Too Big to Fail [16]
Glucksman’s tenure as the head of Lehman was short-lived. Eight months later, on April 10, 1984—a day Fuld called the darkest of his life—the company’s seventeen-member corporate board voted to sell out to American Express for $360 million. It had been Peterson’s loyalists who had initiated contact with American Express, making the deal, in effect, a countercoup. And it prevailed for more than a decade, until the original insurgents fought back and won.
Shearson Lehman, as the newly combined investment arm was known, involved merging Lehman with AmEx’s retail brokerage operation, Shearson. The idea was to combine brains and brawn, but the relationship was troubled from the start. Perhaps the biggest mistake the corporate parent made was not immediately firing the Lehman managers who had made it clear that they thought the whole deal had been a big mistake. At the time of the merger, Fuld, who was already a member of Lehman’s board, had been one of just three directors to oppose the sale. “I loved this place,” he said in casting his dissenting vote.
Glucksman, Fuld, Gregory, and the rest of Glucksman’s inner circle would spend the next decade fighting to preserve Lehman’s autonomy and identity. “It was like a ten-year prison sentence,” recalled Gregory. To encourage their solidarity, Glucksman summoned Fuld and his other top traders to a meeting in the firm’s conference room. For reasons no one quite understood, Glucksman was holding a few dozen number 2 pencils in his hand. He handed each trader one and asked him to snap it in half, which everyone did, easily and without laughing or even smirking. He then handed a bunch of them to Fuld and asked him to try to break them all in half. Fuld, “The Gorilla,” could not do it.
“Stay together, and you will continue to do great things,” Glucksman told the group after this Zenlike demonstration.
Lehman’s traders and executives chafed at being part of a financial supermarket—the very name suggested something common. To make things worse, the new management structure bordered on byzantine. Fuld was named co-president and co-chief operating officer of Shearson Lehman Brothers Holdings in 1993, along with J. Tomilson Hill. They reported to a Shearson chief executive, who reported to American Express’ chief, Harvey Golub. A Fuld protégé, T. Christopher Pettit, ran the investment banking and trading division. No one really knew who was in charge, or, for that matter, if anyone was in charge at all.
When a red-faced AmEx finally spun off Lehman in 1994, the firm was undercapitalized and focused almost entirely on trading bonds. Stars like Stephen A. Schwarzman, the future CEO of Blackstone, had left the company. No one expected it to survive for long as an independent firm; it was just takeover bait for a much larger bank.
American Express CEO Harvey Golub anointed Fuld, who was Shearson Lehman’s top trader and had risen to be co-president and chief executive of the newly independent entity. Fuld had his work cut out for him. Lehman was reeling, with net revenue plunging by a third when the Shearson units were sold; investment banking was down by nearly the same amount. They were bailing water.
And the infighting continued. By 1996 Fuld pushed out Pettit when he made noises about increasing his status. (Pettit died three months later in a snowmobile accident.) For years, Fuld operated the firm alone, until he appointed Gregory and another colleague, Bradley Jack, to the role