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people think we are the fucker!" He also told people that if he'd been left in his seat, he

could have sorted out the situation; Bart McDade is to blame, he claims, for losing the

firm.

Many Lehman people find it impossible to let go. "Sometimes I wake up and I think for a

second that Lehman's still alive; it's like it was a person," says Craig Schiffer. "For all the

things that went wrong, there was something unique about it, something really strong and

magical."

Months later, there was still rage in the eyes of the men and women at Lehman who felt

they'd been wrongly singled out and shot in the name, not of merely saving the economy,

but, so they believed, saving Goldman Sachs.

"I' m looking at a person who is responsible for this mess," one Lehman senior manager

said. "Switch on your TV and you' ll see Tim Geithner."

Many ex-Lehmanites believe Treasury and the Fed rushed the math that last weekend,

and in Paulson's haste to fix the bigger problems looming he made a massive mistake.

Their marks to market, they claim, were not so overvalued--and as proof, they cite the

increasing suspicion that the Lehman estate was robbed of a good $5 billion in its last-ditch deal with Barclays.

"I think it's more a story of hubris than a tragedy," a former executive committee member

says. "There's a long street of mistakes on Wall Street, and there's a car that's slowly

rolling toward a cliff, and there's this guy who gives the last little push, to make it topple

down. . . . I mean is he the villain? Yes, on one level he is. But the guys who drove it to

the edge are the ones who may deserve most of the blame."

Chapter 21

Closing the Books

Kathy Fuld is a nice person. The trouble is, she thought everyone else on Wall Street was

as nice as she is. They' re not.

--Peter A. Cohen

Whoever said it's lonely at the top never consulted with Kathy Fuld, who quickly found

that it can be lonely at the bottom as well. Her fall from grace and the social ostracism

that followed were swift. After Lehman collapsed and her husband became a pariah (and

a poster boy for the naked avarice of Wall Street), Kathy stopped getting calls from the

wives of other CEOs. At a dinner party with Peter Cohen and his wife, Kathy burst into

tears. "I didn't realize these people weren't actually my friends," she said.

By the end of September, she had announced her intention to sell, at auction, the Fulds '

$20 million art collection. A month later, they sold 12 of their 16 Abstract Expressionist

paintings for $13.5 million.

Months later, she quietly stepped down as vice-chair of the Museum of Modern Art's

illustrious board. "You need a lot of money to get to run the MoMA board," explains an

insider. And Kathy no longer had enough. The Fulds sold their 16-room Park Avenue

apartment for $25.87 million. Like all the other Lehman Brothers wives, Kathy also paid

a price for being married to the firm. She once told Karin Jack that her social duties

meant she did not spend as much time as she would have liked with her twin daughters.

She also confessed that she seldom saw her own family because they did not like Dick.

She was to soon learn that, as one former Lehman wife said, "When your husband leaves

Lehman, you become a ghost."

Her husband, Dick, eventually moved his office to the Time -Life Building at 1271 Sixth

Avenue, where Fortune magazine is located, and where the remaining employees of

Lehman Brothers Holding, Inc. helped direct the bankruptcy proceedings.

In early April 2009, he moved to offices at 780 Third Avenue, where he set up his new

private equity venture, Matrix Advisors. "You can either look forward or look back," he

told friends. After six months of restless sleep, Fuld decided to look forward.

At a party in Greenwich, Connecticut, that summer, Dick Fuld looked deeply tanned and

relaxed, far removed from the winter's guilt and sleepless nights. He was charming and

funny and wanted to talk about his