun times, no? I heard that a lot of venture capitalists attend your winter party in Aspen. I'd like to attend, because I'm looking to start my own company." That's how 90+ percent of the most successful people got where they are.
In a lot of ways, frats and university clubs do similar things, formally and informally. When people do embarrassing, dangerous, illegal, or immature things together, it bonds them in interesting and tight ways.
One can imagine that if it was 1999 and you had been one of GWB's close Yale or MBA buddies who had blown a snowstorm of cocaine together, and you called him up for a little favor or consideration, that such a thing might come through rather quickly and discreetly.
[citation needed]
No doubt this is true in an abstract sense, but is there any recorded data on this (reports of scandals, etc) or is this just speculation.