Wall Street. (Flickr)

Roose managed to slip into Kappa Beta Phi's annual 'induction ceremony,' which is held to welcome the secret society's newest members into the ranks of extraordinarily wealthy people.

The event is held once a year in the New York St. Regis Hotel, and is strictly exclusive: apparently, Kappa Beta Phi makes sure "what happens at the St. Regis stays in the St. Regis." For 80 years, no outsider had ever made it in - until Kevin Roose.

According to Roose, "enough wealth and power was concentrated in the St. Regis that night that if you had dropped a bomb on the roof, global finance as we know it might have ceased to exist."

The powerful financiers gathered at the St. Regis to enjoy lamb, foie gras, and expensive alcohol while enacting skit parodies about Wall St. troubles and even poking fun at the financial crisis.

Highlights: 

• Executive financiers drank expensive alcohol, feasted on lamb, and threw tiny French desserts at Kappa Beta Phi's newest members who were dressed in gold-laced skirts and wigs.
• A parody of "I Believe" from The Book of Mormon: "I believe God has a plan for all of us. I believe my plan involves a seven-figure bonus." 
• A parody of ABBA's "Dancing Queen," rewritten as "Bailout King" to poke fun at the financial crisis.

Talk about bad press.

Roose's firsthand account of the secret society is only icing on top of what seems to be no end of negative public opinion towards Wall Street in the past few years.

The 2008 financial crisis, putting millions into debt and unemployment, has been traced back to the ill-conceived plans of Wall St. executives. Taxpayers gave billions of dollars to bail these financial barons out of bankruptcy, only to find Wall St. bigwigs giving each other million dollar bonuses while the rest of the country was in turmoil. The list goes on.

To some extent, it seems that people are catching on to what's going on in the economic big leagues. 

At the very least, Occupy Wall Street led a campaign attacking the '1%'s iron grip on the nation's wealth for the sake of the exploited '99%'. Leonardo DiCaprio's "The Wolf of Wall Street" offered some degree of social criticism on Wall Street's culture of cutthroat greed. 

Despite the public debate, the kings of Wall Street aren't likely to change anytime soon, if the motto of Kappa Beta Phi is any indicator of the motivations and philosophies America's wealthiest live by. 

"Dum vivamus edimus et biberimus," shouted the financial executives at the St. Regis in January 2012. 

"While we live, we eat and drink!"

Read more in Kevin Russo's book, Young Money

Contact Executive Producer Benjamin Li here: