By
John HomansPublished 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,' Chron.com -
Houston.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
The New York Times, 'Firm That Was Hit Hard on 9/11 Grows Anew,'
www.nytimes.com/2004/09/10/business/10cantor.ht... By RIVA D. ATLAS
is a much different company today than it was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. It is spinning off what was once its core business of brokering trades in government bonds among banks, and is diversifying into new areas, including asset management and investment banking.
said William Doyle, whose son, Joseph, was a Cantor employee who died in the attack. "But Howard has really gone to bat for these families. He hasn't forgotten them." Allan Horwitz, whose 24-year-old son, Aaron, a Cantor employee, died in the attack,
Some of the growth is from Cantor's stock trading division, which was less disrupted than many of Cantor's businesses after the terrorist attack, said Philip Marber, president of the unit, because it had a number of crucial employees at other locations.
Cantor's subsidiary, eSpeed, an electronic trading company that is listed as a public company, has had its ups and downs since 9/11. The company, which turned profitable at the end of 2001, said recently that it expected this year's earnings to be lower than it had previously projected because of a price war. The price of eSpeed's shares, which rose from a low of $5 a share after the terrorist attack to a high of $27.60 last November, have fallen 59 percent this year, to $9.58 a share. "There are competitive issues eSpeed faces," Mr. Lutnick, who is also chief executive of eSpeed, said. But the company "has certainly faced more difficult situations," he said.
CNN AMERICAN MORNING WITH PAULA ZAHN
Cantor Fitzgerald's Fighting Spirit
Aired January 24, 2003 - 09:21 ET
a new book. It is called "On Top of the World," and the author, Tom Barbash, is Howard Lutnick's longtime friend.
in order to try to rebuild a company to help these families. And it became so surreal that I thought it would be important for Tom to be with us and to -- and to make sure we documented it, because sooner later, it would all become a blur and (UNINTELLIGIBLE) remember.
ZAHN: And you pretty much were with Howard around the clock?
TOM BARBASH, AUTHOR, "ON TOP OF THE WORLD": Yes. Well, yes. And I think the idea in the beginning was that maybe if there was a book to be written, it would be a memorial, that it was not at all likely that Cantor Fitzgerald would survive after what happened September 11. But then what evolved ended up being a story that took -- well, Howard was occupied, literally, 20-22 hours a day. And you slept, what is that, four or five hours a day usually?
LUTNICK: Yes, a couple of hours I get to sleep.
You had promised the families to take care of them, but then you had to cut off their paychecks to save your company. Now, at the same time, you had suffered the personal loss of your own brother, so you certainly could understand their pain.
LUTNICK: Well, we had offered 25 percent of our profits and 10 years of healthcare, but the -- I guess some people in the media and the media sort of captured that. Some people said 25 percent of a company that's been decimated, well maybe that's just words, that's not really going to mean anything. And they -- and they doubted that we could actually bring it back together. And then people got angry because they thought this is a sort of a CEO sort of thing.
But we knew that what we needed to do was take care of our friend's families. I mean these were our friends who were killed
LUTNICK: I think we are -- we are one. I mean the 650 families and the -- and those who survived at Cantor Fitzgerald are one and the same together. Tom's been at a variety of the meetings that we've had together.
ZAHN: You witnessed the hostility firsthand...
BARBASH: I did. I did.
ZAHN: ... directed at Howard.
BARBASH: I did.
ZAHN: How bad did it get?
BARBASH: Well, it was an incredible thing to see somebody that you'd gone to college with and you in another context and to see Howard and see the company go through what they went through and then -- and then to go through that. I think what people kept saying is why isn't Cantor Fitzgerald doing more? But then the question that you had to ask at that point, what was Cantor Fitzgerald? If the buildings come down and 700 people are dead, then what is Cantor Fitzgerald at that point?
And Howard had pledged to do things. I knew, because I was with Howard, that he was working around the clock to do things for the families. But there was every reason to doubt his word at that point, because it wasn't clear how the company could possibly do, you know, what he said -- that Howard said he would do for the families at that point. And I think there's a lot of anger at people who survived. I think that was another complication is that it was the people who survived were people who are on vacation, who are late, who are sick, who...
ZAHN: Who dropping their kid off at school like Howard.
or me and thousands of other New York City dwellers, the day began with the most fundamental exercise of our democracy: voting. It was primary day for candidates hoping to become the 108th mayor in the city's history. My assignment for CNN was to cover the leading Democrat, Mark Green, and the leading Republican, Michael Bloomberg, going to the polls.
