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financial experience. For Boshart this was hugely embarrassing, but he insisted they'd be

good hires.

"Okay, so pick one," he was told. Boshart picked Pettit.

Pettit refused the job out of loyalty to his friend, but Tucker insisted that he accept it, so

he did. Six months later Pettit had shown he was an invaluable hire, and Tucker got

another interview. He showed up for this grilling wearing the same suit he'd bought for

the first session. This time the tag was cut off. This time, he was hired.

What was it that Boshart had seen in the tall, earnest, brown-eyed Pettit and in the goodlooking, fair-haired Tucker? "I just felt that they were extraordinarily high -quality people

who had an element that Wall Street clearly lacked, which was a sense of how to build a

team."

Given his military background, the demands of a grueling Wall Street day weren't much

of a challenge for Pettit. Of all the Ponderosa Boys, he was the quickest to ascend

Lehman's ranks. In 1979 he was made head of sales in the San Francisco office. He

moved his family to the West Coast without hesitation. But they weren't there for long.

By 1980 he was head of all sales in LCPI, and he made partner of Lehman Brothers Kuhn

Loeb (LBKL) in 1981.

"I think because he was quite old when he started, he was in more of a hurry than the rest

to succeed," says Lara Pettit, 40, his eldest daughter. "So he got in earliest and he worked

through lunch."

Unlike Fuld, Pettit had a charisma that people still recall with awe. He was an excellent-and often inspirational--impromptu speaker. Unlike Pete Peterson, Lehman's CEO, Pettit

offered humble, practical advice. He often liked to remind colleagues of how John F.

Kennedy had once bumped into a janitor cleaning the floors of NASA's vast corridors.

"What are you doing?" JFK had asked the janitor. "Mr. President, I am helping put a man

on the moon," the janitor had replied. Pettit said he wanted every person at Lehman to

have that janitor's spirit. Every man and woman had his or her part in the firm's business.

Bond salesman Craig Schiffer recalls that "Chris had an ability that I have never seen"-people often walked away inspired even after he had ripped into them. "He was

particularly hard on me, kind of like a tough dad. He would beat the living crap out of

you. Scream at you. But he's the only person I've ever met who could do that to you, and

you didn't walk out of the room going, 'What an asshole!' You'd walk out of the room and

think, ' I've gotta do a better job for that guy!' "

Pettit was blunt and honest with people, and revered for it. He also had a knack for

spotting talent. Jim Vinci was an accountant for what was then Coopers & Lybrand and

had been hired to update Lehman's antiquated operational systems. He had a reputation

for being mean, pig-headed, and tough--and knew it. He had never met Pettit when he

was summoned to his office in the mid -1980s, when Pettit was Fuld's number two.

"I was six months into my tenure there," Vinci recalls. "He calls me into his office, and

he says, 'Jim? I've heard you' re the biggest asshole we've ever hired.'

"I was thinking, 'Okay, this is going to be a good meeting. . . . I think I can probably go

back to my old job . . .' And then Pettit says, ' But I've also heard that you' re one of the

brightest people we 've ever hired.' He added, 'I came across your sort in the military.

And so what I' m going to do is save you. You' re going to come work for me. '" Vinci

quickly morphed into Pettit's chief of staff.

Pettit remained untainted--or so it seemed for many years--by his swelling paycheck. His

four children all attended the same public school he had attended in Huntington. The

moment he got home he'd rush to help them with their homework.

"We would have all the kids coming over--their parents would drive them over--because

he was the only one who could figure out our chemistry homework," says Lara. "And

he'd be doing this at eight o'clock at night, right after he got back from