The Devil's Casino_ Friendship, Betrayal - Vicky Ward [69]
"He stayed on the 10th floor, in the office of PR chief Bill Ahearn after I left," she says.
"I was walking up the West Side Highway and I stopped to speak to the Channel Four
news team on the corner of Vesey Street. They had a zoom lens so what they could see
was horrendous. It was people jumping from the top floors and the crowd below
screaming: ' Don't jump!'
"I was explaining to the crew who I was and where I worked. I didn't know at the time,
but Scott was watching me on TV.
"I was midsentence--that's when the North Tower fell. The ground shook, there was this
rumble, and then a huge plume of smoke that went south. I screamed 'Omigod!' I only
learned later that that 's when Scott rushed for the fire exit. He told me he had to vault
down the stairwell to make it out in time.
"I was still standing at the corner of Vesey Street when I saw him suddenly sprinting past
me--in his Gucci loafers--on the West Side Highway. He stopped to tell me he was fine.
He was on his way to see Dick."
Freidheim knew Fuld would be at Lehman's broker's offices at 48th Street and Park
Avenue.
When Freidhem got there, Fuld was watching the horrible scene unfold on the television.
He pelted Freidheim with questions about personnel, equipment, the buildings-everything and anything he could think of. He was worried sick. Freidheim told him:
"Dick, there's no going back there. We have to find our people. We 've got to rebuild the
company, like now. We have to find our people. We have to start from scratch."
Fuld told him to "get everyone together and meet at the backup facility in New Jersey."
That night, over dinner with a friend, Freidheim pulled out a notepad and started to create
an agenda for Lehman.
One: Find people.
Two: Real estate.
Three . . .
Four . . .
On and on it went.
He was not the only person thinking ahead. That night Ian Lowitt, a South African-born
Rhodes scholar and then the treasurer of Lehman, did something incredibly brave that
probably saved the firm. He slipped behind the police lines and secretly reentered the
Lehman building. He knew he needed certain computer files to be sure the firm could
fund itself again the next day from Hoboken.
The next afternoon, Lehman's senior executives met in New Jersey. They had been
unbelievably lucky--they had lost only one person: Ira Zaslow, a financial analyst who
had been stuck in an elevator in the North Tower. A former colleague remembers that
Zaslow, who worked on the 38th floor, preferred the coffee on the 40th floor and had
been on his way to get it when the plane struck.
Lehman's technical staff had carried computer servers down 29 flights and brought them
across the river to Hoboken, where a facility that accommodated 800 people was adapted
to serve 3,000--i ncluding 1,400 traders and support staff. Jonathan Beyman and Bridget
O'Connor, then in charge of information technology, had also organized for the sufficient
technical equipment to be trucked in within 48 hours.
On the afternoon of September 12, there were dozens of tractor-trailers parked outside the
facility, hauling servers and equipment from as far away as Denver.
When the debt markets opened on Thursday, September 13, Lehman was prepared to
trade every asset class.
Anyone who could get any kind of phone service got in touch with Lehman's clients and
told them, "It's business as usual."
The firm's relationship with Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Hotels would now pay huge
dividends. Lehman Brothers arranged temporary office space for hundreds of employees
in the Sheraton Hotel in midtown. They got 1,000 laptops from IBM and 10,000 phone
lines from SBC.
The rest of Lehman's 6,200 employees were scattered to 39 locations throughout New
York and New Jersey.
If ever there was a time for the people of Lehman to pull together--to be "one firm"--it
was now. And they did.
Peter Thal Larsen later told the Financial Times that the hotel rooms in the Sheraton--two
people to a room--"resembled