Early Days at Lehman
Lehman Brothers was looking for a government bond salesman, and the hiring manager was a guy called Fast Eddie. The first time I met him, he was on the trading floor. A Robert Redford clone, Eddie had one phone on each ear while he was talking with three people on the desk. As I sat in the seat next to him, I could not believe how many things he had going on at the same time. In between these conversations, he would look at me and say in rapid fire, “Find me a govie sales guy who covers the top insurance companies, money managers and pension funds.” Then he would go back to his other conversations and in between blurt out, “Make sure he is comfortable with the long end of the curve.” He went back to the phones, then shouted, “Options, he has to know the options market.” Someone whispered in his ear, and he got up and raced into one of the glass offices surrounding the trading floor. I could see him involved in an animated conversation with three other people in the office. When he came back to the desk, he started to say something to me but got interrupted by a phone call. As I waited, he put his hand over the receiver and said, “Thanks for coming in, kid. I’m gonna be a while,” and walked away. I got up to shake his hand and say goodbye, but he did not look up as he left the floor. The whole meeting lasted twenty minutes.
The trading floor was a massive sea of white shirts that stretched as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of guys with phones plastered to their ears stood, shouting bids and offers at a frenetic pace. This was the most intense work environment I had ever seen. There was so much energy in the room you could cut it with a knife. The pace and excitement were immediately attractive to me. You either loved it or hated it—and I loved it. In those days Lehman Brothers was lean, mean and looking to build its trading prowess. It was like an underfed teenager with a giant appetite, as it gobbled up all the talent it could find. I helped the firm build the trading desk through the eighties and mid-nineties under the benevolent tutelage of magnanimous men like Tom Tucker, the former head of fixed income sales, and Lehman Brothers president Chris Petit. In those days, Lehman operated under the modus operandi of “My Word is My Bond.” We completed deals with a handshake or over the phone; no one ever backed out of an agreement or went back on their word. Customers came first and honor was the code. Under Tom and Chris, Lehman created an ethic of trust in an industry that idolized the celluloid indifference of Gordon Gekko. Their example taught me that integrity mattered. Chris Petit and Tom Tucker were childhood friends and created an environment of camaraderie. The C-Suite was called “the Living Room” because Petit wanted employees to feel as comfortable there as they did at home. Little did they know that their own Gordon Gekko was in their midst in the form of future president Joe Gregory. Joe would unseat them both in the years to come and change the foundation of trust and community to one of subterfuge and intrigue. But in 1984, we were all naïve and happy to be where we were. Life was good and the future looked bright.
The Resurrection
Maybe it was because my drinking had grown out of control, and I could no longer hide it. It was beginning to interfere with my day job in a big way. Sometimes in the morning, I was known to have a quick nip—just to take the edge off. It soothed me until the shakes came and I needed more. Or maybe it was because I, drunk out of my mind, had taken on six guys in a bar and woke up in a pool of blood, with broken ribs and black eyes. Even more than that, it could have been that I was married now to my first wife with a six-month-old baby and did not want to become like my father - a dysfunctional abusive parent. At age twenty-six, I found myself in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous “counting days.” There is a saying in AA that, “In order to keep it, you have to give it away.” The belief behind this is if we help others, it helps us too. It is doubtful that I would have made it through on my own. Early in the program I met Bruce, a fellow New Yorker with a heart of gold and seemingly unlimited patience. Bruce had been a cop in one of Brooklyn’s toughest neighborhoods, Bedford Stuyvesant, before becoming a New York City fireman. He embodied the outer and inner strength I admired and helped me develop my own. When I met him, he said, “If you are willing to do the work, I will carry you for ninety days.” He ended up “carrying” me for nearly nine years.
For me, the Twelve Steps were a spiritual awakening. It jogged something in my brain from childhood. They prayed here. They asked a “higher power” to help lift the burden of their lives and find relief from pain. I found myself listening, first with arrogance but gradually with humility. In all my years of searching, this was the only lifeline I had found. These were people who had the same inner demons I had, and somehow they found a way to quiet the voices. My sobriety gave me a new lease on life, a new way to deal with all the rage I carried. Finally, I had come home. The biggest part of AA for me was I could no longer be reckless; I now had to be accountable. The Twelve Steps emphasized moral rightness. They demanded you take a personal inventory to reflect on how you treated others who you wronged and how to make amends. In every meeting, you were called to answer for your behavior. I had followed the model of my beloved grandfather whose code was the Golden Rule. But my drinking had allowed me to do things I wasn’t proud of and ponder things that made me feel ashamed. In these walls, so many others felt the same way. We were strangers tied together by circumstance. By admitting our weakness, we found our strength. It was a world where your success was mine and mine was yours. A code of the Steps was to learn how to live “one day at a time.” This meant that every day was both a challenge and an opportunity for transformation. It required me to develop a new spiritual and moral structure and gave me a foundation of personal responsibility that colored my view of the world. I had no idea how much I would need that in the life-changing events that lay ahead.
History in the Making
Short of a man-made or natural disaster, nothing can stop the city that never sleeps or its international center of commerce. However, on September 11, 2001, two decades after I entered the industry, that moment came. New York and Wall Street were closed for business. It took nothing less than a world-changing event to make that happen. For the first time in our careers, my colleagues and I had time to think—about life, death and the meaning of our existence.
As the planes hit the Towers, I was busy closing deals and making millions along with the rest of the financial industry. It took me several minutes to register what was happening when Monika, my life and business partner (and co-author of this book), called to tell me the city was under attack. It would be only a matter of hours before I learned that my dear friend, Franciscan priest and Chaplain of the Fire Department of New York City, Mychal Judge, had perished that morning. Father Mike and I had sat for many years in Twelve Step meetings at St. Francis of Assisi on West 31 Street admitting our powerlessness. He had taught me through his example the meaning of humility and service. And now he was gone. Along with his passing, I would discover were dozens of other friends, associates, neighbors and colleagues who perished on that day. It was a once-in-lifetime event none of us could forget.
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