www.usatoday.com/money/covers/2001-11-12-bcovmo...
By Noelle Knox, USA TODAY
His father, a history professor, died after a nurse accidentally gave him an overdose of chemotherapy. Lutnick, who had just started Haverford College in Haverford, Pa., felt abandoned by his relatives, who offered little support.
But as the families waited for details of how Lutnick would take care of them, some criticized him, especially for his decision to take the victims off the payroll on Sept. 15, while rescuers still searched the rubble.
Lutnick calls the portrayal of his actions unfair. "I said, 'We would pay everyone on the 15th, and anyone who is not alive on the 30th, we can't pay.' And I said, 'I don't think anybody is alive.' "
Lutnick also set up a foundation for the families, including the cafeteria workers and other contractors on Cantor's floors. The foundation has started sending out checks for $1,500 per child to the families.
Cantor's pledge to support the families has inspired the surviving staff."The bar has been set, and we're headed toward it, and we're going to go past it," says Craig Cummings, a trader who is alive because he had a golf game with clients on Sept. 11. "The families are now all behind us, and I can't stress enough how, as a team, the firm is moving forward."
Amid all the devastation, some good luck helped speed Cantor's recovery.
Six of eSpeed's top technology executives, including Claus, had planned to go on an annual, 1-day fishing trip that day. The trip was canceled because of bad conditions on the Atlantic — but not until 8 a.m. All six were on their way to the office when the planes hit the towers, killing President Frederick Varacchi and 125 other eSpeed employees.
The six executives headed straight to the firm's New Jersey location and started rerouting the trading network. They worked around the clock, napping on the floor. One slept with his head propped on an upside-down coffee cup.
When the bond markets reopened Sept. 13, eSpeed was up and running.
'Climbing back fast and hard'Last week, [Nov. 12, 2001] investors were trading $150 billion worth of bonds a day through Cantor, back above pre-attack levels.
Bond trading had been shifting to electronic trading even before the attacks, and Lutnick says it is "unlikely" he will replace his bond brokers. "We are not going to try to get back to who we were," he says. "We are going to take the cards that have been dealt to us. Take the assets we still have, which are incredible, and just play a different way."
Lutnick, however, must hire scores of people to restaff his stock-trading operations. In the past 8 weeks, he has hired about 50 people, including Tony Manzo, the veteran head of Nasdaq trading at Prudential.
"While we are surely not where we were," Lutnick says, "we are definitely climbing back fast and hard."
One client, Scott Geller, director of stock trading at the investment firm Cramer Rosenthal & McGlynn, says he had to wait until Sept. 25 to place his first order with Cantor because so many of its employees were out attending funerals.
Last month, he had to close unprofitable offices in Paris and Frankfurt, Germany.
Howard Lutnick's Second Life New York Magazine no date www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cp... By Meryl Gordon
Jennifer Gardner, who reveled with her husband, Doug, another Haverford classmate and a partner at Lutnick's firm, Cantor Fitzgerald,
75 Cantor Fitzgerald technical-support-staff members. These people are alive only by luck; their workday at 1 World Trade Center started at 9 a.m.,
They are furiously fighting off competitors who would feed on the firm's misfortune.
"Two things allow me to communicate with my employees," he says. "I was there, and I lost my brother."
By the 13th, he'd become the accidental survivor who was crying on Connie Chung about how it felt to lose so many people and to run for his life. By the 15th, he was the Dickensian villain who'd cut off the widow's mite, the paychecks of the dead, to assure the bankers of his sangfroid. By October 10, he had announced a munificent and detailed financial plan for the families.
"I needed my bankers to know that I was in control," Lutnick says. "That I wasn't sentimental and that I was no less motivated or driven to make my business survive."
The luckiest people in New York? The twenty Cantor Fitzgerald staff members let go on Monday, September 10, most of whom have loyally returned to the firm.
Richard Breeden, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman who serves on the board of eSpeed,
"The business of bond traders is people fighting for one hundredth of a penny," Breeden says.
Cantor Fitzgerald's chaotic, box-filled temporary headquarters UBS Warburg Building
Practically twice a day for weeks, the building has been evacuated because of bomb scares phoned in by some apparent wacko targeting Warburg.
Dave Kravette, a Lutnick friend since the seventh grade
Stuart Fraser, the easygoing vice-chairman of the firm
Elise Sand, Elise, who lost her brother in the attack, Mourning his brother-in-law, Fraser
Cantor Fitzgerald was left with 1,450 employees, including vital players in the firm's large London office,
Lutnick closed offices in Paris and Frankfurt, and transferred these staff members to London.
To the awe of Wall Street and government regulators, Cantor was able to get the company's U.S. eSpeed operations -- a crucial link in the Treasury markets -- up and running two days after the attack.
a series of "miracles" -- a golf outing with clients; a corporate fishing trip, canceled at 8 a.m., that prevented the disappointed anglers from getting to their desks by 9 --
Lauren Manning and Harry Waizer, two employees who were severely burned by a fireball of jet fuel that hit the lobby of the Trade Center,
eSpeed -- the publicly traded division of the privately held Cantor -- is actually expected to be profitable in the fourth quarter. That day, eSpeed stock soars more than 20 percent, almost reaching its pre-September 11 level,
He schmoozes on the phone with a pleased major investor, then takes a call from an Orthodox Jewish family distraught over their son's missing remains. "I know, I know, I'm just like you,"
He is still waiting for DNA tests to tell him that his brother, Gary, is really gone.
His fiercely loyal secretary, Maryann Burns,
He is referring to a dead colleague, Beth Logler
he recruited his buddy Doug Gardner, who left his father's real-estate firm to join Cantor Fitzgerald.
Jennifer Gardner, who talks to Lutnick and his wife almost daily,
"I miss Doug's partners. I could get through this so much better if they were here."
reviewing, one by one, the $45 million in bonuses going out to families of dead employees.
In 1978, his senior year of high school, Jane Lutnick died of lymphoma. Less than a year later, His father, was dead.
his college roommate Michael Kaminer,
Lutnick talks about feeling abandoned by his uncles and aunts and grandparents after the death of his parents. "The way I describe it, you're either in or you're out," he says. "What I learned in 1979, all my relatives -- they stepped out. We learned to live without all of them. All of them. It was just the three of us. Gary and Edie and me."
Lutnick to become the protégé of Bernard Gerald Cantor
Stuart Fraser, Iris Cantor's nephew, this was a family feud in which he sided with his friend, Lutnick,
His mother and Iris are sisters but no longer speak. The distressed Fraser says that after September 11, "Iris didn't even call to find out if I was alive."
Only one in six opted to purchase company-subsidized supplemental life insurance of up to $1 million.
on the wall of a 1998 Westchester golf tournament, with a photo of Howard and Gary and Stuart Fraser and Doug Gardner.
his secretary, Maryann Burns, the world's most punctual woman, drove to the Bayside train station and couldn't find a space to park. She ran for her train and missed it by a minute.
Stuart Fraser had cut back on his work week earlier in the year, coming in to the World Trade Center only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Those mornings, he always joined his brother-in-law Eric Sand at 7:30 a.m. at his desk on the 105th floor for a bagel and coffee. But an Australian investor, flying in to discuss a personal project involving canoe camps, had asked to switch their September 10 meeting to September 11, and to do it out of the office. So Fraser was at home in Armonk that morning, waiting to go to his appointment.
Dave Kravette was at his desk on the 105th floor at 7:30 a.m.,
Howard and Allison were perched on child-size chairs in their son's classroom when both their cell phones rang and then died. Howard was summoned by a school staff member to the lobby, where he learned from his driver, Maio, that a plane had hit the Trade Center.
"Like a combination of a jet engine in my ear, and metallic, like the Titanic hitting, an eerie sound," Lutnick says
Cantor lawyer Stephen Merkel had survived. Lutnick made his way to Merkel's Greenwich Village home, where other Cantor employees showed up, Lutnick was fairly certain that Gary, who had called Edie in the final moments to say good-bye, hadn't made it, nor had Doug Gardner. Instead of heading directly home to be with his own family, Lutnick went to see Jennifer Gardner and her two young children at their Upper West Side home. "He was covered with concrete and dust," she says. "We were speechless. He kept saying, 'You are fine, you will be fine, I love you.' Doug and Howard loved each other like brothers. I'm sure Howard is the loneliest man in the world because of what happened. He had lost nearly 700 people.
A Tale Of Renewal: For the 9/11 survivors of Cantor Fitzgerald, working to rebuild their firm has been the key to healing 9/11 FIVE YEARS LATER By Tom Barbash
www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/06_...
It just might be that the Americans most able to move on from the events of September 11 are the men and women of Cantor Fitzgerald who lived through them.
Heidi Olson, now chief administrative officer for equities, had left Cantor when the firm downsized just before the attacks; she came back to work the next day. Chris Crosby and Jim Johnson are both members of the technology team at eSpeed, Cantor's electronic bond-trading system. Crosby was setting out on a fishing trip when the Twin Towers were hit. Johnson was working in Cantor's London office.
Harry Waizer, Cantor's tax specialist, was out to dinner recently with his wife, Karen, and someone he hadn't met before. "It came out that I'd been in the building on 9/11, and I got the look," Waizer tells me the next day in his office.
Waizer was in an elevator high in the North Tower when the plane struck. Flames ignited inside the car and he was badly burned on his body and face and in his throat.
Stephen Merkel was on a different elevator on the lobby level when the plane hit. Merkel was physically unharmed
Frank Walczak Walczak, a life-long surfer, had taken the day off on September 11 to catch the swells kicked up by Hurricane Erin. Sitting on his board in the water off Sandy Hook, just south of the city in New Jersey, Walczak saw smoke pouring out of the Trade Center. He began calling the office and the homes of his colleagues. No one else on the foreign exchange desk where he worked survived. Walczak had to reinvent himself as an equities trader. He now works in Cantor's Shrewsbury (N.J.) office,
"I had a lot of guilt with this. I still get the feeling that people look at me and think, 'Why weren't you there?'
Cantor Partner David Kravette, a childhood friend of Lutnick and one of only two Cantor survivors who had been in the office that morning and left before the plane hit.
In the firm's post 9/11 realignment Kravette was forced, like Walczak, to switch jobs and become an equities trader after a dozen years trading bonds.
Joe Noviello, chief product architect at eSpeed.
Noviello, Crosby, Matt Claus, and two others survived because they were preparing to take a fishing trip. When they heard about the attacks, they convened at Cantor's disaster recovery site in Rochelle Park, N.J. (built after the 1993 World Trade Center attack), and began the Herculean task of restoring Cantor's bond trading system.
LaChanze, who won the Tony Award this year [2006] for best actress,
sane[?] and restored her happiness. "I can't imagine my life with Calvin now because I'm married to someone else," she said. "But I wish he was here. I miss him."
LaChanze was in her ninth month of pregnancy on September 11. She was one of thirty-eight wives of Cantor Fitzgerald victims who were pregnant. I visited her in the hospital shortly after the attacks. She told me then she could never imagine remarrying.
The December after the attacks, Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, who'd heard about LaChanze's loss, called her and told her she needed to get out of the house and start working. Ensler knew LaChanze only through her work but gave her a role reading the play for a three-week run at an Off-Broadway theater near Times Square. It changed everything, LaChanze says.
"I really was spiraling down," she says. "I was an unemployed actress with two children, a husband who had died. My prospects were slim. I got that job, and I saw that I could be productive. That I had things I could bring to people."
Two years ago she met the artist Derek Fordjour when she commissioned one of his paintings as a gift for an attorney who had handled her post 9/11 finances pro bono. They married in the summer of 2005.
LaChanze says she's tiring of September 11 memorials.
I don't want to go back there over and over again," she says.
Phil Marber, the popular head of Cantor Fitzgerald Equities. "For a long time I couldn't really figure out why I wasn't there with everybody else.
"I used to get very sad and reflective when I was alone in the car or alone in the dark. As time went on, it happened less, and I just stopped one day. Just this past weekend, I was at a party, and I met one of the firefighters. He told me how he'd been at the scene that day and then we told each other stories with much more color and granularity and clarity than we would normally tell them with. Because we'd both lived through it. I could see everything as we talked, and so that makes me know that it's all still very present in me. It just doesn't come out in front of everyone."
While he values time with his wife and children, he says he now equally cherishes his days at the firm with the other Cantor survivors.
"We stood at hell's doors, and we held the line. It doesn't matter what you throw at us. [Our people] will hold their line, and I'll hold mine. It's much more personal now."
'The man who had everything' By Edward Cone 6-2-02
radio.weblogs.com/0107946/stories/2004/09/10/th...
A former colleague of mine at Forbes, who wrote a scathing article about Cantor a few years ago, appeared on "20/20" this fall to question Howard's integrity. Before he went on the air he called me to ask if I thought Howard was faking his tears.
This about a man fresh from his brother's funeral, who stood up to eulogize his best friend, Doug, just five days after the attack. I shared the lectern with him in front of 1,100 mourners at Calvin's funeral,
Cantor Fitzgerald 'Our People'
http://www.cantor.co.uk/people/management.html#fraser
Howard Lutnick Mr. Lutnick is the recipient of numerous awards in recognition of his philanthropic efforts. He received the Department of the Navy's Distinguished Public Service Award, the highest honor granted by the Navy to nonmilitary personnel.
...he is a frequently sought speaker and commentator, and has addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and testified before committees of both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Philip Marber
CEO and President of Equity Capital Markets
Phil Marber has been instrumental to the expansion and success of Cantor's Institutional Sales and Trading business over the last fourteen years. Under his direction, the equities division has grown to become one of the largest third market sales forces on Wall Street, offering an impressive array of sales and trading in NYSE, OTC and international equities, portfolio trading, investment banking and electronic equity order routing.
Mr. Marber's leadership was a significant part of Cantor Fitzgerald's reconstruction after the events of September 11, 2001. Following the events, the firm made a strategic decision to rebuild its U.S. franchise on the strength of Mr. Marber's Equities Sales and Trading business, which was headquartered in New York but maintained several satellite offices across large U.S. cities. Today the Institutional Equities Sales and Trading division is flourishing, and continues to rank at the top of listed U.S. Securities brokers for cross ratios, execution and client-service.
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Executive Managing Director
General Counsel
Secretary and Director
General Counsel
Secretary and Director
Stephen Merkel is Executive Managing Director; General Counsel and Secretary of Cantor Fitzgerald L.P. He joined Cantor Fitzgerald in 1993 and oversees all legal, compliance, risk management, credit and internal audit functions for the firm. He is a Director of eSpeed and has been the Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of eSpeed since June 1999. Mr. Merkel also serves as a Director and Secretary of the Cantor Exchange (SM).
Prior to joining Cantor Fitzgerald, Mr. Merkel was Vice President and Assistant General Counsel at Goldman Sachs & Co., dedicated to the J. Aron Division. He began his career at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.
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Chief Financial Officer
As Chief Financial Officer of Cantor, Douglas R. Barnard is responsible for all financial and accounting operations. In this role, Mr. Barnard oversees financial reporting and budgeting, globally.
A seasoned veteran with over 20 years experience in corporate accounting, Mr. Barnard joined from Dover Management LLC, an investment management firm, where he served as Chief Administrative Officer. Prior to his tenure with Dover, Mr. Barnard held the position of Managing Director and Controller of the Americas Region at Deutsche Bank AG, where he oversaw all regional financial control during a period of rapid expansion, including the integration of Bankers Trust Corporation. Previously, Mr. Barnard was a Vice President and Investment Banking Controller at Goldman Sachs & Co., joining the bank from Deloitte Haskins & Sells.
John Manning
President at Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P.
NEW YORK, Feb. 6, 2003
9/11 Book Follows Hard-Hit Firm Cantor Fitzgerald Lost 658 Workers In Terror Attack
By Bootie Cosgrove-Mather
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/06/print/main53...
"My life had become surreal," said Lutnick, who is 41 and has a gravelly voice and slicked-back hair. "I just wanted help in trying to remember. ... I wanted someone who was at least one step removed."
Lutnick and Barbash spoke at Cantor's temporary headquarters in midtown, where Lutnick's office decor includes fragments of Rodin sculptures salvaged from the trade center ruins, relics of the collection amassed by the firm's founder, Bernie Cantor.
Initially, the book was envisioned as a memorial, said Barbash, who teaches writing at Stanford University and San Francisco State University and has published a novel, "The Last Good Chance." He and Lutnick were schoolmates at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.
The new book, subtitled "Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal," tells how the firm survived. Present-tense narrative passages alternate with first-person accounts from Lutnick and others who were spared by quirks of fate - they were late to work, they were on vacation, they were in the lobby clearing a visitor through security.
"Three hundred twenty-five people could not, days after the attack, pay the salaries of 658 people who died, when it was unlikely ... that the 325 people would have had a business that covered their own pay."
Sheila Martello, whose husband, James, was an equity sales trader for Cantor, said Lutnick has been "nothing but helpful."
ESpeed, Cantor's publicly traded subsidiary, which was trading at $8.69 a share on Sept. 10, 2001, was trading at more than $15 this week.
Cantor has given $90 million in profits to the Sept. 11 victims' families so far.
9/11 Book Follows Hard-Hit Firm Cantor Fitzgerald Lost 658 Workers In Terror Attack
By Bootie Cosgrove-Mather
www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/06/print/main53...
"My life had become surreal," said Lutnick, who is 41 and has a gravelly voice and slicked-back hair. "I just wanted help in trying to remember. ... I wanted someone who was at least one step removed."
Lutnick and Barbash spoke at Cantor's temporary headquarters in midtown, where Lutnick's office decor includes fragments of Rodin sculptures salvaged from the trade center ruins, relics of the collection amassed by the firm's founder, Bernie Cantor.
Initially, the book was envisioned as a memorial, said Barbash, who teaches writing at Stanford University and San Francisco State University and has published a novel, "The Last Good Chance." He and Lutnick were schoolmates at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.
The new book, subtitled "Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal," tells how the firm survived. Present-tense narrative passages alternate with first-person accounts from Lutnick and others who were spared by quirks of fate - they were late to work, they were on vacation, they were in the lobby clearing a visitor through security.
"Three hundred twenty-five people could not, days after the attack, pay the salaries of 658 people who died, when it was unlikely ... that the 325 people would have had a business that covered their own pay."
Sheila Martello, whose husband, James, was an equity sales trader for Cantor, said Lutnick has been "nothing but helpful."
ESpeed, Cantor's publicly traded subsidiary, which was trading at $8.69 a share on Sept. 10, 2001, was trading at more than $15 this week.
Cantor has given $90 million in profits to the Sept. 11 victims' families so far.
Tears of a CEO
nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/n_8273
Grieving friend or calculating villain? The view of Howard Lutnick in Tom Barbash's new book, On top of the World, is still murky. But one thing is clear—he's a businessman.
By John Homans
Published Jan 27, 2003
a new mission. Lutnick vowed to stay in business for the sake of “my 700 families.”
that he’d made September 15 the date of his lost employees’ final paycheck because Cantor couldn’t afford to pay their salaries. A man who could do such a thing—before some of the families had even accepted that their loved ones were dead
In Tom Barbash’s logy, teary new book, On Top of the World (it began as an as-told-to, before Lutnick, citing time constraints, decided last September to remove his byline), Lutnick pleads guilty to calculation. “Always, we were thinking, Which way do we go now?” he says. “Where do we move? Like chess . . .
It was in a Cantor partner’s West Village townhouse on the night of September 11 that Lutnick decided that the best way to help the victims’ families was to quickly bring his business back to health—to do good by doing well.
Simultaneously, he was trying to convince bank regulators that his company could survive the loss of its employees, and that he could still lead it. “Essentially they said, Howard, I understand bad things have happened to you, but this is a business conversation, and . . . you’re screwed.” Wall Street was back to playing Wall Street games. Lutnick acquired a nickname: “the grim weeper.” And the CEO of one of Cantor’s British competitors crowed in an e-mail about the opportunity to “put one up their bottom.”
Before September 11, what was most notable about Lutnick was his business acumen—and smash-mouth tactics—and a materialism that can verge on self-parody.
Barbash spent months with Lutnick and the Cantor Fitzgerald survivors, but he spent the time as a friend—he was on the Haverford tennis team with Lutnick—as much as a reporter. His book often feels like a Cantor Fitzgerald scrapbook, a wake between covers, a jumble of first-person accounts and present-tense scene-setting, interspersed with Lutnick’s italicized reminiscences. There are moving stories here, but Barbash is writing for his subjects, not his readers. Lutnick, who began as an author and character, ends up being neither fully.
http://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/WTC/CantorFitzgerald.html
The face of Eddie Schunk is plastered on fliers all over Manhattan. When his wife, Lisa, walked into a Cantor family-support center set up in the grand ballroom of New York's Plaza Hotel, she was overwhelmed by a wall of photographs of missing employees.
No one does more volume than Cantor: It controls as much as 75 percent of the government-securities market.
One of the most valuable services Cantor provided to big institutional clients like banks and insurance companies was the ability to trade anonymously, selling off or buying millions of dollars worth of bonds without alarming others in the market.
The company's backup system in Rochelle Park, N.J., kicked in almost immediately after the attack and would have continued to hum if bond trading had not been suspended. Two days later, Cantor's electronic-broker system was up and running an hour before the bond market cranked up again, thanks to the all-night efforts of the company's surviving technology whizzes.
Now, despite unspeakable grief for their friends and relatives, and the logistical nightmare of rebuilding the offices in other locations, Cantor has moved ahead aggressively. New hires have been brought in. Former employees have returned to help out.
Cantor capped its life-insurance payments at $100,000 -- for some families, far less than the expected payment of twice an employee's salary.
For Kravette, a 40-year-old father of two, it was his pregnant secretary and a visitor without identification.
Instead of sending his secretary, Kravette caught an elevator down from the 105th floor to meet clients in the lobby.
"I was trying to be the nice guy," Kravette said.
He emerged in the lobby, slightly aggravated at the inconvenience.
"Which one of you knuckleheads came without an ID?" Kravette recalled asking, just as a tremendous explosion shook the six-story lobby.
"I saw a couple of elevators in free fall; you could hear them whizzing down and as they crashed, there was this huge explosion, like a fireball exploding out of the bank of elevators," Kravette said. "People were engulfed in flames."
He escaped across an overpass to the West Side Highway. Three Cantor employees in the lobby suffered severe burns but will survive. His pregnant secretary is missing.
Others suffocated in thick black smoke in the skyscraper's stairwell as they tried to make it to the roof. Several made phone calls or were in the midst of conference calls, managing to tell clients and family members they were trapped.
Others, like Jack Lanzer, 30, were on vacation. With their car packed, he and his wife lingered in the city so they could vote in the Sept. 11 mayoral primary.
"The first week I was a mess. Whenever I stop to think about it, tears come to my eyes," said Lanzer, a member of the equities-trading support staff. "Everybody's lost friends up there. I had an uncle up there, and he was getting married next month."
Cantor Fitzgerald was not the only hard-hit firm, but few were as tightly knit. A private partnership, the firm often hired the friends and family of existing employees.
Peter DaPuzzo, co-president of equities said "We have many sons of standing members of the Security Traders Association working for us," he added. "Nepotism makes our industry work because we know that if the father or mother is good, you know the son or daughter is good in this business."
parents like Geraldine Shaw, a receptionist from Princeton, N.J. She lost her 42-year-old son, Jeffrey.
Published Jan 27, 2003
a new mission. Lutnick vowed to stay in business for the sake of “my 700 families.”
that he’d made September 15 the date of his lost employees’ final paycheck because Cantor couldn’t afford to pay their salaries. A man who could do such a thing—before some of the families had even accepted that their loved ones were dead
In Tom Barbash’s logy, teary new book, On Top of the World (it began as an as-told-to, before Lutnick, citing time constraints, decided last September to remove his byline), Lutnick pleads guilty to calculation. “Always, we were thinking, Which way do we go now?” he says. “Where do we move? Like chess . . .
It was in a Cantor partner’s West Village townhouse on the night of September 11 that Lutnick decided that the best way to help the victims’ families was to quickly bring his business back to health—to do good by doing well.
Simultaneously, he was trying to convince bank regulators that his company could survive the loss of its employees, and that he could still lead it. “Essentially they said, Howard, I understand bad things have happened to you, but this is a business conversation, and . . . you’re screwed.” Wall Street was back to playing Wall Street games. Lutnick acquired a nickname: “the grim weeper.” And the CEO of one of Cantor’s British competitors crowed in an e-mail about the opportunity to “put one up their bottom.”
Before September 11, what was most notable about Lutnick was his business acumen—and smash-mouth tactics—and a materialism that can verge on self-parody.
Barbash spent months with Lutnick and the Cantor Fitzgerald survivors, but he spent the time as a friend—he was on the Haverford tennis team with Lutnick—as much as a reporter. His book often feels like a Cantor Fitzgerald scrapbook, a wake between covers, a jumble of first-person accounts and present-tense scene-setting, interspersed with Lutnick’s italicized reminiscences. There are moving stories here, but Barbash is writing for his subjects, not his readers. Lutnick, who began as an author and character, ends up being neither fully.
http://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/WTC/CantorFitzgerald.html
``I saw a couple of elevators in free fall; you could hear them whizzing down and as they crashed, there was this huge explosion, like a fireball exploding out of the bank of elevators,'' Kravette said. ``People were engulfed in flames.''
He escaped across an overpass to the West Side Highway. Three Cantor employees in the lobby suffered severe burns but will survive. His pregnant secretary is missing.
Victimized company tries to get on with business | Assault on America | Chron.com - Houston
www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/terror/fro...
The face of Eddie Schunk is plastered on fliers all over Manhattan. When his wife, Lisa, walked into a Cantor family-support center set up in the grand ballroom of New York's Plaza Hotel, she was overwhelmed by a wall of photographs of missing employees.
"I'm not giving up on my husband," she said. "But I know wherever he is, he's with everybody else at Cantor."
No one does more volume than Cantor: It controls as much as 75 percent of the government-securities market.
One of the most valuable services Cantor provided to big institutional clients like banks and insurance companies was the ability to trade anonymously, selling off or buying millions of dollars worth of bonds without alarming others in the market.
The company's backup system in Rochelle Park, N.J., kicked in almost immediately after the attack and would have continued to hum if bond trading had not been suspended. Two days later, Cantor's electronic-broker system was up and running an hour before the bond market cranked up again, thanks to the all-night efforts of the company's surviving technology whizzes.
Now, despite unspeakable grief for their friends and relatives, and the logistical nightmare of rebuilding the offices in other locations, Cantor has moved ahead aggressively. New hires have been brought in. Former employees have returned to help out.
Cantor capped its life-insurance payments at $100,000 -- for some families, far less than the expected payment of twice an employee's salary.
For Kravette, a 40-year-old father of two, it was his pregnant secretary and a visitor without identification.
Instead of sending his secretary, Kravette caught an elevator down from the 105th floor to meet clients in the lobby.
"I was trying to be the nice guy," Kravette said.
He emerged in the lobby, slightly aggravated at the inconvenience.
"Which one of you knuckleheads came without an ID?" Kravette recalled asking, just as a tremendous explosion shook the six-story lobby.
"I saw a couple of elevators in free fall; you could hear them whizzing down and as they crashed, there was this huge explosion, like a fireball exploding out of the bank of elevators," Kravette said. "People were engulfed in flames."
He escaped across an overpass to the West Side Highway. Three Cantor employees in the lobby suffered severe burns but will survive. His pregnant secretary is missing.
Others suffocated in thick black smoke in the skyscraper's stairwell as they tried to make it to the roof. Several made phone calls or were in the midst of conference calls, managing to tell clients and family members they were trapped.
Others, like Jack Lanzer, 30, were on vacation. With their car packed, he and his wife lingered in the city so they could vote in the Sept. 11 mayoral primary.
"The first week I was a mess. Whenever I stop to think about it, tears come to my eyes," said Lanzer, a member of the equities-trading support staff. "Everybody's lost friends up there. I had an uncle up there, and he was getting married next month."
Cantor Fitzgerald was not the only hard-hit firm, but few were as tightly knit. A private partnership, the firm often hired the friends and family of existing employees.
Peter DaPuzzo, co-president of equities said "We have many sons of standing members of the Security Traders Association working for us," he added. "Nepotism makes our industry work because we know that if the father or mother is good, you know the son or daughter is good in this business."
parents like Geraldine Shaw, a receptionist from Princeton, N.J. She lost her 42-year-old son, Jeffrey.
"We're hoping we'll find some part of him," she said, sobbing, "so we can put closure to this."
Although much is made of the family-like nature of Cantor Fitzgerald, it was, and still is, a hard-nosed business. Nearly 500 people had lost their jobs before Sept. 11, and 300 more were about to be axed, made obsolete by the success of their electronic bond-trading network, DaPuzzo said.
The reliance on that technology is a key reason Cantor survive. September 10, 2004
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