Too Big to Fail - Andrew Ross Sorkin [169]
When Thain finally arrived for his dinner engagement at Rebecca’s restaurant in Greenwich, he saw Steve Black of JP Morgan, who had been on his cell phone for the past half hour with the firm’s management team, standing out front, still talking. As it happened, he was in the middle of a conversation speculating about what might happen to Merrill Lynch.
Black, who was aghast to see Thain—His company is next! What’s he doing here?—nonchalantly greeted him with, “Great minds think alike.”
“Yeah, but I was supposed to meet another couple and my wife, and they’ve been sitting here for the last two hours,” Thain replied.
“At least I called,” Black said with a laugh.
As Thain went inside, Black returned to the conference call. “You’re never going to believe who I just ran into…”
At Lehman’s headquarters, a stunned and livid Dick Fuld had just gotten off the phone with Bart McDade, who had the unenviable task of informing the CEO that a meeting had been held down at the Fed about his company, and that he hadn’t been invited.
Rodgin Cohen had been notified by the Fed to instruct McDade to bring a team down to the Fed on Saturday morning—and had explicitly warned him not to bring Fuld, explaining, “The Fed doesn’t want him down there.”
Trying to soften the blow, McDade prevaricated: He told Fuld that there would be a lot of grunt work to do downtown, and that his time would be better spent manning the office so that he could remain in constant contact with the regulators and his CEO brethren. What he didn’t relay to Fuld, of course, was that they would all be together at the Fed in person.
As he ended the call with McDade, Fuld had another reason to be furious when he realized that he hadn’t heard back from Ken Lewis all day, and it was already past 9:00 p.m. Bank of America’s diligence teams over at Sullivan & Cromwell had left hours earlier, and from what he had heard, their body language suggested they weren’t leaving just for the night.
“I can’t believe that goddamn son of a bitch won’t return my call,” Fuld complained to Russo. Fuld had phoned him at least a half dozen times, sometimes not leaving a voice-mail for fear of seeming desperate. He thought Lewis had practically shook his hand over the phone just twenty-four hours earlier; where the hell had he gone?
Enough was enough. Fuld swallowed his pride and dialed Lewis’s home in Charlotte.
Lewis’s wife, Donna, picked up in the kitchen.
“Is Ken there?” Fuld asked.
“Who is it?”
“Dick Fuld.”
There was a long pause as Linda looked over at her husband, who was sitting in the living room. When she mouthed Fuld is on the line, Lewis shook his finger, signaling to her to duck the call.
Donna felt uncomfortable, but she had had plenty of experience in dodging unwanted callers for her husband.
“You really have to stop calling,” she said sympathetically to Fuld. “Ken isn’t coming to the phone.”
Crestfallen, Fuld replied, “I’m really sorry to have bothered you.”
Fuld placed the phone down and put both hands on his head.
“So, I’m the schmuck,” he shouted at nobody in particular.
Harvey Miller, Lehman’s bankruptcy lawyer, walked into Weil, Gotshal’s conference room just down the hall from his office and told the associates to go home and have dinner. It was getting late, and he hadn’t heard anything new from anyone at Lehman. This is just a fire drill, he thought. Lehman Brothers isn’t going to have to file.
Miller hopped into a cab to his apartment on Fifth Avenue. As he opened the door, his cell phone rang. James Bromley, a lawyer with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, which was advising the New York Fed, asked almost matter-of-factly, “Harvey, are there any plans for a bankruptcy?”
Miller was taken aback. “It’s not the objective; it’s not in the forecast,” he replied decisively. “There certainly isn’t any intensive work being done on it. I’m at home. I can tell you that right now the company really believes it’s going to get a deal.”
“Are you sure?” Bromley persisted.
Miller related how the New York Fed had not seemed