The Devil's Casino_ Friendship, Betrayal - Vicky Ward [115]
boardrooms and offices of the executive floor and onto the trading floor and show how in
the end, as Heraclitus said, character really is destiny.
Because of all the lawsuits facing the Lehman board and executive committee over the
bankruptcy, as well as the dispute between Barclays and Lehman, some people were
forced to speak off the record.
Others are on the record in places, off in others; but if someone spoke off the record, I
always verified what they said by speaking to at least one more source. Thus, if I narrate
a conversation that took place in an office, on the trading floor, or on the golf course near
Dick Fuld's house in Sun Valley, it may be that I was told about the conversation by
someone who was there, listening in. The speakers may have verified this, but don't want
attribution.
Where I've taken facts already reported, they are, when possible, endnoted and sourced.
But again, I tried to check every reported fact with the players themselves. (I had working
with me a team of five outstanding fact-checkers.) Sometimes there was a conflict, and
here I did what every journalist does: I went with my gut in the telling of the narrative but
noted the conflict on the page, in the text.
When something as momentous as the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history occurs, people
are inevitably not going to agree. And I expect that Joe Gregory will not agree with the
general perception of him as characterized in this book: as the Lehman president who did
not manage risk, and was preoccupied with things other than running the business. As
even his friends admitted, he does not see himself the way others do.
However, the way Gregory is characterized is the way that every person--of the hundreds
who were interviewed about him--saw him. The only exception might be Lehman's
general counsel, Tom Russo. But even Russo grew uncomfortable on the subject, saying:
"Well, I guess I have heard all the things you are talking about, but I didn't see Joe that
way myself."
As a reporter, one's duty is to put all the pieces together--this means as many voices and
as many perspectives as possible--until you arrive at a kind of kaleidoscopic picture that
gives you a sense of the accurate whole.
There are only two major sources I regret not interviewing for this book. I wish I could
have interviewed Chris Pettit. In fact, I wish I had known Chris Pettit. His story, his
charisma, his noble character, his terrible ending--all of it is a tragedy worthy of a
powerful motion picture. But even the best reporter cannot interview the dead--although,
as you will have read in the Epilogue, I had a go!
The other is Joe Gregory.
The second half of this book is really Gregory's story, inasmuch as the first half belongs
to Pettit.
I talked to Gregory only briefly on the phone--he picked up by mistake when his assistant
was out--and in that conversation he insisted he was never fired, and he blamed short
sellers for what had happened to Lehman. He told me he wanted to talk for the book but
that one of his lawyers was stopping him.
Yet I already had the real, undiluted Joe Gregory. I had his diaries: his own words, not
written for a journalist, but for himself. So, I felt this was better than interviewing
Gregory himself. I knew from my interviews with all the people who had worked with
him that he was seen as a smooth interviewee full of self-justification, and that he would
never see himself the way anyone else did. That is the story of his life as told by those
who worked with him and arguably his downfall.
His lawyers knew I had his journals. Apparently, albeit astonishingly, he does not have a
copy of them and could not remember what he had written. I was asked to send him a
copy. Like any good journalist, I did not do so. I did not want to give him any chance to
deduce the source from whom I'd obtained them (though I did wonder why he had not
kept a copy electronically, since they were written in 2003).
Over the phone I told an associate of his lawyer, Steven Witzel,