The Devil's Casino_ Friendship, Betrayal - Vicky Ward [16]
with a text book, figuring it out." He rarely missed a game played by any of his children.
"I remember him running to catch the last quarter, his tie flying behind him--he was late
because he'd been caught in traffic on the way home from the office," says Mary Anne.
Once he arrived, everyone knew he was there because he shouted and cheered louder
than any other parent.
On weekends he hung out with his family and with the Tuckers, the Lessings, and
sometimes the Gregorys. Occasionally the Fulds, Dick and his beautiful blonde wife
Kathy, came out from their apartment in the city. "Be on your best behavior, because my
boss is coming," he'd say to the children, who remembered liking Dick and Kathy Fuld.
"She was so pretty," says Lara.
Dick took photographs of them all sitting in the Pettits' backyard with the children and
their pets: two golden retrievers and two cats.
The romance of Dick and Kathy Fuld was by now part of Lehman lore. Kathleen Bailey,
a statuesque blonde, the youngest of eight Catholic siblings, had been hired in the 1970s
to work on the sales desk. Fuld had not wanted to hire her. "She's too pretty--she' ll
distract someone and marry them and will be no use to the firm," he had said.
He was partly right. "We all pretended not to notice that when Dick traveled for work
Kathy would be going, too, but no one was fooled," recalls Paul Newmark. They got
married on September 24, 1978, the day after Fuld was made partner. Kathy converted to
Judaism for her husband, and the couple had three children, Jacqueline and Chrissie,
twins, and Richie. To the amusement of the Lehman staff, once they were married Dick
called his wife "Fuld."
Pettit's simple lifestyle was a dramatic contrast to that of most of his Lehman peers, the
majority of whom in the early 1980s were on LBKL's banking side. They were men with
last names like Gleacher, Altman, Rubin, Solomon, and Schwarzman. They were famous
for their brains, their smooth talk, and their tough negotiating skills; but most of all they
were guys who'd made money--lots of it (although they believed there was much more to
be made, and in many cases, they were right). They had multiple houses, large domestic
staffs, and as they got richer, many of them traded in the first wife for a younger one.
Pettit took all this in and told Mary Anne, "I only want to do this for 10 years. I 'm
worried it will change me if I do it for longer than that."
The Lehman partners in the early 1980s regularly ate lavish lunches, washed down with
expensive wine and dirty martinis. There was a barber in-house, free cigars (for which the
annual bill ran as high as $30,000), and fresh raspberries at the ready. "Lehman's dining
room, and its chef, was as fine as any restaurant in the world," recalls Newmark. "It was
hard to get a reservation. You had to come with a client. But if you were a partner, you
could go up and eat every day. But this wasn't just 'Come up and grab a sandwich. ' This
was a three-course, four-course [meal], the finest food, no expense spared, with cigars,
with alcohol, with wine, and then you had Robert Lehman's art collection up there, with
Picassos and Rembrandts, and all that other good stuff. It was a fascinating place."
Back then the traders in LCPI never really partook of that lifestyle. They wore belts; the
bankers wore suspenders. When Pettit first arrived, he found the traders reading Playboy
magazine at their desks during lunch, and as soon as he was in a position to impose his
will and taste, he put an end to that. In this way, he was like Fuld, who had strict moral
principles and believed in the sanctity of family values.
What Pettit also loved about LCPI in those early years was that his little unit always
fought above its weight. Its profits were disproportionally high, and this was in large part
due to the camaraderie of the people who worked there. This was what all of the
Ponderosa Boys were proudest of.
Mary Anne says, "What they loved about Lehman was its insistence on team,