Almost every day, Chris Crosby turns in his chair at Cantor Fitzgerald's technical center in Rochelle Park, New Jersey, to ask his buddy for help -- for one sweet instant forgetting his friend is dead.
Philip Marber, a Cantor division president in Manhattan, still wakes up at 3am most mornings worrying about how to turn his new stock trading desk into the "well-oiled machine" he once ran. John Law, one of a handful of surviving Cantor stock traders, now works with 50 newly hired employees on a trading desk unlike any he's known before.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The raucous, knowing banter he once shared with his lost friends is gone, replaced by the slightly formal ceremony of well-meaning people who do not yet call each other by nickname or know each other's pet peeves.
These men are among the roughly 340 surviving employees in Cantor's New York headquarters, working together on an almost unimaginable task -- saving a business in which three colleagues out of every four, around 660 people, died in the attacks on the World Trade Center. In a world that thrived on a smooth, familiar routine, every aspect of the workday environment is strange, and much harder.
Office space, new equipment, telephone and computer links, market data and even basic office supplies had to be conjured out of the chaos so the firm could reopen with the national markets. Veterans took on new jobs -- from the Dallas trader who now reads market tidbits over the squawk-box to his New York colleagues because they do not yet have a full news service, to the public relations executives who helped build the firm's memorial website.
In this struggle, Cantor's survivors -- the firm now employs roughly 1,450 people, about 350 of them in the New York area -- have become what Crosby called a band of brothers. People who had once been, at most, a face in the cafeteria quickly became foxhole friends. Help has come from unexpected quarters, like the administrator who left the firm six months ago and has now returned to help get its equity operations organized. In the process, the survivors have found unsuspected strengths and a shared sense of altruism that has produced an added mission: to deliver on the firm's promise to contribute 25 percent of its profits over the next five years to the Cantor families who lost loved ones.
The impulse to rebuild came naturally to Cantor's surviving executives, Marber said. Surviving partners in New York had a substantial investment in the firm, and partners and employees working in branch offices around the country and in London "needed a place to make a living," he said.
It may well be an uphill battle. However loyal and sympathetic, longtime customers will stay with Cantor only if the badly bruised firm can deliver the service they demand. Rivals are trying to capitalize on any sign of disarray or confusion at the firm, as a weak economy shrinks the pie for everyone.
Indeed, even before Sept. 11, Cantor was in flux. Its traditional business -- handling government bond trades for giant institutional investors wary of revealing their trades to one another -- was giving way to modern electronic trading systems, including its own eSpeed operation. Its stock-trading business was booming, but its bond traders faced an uncertain future. Layoffs had left the usual scars, a residual uneasiness in some departments; resumes were circulating and resentments were brewing.
Then came the terrorist attacks, which doomed all Cantor employees working on four floors near the top of the World Trade Center's north tower. Overnight, the magnitude of Cantor's losses transformed the firm from an obscure specialty trader firm to a national symbol of the awesome human and business devastation caused by the attacks.
For Law, now working in a makeshift trading room in a Park Avenue building, each day is a new reminder of "how good I had it before."
In the world of "before," where everything he needed was at his fingertips, he had time to read the papers and check the news wires, to tease his colleagues, to nurture about two dozen clients. Now, he has many more client accounts, the jokes have vanished, and none of his tools are where he expects them to be. And almost every person around him is an unknown quantity.
"It's a scramble every morning," he said. "I just keep repeating two little words: `It's temporary.' Each day, the pain doesn't hurt so much. Every day we get a little better organized."
Crosby, one of a handful of technology staff members to survive, has found work to be the best treatment for a pain that prompts him to refer to his lost colleagues, once known as the guys, as gentlemen. Since about 3am on the day after the attacks, Crosby has poured himself into his job, a job that now requires him to shuttle between computer centers in Weehawken and Rochelle Park. "I used to be managing the development of our large-scale databases," he said. "Now? Oh, I've got a whole bag of tricks." He has taken on projects that lost colleagues left behind.
As at many financial firms displaced from Lower Manhattan, Cantor executives are struggling to coordinate a business that is scattered across Manhattan, New Jersey and Connecticut. Although executives say a new office home will eventually pull the firm together again, for now the surviving employees work alongside newly hired traders in Manhattan and unfamiliar sales and technology colleagues in Darien, Connecticut, and Rochelle Park and Weehawken, New Jersey.
"The first day here we didn't even have pens," sighed Heidi Olson, the chief administrative officer in the equities division, as she sat for a moment outside one of the firm's temporary Park Avenue trading rooms. Olson left Cantor last April, after more than five years in corporate development. But after the disaster -- "I could not believe my friends were on fire," she said with a shudder -- she called and volunteered to help. Chores were handed to her, and then more chores.
Bank accounts had to be opened for Cantor's new relief fund. Supplies had to be ordered for the temporary trading room. Computers and phones had to be installed. Someone had to buy the machines that stamp the time and date on each order. There were no job descriptions -- just jobs, many of them utterly unfamiliar to Olson.
"Everything we ever took for granted was gone," Olson said. "So I just did whatever had to be done. It is like being a mom -- in that spiritual sense of doing whatever is needed for the good of the family."
Throughout the firm she senses a greater patience, a quiet pride in enduring the daily inconveniences of having "absolutely no routine at all."
At the beginning, there were moments when things fell apart. "People had breakdowns, people fainted," Olson said. "You sobbed, and then you got on with it."
But she still doesn't sleep very well, she said. "The ghosts come to get you at night. There's so much to think about: what you miss and all that needs to be done here." She finds considerable comfort at work, she says. "This was a tribal event -- something happened to our tribe. And it helps to be here with people who feel the same pain."
But for Scott Wall, one of the few surviving Cantor bond traders, about the only thing in his work life that is unchanged is Cantor's name on his business card. He once traded corporate bonds in Manhattan, surrounded by people he'd known for almost a decade. He now sells convertible bonds from an office in Darien, among people he had barely met before Sept. 11.
"I remember hearing the president say that we should all go back to work, and thinking that I didn't have any work to go back to," Wall said. "I'm 38. I just hope it's not too late to make a change."
Howard Lutnick, the chairman of Cantor, has also found his workday much changed. Once known for his combative arm-wrestling in a competitive business, Lutnick was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of grieving families who needed gentle handling. He took a self-taught crash course in the politics of philanthropy, meeting with the head of the American Red Cross to argue successfully for immediate cash assistance for families who lost breadwinners in the attacks.
Lutnick lost his only brother, Gary, in the attacks. His grief and shock were apparent right after the disaster in a spate of tearful media interviews. But in recent weeks, after criticism from some employees surfaced publicly, Lutnick has pulled out of the spotlight, refusing interviews and spending time talking quietly with families at a series of informational gatherings Cantor has held around New York City. Marber was stranded at a golf resort in Ohio when the attack occurred. Otherwise, he almost certainly would have perished along with 130 others on the stock trading desk he ran. Isolated in his hotel room, he coped with his hopeless, impotent grief by making lists of what the firm would need to re-open.
When he got back to New York on Sept. 13, after a 12-hour van trip, he slept for a few hours and went to work. By Sept. 17, when the stock markets re-opened, his jury-rigged trading team was ready.
The trading line held, and the work got done. But it is not like any trading desk he's ever run, Marber said. The easy laughter, the teasing banter that lubricated the tension, is gone.
"We had such a well-oiled machine," he said, with a tone of almost palpable longing. "Everything was in its place and everything worked, and if it didn't, we got it fixed in five minutes and got back to work. I want that back."
The only way to get it back is to build it again, he said. He is hopeful -- he expects the firm to hold its own for the rest of this year and be ready to grow again next year.
Peter DaPuzzo, a Wall Street veteran who is Cantor's vice chairman, has attended 32 funerals, and his wife has been to 18 more. Seeing the young widows and solemn toddlers breaks his heart, he said.
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