Too Big to Fail [19]
After five years at Simpson, she took a chance one day and phoned her contact at Lehman: “Would it be weird for someone like me to work on Wall Street?” she asked.
No, it would not. Hired by Lehman, she caught a break early on when a change in the tax law sparked a boom in securities that were taxed as if they were debt. Callan, with her tax law expertise, became adept at structuring these complex investments for clients like General Mills. Savvy, confident, and a skillful pitchwoman, she quickly catapulted up the ranks, overseeing the firm’s global finance solutions and global finance analytic groups within a few years. Hedge funds were becoming top Wall Street clients, and in 2006 Callan was entrusted with the critical job of overseeing the firm’s investment banking relationships with them.
In this role, she solidified her reputation as a player by helping Fortress Investment Group become the first American manager of hedge funds and private-equity funds to go public; she later oversaw the initial public offering of another fund, the Och-Ziff Capital Management Group. For Lehman’s most important hedge fund client, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, she orchestrated the sale of $500 million worth of five-year bonds, a groundbreaking offering by a hedge fund.
She soon caught the eye of Joe Gregory, an executive who believed strongly in the value of diversity. He recognized that the world was changing and that Lehman, as well as the rest of the financial community, could no longer be a sanctuary for white men only. Promoting someone who was young and smart—and a woman—would be good for Lehman and would reflect well on him. It didn’t hurt that Callan looked great on television.
On the night of March 17, in her apartment at the Time Warner Center, Erin Callan endlessly tossed and turned. The next day was going be the biggest of her career, a chance to single-handedly extinguish the flames threatening to engulf Lehman—and to prove her critics inside the firm wrong.
In just a few hours Callan would represent Lehman Brothers—to the market, to the world. She would run the crucial conference call detailing the firm’s quarterly results. Scores of financial analysts from around the nation would be listening in; many of them would be ready to shred Lehman at the slightest sign of weakness. After presenting Lehman’s numbers, there’d be questions, and given all that was going on, there’d probably be a few very tough ones that would force Callan to think on her feet. Her answers might literally make or break the firm.
Finally giving up on getting any sleep, she rolled out of bed and grabbed the Wall Street Journal outside her apartment door. The page-one story did nothing to alleviate her nerves; its headline read: “Lehman Finds Itself in Center of a Storm,” and it featured her as one of the main Lehman executives fighting back rumors about the firm’s failing health. But she liked the press.
Despite her fatigue, Callan was fired up, adrenaline coursing through her slender body. She dashed downstairs, coffee in hand, dressed in an elegant black suit picked out by her personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman. She had blown her hair out for an appearance later that day on Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC.
She waited for her driver under the awning of the Time Warner Center. She was hoping her place there would be only temporary. With her new job title and expected income, she had been looking to upgrade and was in negotiations to buy her dream home: a 2,400-square-foot apartment on the thirty-first floor of 15 Central Park West, one of the most coveted addresses in New York City. The limestone building, designed by Robert A. M. Stern, was the new home to such storied financiers as Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, Citigroup’s legendary Sanford Weill, hedge fund maestro Daniel Loeb, and the rock