The Devil's Casino by Vicky Ward Read Free Book Online

years. I ‘m worried it will change me if I do it for longer than that.”
    The Lehman partners in the early 1980s regularly ate lavish lunches, washed down with expensive wine and dirty martinis. There was a barber in-house, free cigars (for which the annual bill ran as high as $30,000), and fresh raspberries at the ready. “Lehman’s dining room, and its chef, was as fine as any restaurant in the world,” recalls Newmark. “It was hard to get a reservation. You had to come with a client. But if you were a partner, you could go up and eat every day. But this wasn’t just ‘Come up and grab a sandwich. ‘ This was a three-course, four-course [meal], the finest food, no expense spared, with cigars, with alcohol, with wine, and then you had Robert Lehman’s art collection up there, with Picassos and Rembrandts, and all that other good stuff. It was a fascinating place.”
    Back then the traders in LCPI never really partook of that lifestyle. They wore belts; the bankers wore suspenders. When Pettit first arrived, he found the traders reading
Playboy
magazine at their desks during lunch, and as soon as he was in a position to impose his will and taste, he put an end to that. In this way, he was like Fuld, who had strict moral principles and believed in the sanctity of family values.
    What Pettit also loved about LCPI in those early years was that his little unit always fought above its weight. Its profits were disproportionally high, and this was in large part due to the camaraderie of the people who worked there. This was what all of the Ponderosa Boys were proudest of.
    Mary Anne says, “What they loved about Lehman was its insistence on
team, team, team
. ”
    She recalls that during one LCPI Christmas dinner in the late 1980s, “Chris was recapping the year’s growth and success, and he looked around the room and said, ‘Now look at this! Every single person here is with their original spouse. That is why we are successful: because our word is our honor. We succeed in business because people can trust us.’”
    He was seen as messianic, says Kim Sullivan, a secretary on the sales side. “I can remember when I first started working on the trading floor, and he brought me out one day—it was like my second day—and said, ‘ You’ re going to see a lot of things go on here. You ‘re going to see a lot of people make lots and lots of money. Just remember one thing. One day you’ ll be there, too. But remember how you started in your career. And don’t ever lose sight of who you are and where you came from. Because that is easy to do when we all make lots of money.’ ”
    Sullivan recalls the day she found a trader in hysterical tears. “His daughter had been brought to the emergency room in Long Island, and the hospital used the wrong aspirator for her, and the poor thing went into a convulsion, and went into a coma. He had just been notified that he had used up all his health insurance. He was new to Wall Street; he had not made any money yet.”
    “I told him, ‘ You’ve got to go talk to Chris.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know Chris.’ I said, ‘Well, you’ re going to know him in about five minutes.’”
    Sullivan quickly briefed Pettit on the situation and recalls that he said, “Sure, I know him.” “Chris knew everybody’s name on the trading floor. He was amazing! And he brought this guy into his office. They talked for about a half an hour, and when the guy came out, he was all smiles. Chris had given him a bridge loan so he could get a house in New Jersey, so the child could be moved to a better hospital facility. The house was like a block away from the hospital, and Pettit made sure that Lehman took care of everything. There was no limit on our health coverage, because we were a self-insured company.
    “The guy said to me, ‘Wow, this is really an incredible place! They actually care about you!’ ”
    Pettit’s ethos so infused and inspired LCPI that a corporate video about the