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Lehman, one took golf as seriously as work. Within a handful of years Bhattal managed

to acquire a handicap of eight strokes.)

Nagioff's New York counterpart, the co-head of global equities, Rob Shafir, was similarly

deaf to the importance Fuld attached to attire. In 2004 Shafir arrived at the Mark Hotel on

Madison Avenue in New York for an off-site meeting. Shafir was five minutes late (Fuld

was a stickler for punctuality) and as he looked around the room Shafir realized he was

also the only person dressed business casual (no tie, Oxford shirt, and chinos).

"What?" Shafir asked as he caught everyone 's horrified stares. "It's an off-site."

Fuld looked at him. "Rob: off-site, yes. Out of mind, no."

Karin Jack recalls hating the rigorous hike up Bald Mountain, so one year she arrived

with a fake cast in order to pretend she had broken her leg. She was flummoxed when

Niki Gregory arrived with a real broken leg and said she planned to climb regardless. "So

I brought that stupid cast out there, thinking I could get out of the hike, and then Nikki

shows up in one. I wanted to just die," Jack says.

"The competition between the men basically spread over to us," Jack continues. (She says

she made sure she always arrived with a ready supply of jokes to keep Fuld amused. "I

felt like a performing flea.")

When the women went shopping, there was always a pecking order. Usually, the spouses

of the men holding the most senior positions in the company got to ride in Kathy Fuld's

car. Karin Jack was the closest of all the wives to Kathy. Like Kathy, she had once

worked at Lehman. Like Kathy, she was also blonde, pretty, and stylish. They used to go

antiquing together. Dick liked Karin. Sometimes he would humorously push her from

behind up the final stretch of the hike. Like Kathy, she understood the unwritten rules: If

you were married to a Lehman god, you belonged to Lehman. Dick Fuld used to

acknowledge as much when executives became managing directors. In a welcoming

ceremony where spouses were present, he thanked them for all the "canceled dinners,

weekends, and vacations" they were about to go through and no doubt already had.

"Lehman was his life," Karin Jack says of her husband. "I mean, Brad didn't do one

single thing for 20 years that wasn't Lehman Brothers--not a postcard, nor a Christmas

present, nor a phone call to his family. I did everything, unless it had a Lehman stamp on

it. As a Lehman wife, you raise your kids by yourself. You have your babies by yourself

in the hospital. And then you' re supposed to be happy and pretty and smiling when

there's an event, and you really would like to strangle somebody." Brad Jack agreed with

Karin's sentiments.

One time, she had to manage the move to a new house on her own. She later received a

card and flowers from Teddy Roosevelt (a managing director at Lehman and the greatgrandson of President Theodore Roosevelt). The card said: "I know that all we do is steal

your husband, and I 'm sorry you had to move by yourself."

But that was just what was expected of all the wives. "I knew the culture," she says, "so I

knew he couldn't come home if there was an important meeting. I was in labor with our

daughter and had to lie there without him. . . . But I wouldn't get mad at him--he had

called the entire Hong Kong office in for a meeting. We knew that it would have been

used against him. If you made a personal choice that hurt Lehman, it was over for you."

Brad recalls: "It's true. Karin went into labor. I got into the car but only made it three

miles because the traffic was snarled up. I had to turn around and deal with the Hong

Kong office who had flown in to see me. She was right. And she was very understanding.

I had to be in that meeting."

Karin remembers the time one of her children had a seizure brought on by a high fever

the day she and her husband were scheduled to look at the new McMansion Joe and Niki

Gregory were building on Long Island. "It was just the