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Finally, way past the finish line, the blinkers came off Dick Fuld. Lehman may have gone

down, but he was still a Lehman man; and for Lehman men, the kind of men he believed

in, it was never too late to do the "right thing." It would not have occurred to him to sue

the estate for money. That Gregory would . . . well, finally, Fuld saw the great weakness,

the insecurity, and the greed in the man he'd made his number two. He still took

Gregory's calls, but he told close friends that he was furious.

When it no longer mattered, Fuld had finally become "the Gorilla."

Epilogue

I kept the photographs of my family in my bathroom, so first thing in the morning and

last thing at night I just looked at them. It was the only way to keep going: to remind

oneself of what really matters.

--Tom Russo

At its finest, Lehman Brothers was the best of Dick Fuld and Chris Pettit. In the old days,

with Fuld battling upstairs, fighting with Peter Cohen, and with Pettit running the troops,

the duo was unstoppable. Fuld knew that he'd hear what was going on with the troops

from Pettit, who really knew everybody and everything.

Back then, the spoils of money or the trappings of ego hadn't yet begun to rot away

Lehman's "one firm" culture. The Ponderosa Boys were all friends with large and

generous hearts and jaunty Go -Get-' Em! dispositions. They slept only with their wives.

They were honest.

Someone close to Steve Carlson says Lehman became a culture of liars right after the

Mexican crisis. "It was then that basically the job became about 'What are we going to

spin today to hide our real difficulties? ' That's when things started to slide."

Not long after, Carlson left.

In 2006 Lara Pettit was fired from Lehman, she believed, without cause. She was seven

months pregnant and had just bought a new house, and she was shocked. Eventually she

worked out a severance package with the firm. She asked Joe Gregory if he had known

anything about her termination.

"Absolutely not," he had replied. Months later Lara discovered Gregory had known.

Martha Dillman decided to leave Maine and come back to work as a research consultant

for the New York-based company Credit Sites. She and Lara were still speaking, but they

were not as friendly as they once were.

Mary Anne Pettit moved on with her life; she no longer gets the monthly check she had

received as part of Chris Pettit's pension. She is now just another of 64,000 creditors who

have filed claims with the Lehman estate, many of whom have, ironically, found the

protracted bankruptcy process to be something of a Lehman family reunion.

Because it was easier to file in groups, Craig Schiffer recently found himself reminiscing

with Peter Cohen. Peter Solomon spoke to Dick Fuld and found himself in the same

group. The ending of Lehman brought them all back together, to memories of the good

times--and the bad. They remembered that for a while they 'd lived through something

they really thought was unique and worth fighting for.

"You had to live it to get it," Schiffer says, "but for a while Lehman just wasn't like

anywhere else on the Street."

Only a few of the big names were missing. Lew Glucksman passed away in 2003. At his

memorial service in New York, Jim Boshart told how Glucksman had once looked at a

dark-haired newcomer whose only role it seemed was to videotape the Monday morning

meeting.

"What's your name?" Glucksman had asked the young man.

"Dick Fuld," the man had replied.

"Well, Dick Fuld," said Glucksman, "either you can start working directly for me--or

there's the door." That's how it had all begun.

Steve Lessing is thriving at Barclays, where that famous Rolodex is now proving as

useful to Bob Diamond as it had been to Dick Fuld.

Skip McGee helped Barclays kick ass in his first year. Barclays made profits of PS3

billion in its first quarter of 2009, an 8 percent increase.

George Walker held NeubergerBerman steady. By the end of 2009, assets under

management had risen from $158