The Devil's Casino_ Friendship, Betrayal - Vicky Ward [45]
Lessing, and Gregory were behind Fuld, he knew it was over. That Friday, he called Dan
Pollack, the lawyer all senior Lehman executives used when they needed to fight over
severance. He told Pollack he had to leave Lehman and there'd be a battle on his way out.
"Chris almost ate Dick but we didn't let that happen, because Chris was not a good guy,"
Gregory later wrote in his journals.
Pettit kept the news that he planned to leave to himself for as long as he could. His
daughter, Lara, heard he'd changed job titles and went to seek him out. She found him in
a new office on the 19th floor, which was known as the "dead zone." She was shocked at
how small it was.
In the middle of their conversation, she saw her father weep for the first time. "He threw
something across his office. And he started to cry, and he said, 'I have pride, I have pride.
' It was horrible."
Tom Tucker announced he was leaving Lehman right after Pettit's demotion. He returned
all but $1 million of his 1995 bonus, distributing it among his staff. He had always been
interested in helping underprivileged children, and that's now what he set his sights on.
He was dismayed about what was happening at Lehman.
"I wondered what we'd all become. All that money, that success . . . . Were we that
brilliant, really? I was deeply troubled by what had happened to us."
He went to see Pettit in his office before it was public that Pettit was leaving. Tucker told
his old friend that he couldn't bear to stay with Lehman any longer. He'd seen more than
enough of Wall Street to last him a lifetime. Weeping, he told Pettit he wanted out.
He says Pettit was cold and defiant. "He looked at me crying like I was pathetic." Pettit
said that he wouldn't come to Tucker's farewell party, because he was upset at the way
Tucker--who was close with Mary Anne--had treated him and his kids in regards to his
affair with Dillman. Pettit claimed that Tucker hadn't been a good friend, after all.
They had come so far from their days at Finnegan's, and the night when they made their
pact that money would never change them.
Tucker recalls that the last thing Pettit said to him that day was: "In the end, the guy who
coped best with money was you, wasn't it?"
Two weeks later, at Tucker's farewell party, in the partners' dining room at 200 Vesey
Street, Steve Carlson passed Tucker a note that read, in part: "You are the heart and soul
of Lehman Brothers."
Carlson felt that of all the firm's leaders--Fuld, Pettit, Hill, the Ponderosa Boys--Tucker
was the only one, in the end, who really had meant to "do the right thing."
Pettit kept his word and didn't attend that farewell; neither did Lara. Her father had told
her: "Out of respect for me, you will not go."
Pollack began the negotiations over Pettit's severance package, which he calculated was
worth $40 million. Fuld wasn't eager to see that much money walking out of Lehman. It
took eight months to sort out the mess.
Meanwhile, Shaftel was demoted and moved upstairs to the "dead zone" office next to
Pettit 's. "Bankers never die, they just change titles," he joked several years later. Pettit
told him to hire Pollack, too. They weren't going down without one last fight.
Pettit had time to kill while Pollack fought with Bob Genirs over his severance. He put in
some token hours at the office, and that summer he took Martha and Lara to Africa for a
long vacation.
While in Africa, deep in the jungle, he was startled to receive a call on his cell phone. It
was Jim Vinci, calling from a pay phone outside a ranger's station in the Adirondacks.
Vinci told him he had just been fired.
"That's not supposed to happen," said Pettit. But he was powerless to stop it.
Soon after, he got a call from his sister-in-law, who said that his brother, Rusty, had taken
a turn for the worse. Could Chris come back and see if he could search for some miracle
treatment?
Pettit cut his trip short and flew back to New York. He missed the planned highlight of
the sojourn: He'd never