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At eight o’clock on Saturday morning, August 17, he arrived to a surreal scene at Wachtell, Lipton’s offices. Gutfreund was not there; despite miserable weather he had decided to fly up to his Nantucket house, where Susan was staying. All the warlords—theoretically, candidates for CEO—had begun to gather outside an “interview room.” Only a few of them made sense or actually wanted the job, but he had to interview every one. Meanwhile, a pair of “plenty smart,” tough investigative lawyers from Munger, Tolles—Larry Pedowitz and Allen Martin—gave “a masterful presentation” to Buffett and Munger, who had flown in to participate in person. For the first time—to their outrage—they learned that the Treasury Department had investigated Mozer’s earlier trades.70

Next, Buffett had to make what he considered the most important hire of his life: to decide who would lead the firm. If he made a mistake, he could not reverse the decision later. Before starting the fifteen-minute interviews, he told the group, “J.M. is not coming back.”71

With that, he began to interview the candidates one by one. He asked them all the same question: Who should be the next CEO of Salomon?

“I was going into a foxhole with this guy, and he had to be the right choice. The question was, who would have all the qualities that would provide leadership to the firm, cause me not to worry for a second about whether anything was going on that was going to subsequently embarrass the firm or even put us out of business? As I talked to these people, what was really going through my mind was essentially the same questions that would go through your mind if you were deciding who you wanted to be a trustee under your will, or who you wanted to have marry your daughter, or anything of this sort. I wanted the kind of person who was going to be able to make decisions as to what should get to me and what could get solved below the line—who would tell me all the bad news, because good news always takes care of itself in business. I wanted to hear every bit of bad news as soon as it happened, so we could do something about it. I wanted someone who was ethical, who wouldn’t stick a gun to my head later on knowing that I couldn’t fire him.”72

Buffett found that all but one of the other candidates thought it should be Deryck Maughan, who had returned three weeks earlier from running Salomon’s Asian operations.73 Maughan, forty-three years old, now headed the investment-banking group. He was not a trader, and he was English, not American. He had the least resemblance to Mozer or any of Salomon’s frat-house trading boys of anyone that could be found. He was viewed as both ethical and possessed of common sense. Thanks to Liar’s Poker, the public thought of Salomon as a place full of people who stuffed their faces with onion cheeseburgers for breakfast and dangled strippers’ panties from their trading screens.74 Salomon, after all, was the firm where, as Lewis had written, a vice chairman was more like a chairman of vice.75 Maughan, however, was the very portrait of a dignified, impeccably tailored Englishman. Since he had spent the past several years in Tokyo, the chance that he was tainted by the Treasury auction scandal was remote.

Of all Maughan’s qualifications, possibly the most valuable was his distance from the crime. Within Salomon, land of the long knives, all of the other candidates had enemies. Maughan was a question mark, like the token black guy in the movie Putney Swope, who gets elected to the job of CEO of a backstabbing advertising agency when the old CEO croaks during a boardroom meeting. The other executives try to sabotage one another’s chances of getting his job by voting for Putney Swope, who ends up being elected by a huge majority.76 Maughan was respected, but no one knew him all that well. As one of the other warlords put it, they all voted for Maughan because it’s “better to choose someone you don’t know than someone you think is bad.”

In the movie, Putney Swope had