Brass-knuckled deals and stiletto insults are prized in normal times on Wall Street. And by all accounts, Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald fit that world perfectly, edging out his rivals at other bond trading firms and grabbing profits with the best of them.
But since Tuesday morning, Lutnick's open affection and tears have softened his flinty image and shown how a leader can find a new voice to get his firm and the nation's markets up and running again.
Last Tuesday morning, more than 600 of the roughly 1,000 men and women who worked in the New York offices of Cantor Fitzgerald vanished in the pillar of smoke and fire that consumed the World Trade Center.
By 7am Thursday, Cantor's survivors -- led by Lutnick, who had been out of the office only because he was taking his son to school -- had reopened the electronic bond trading network, called eSpeed, that makes this small, specialized firm such a critical link in the nation's Treasury markets.
"I did not make the decision to reopen," an exhausted Lutnick said on Thursday. "I interviewed a broad range of my staff and that is what they wanted to do." In part, they simply "were not going to let somebody defeat them," he said. But much stronger was the conviction that the firm has to survive and prosper because so many bereaved people are now depending on it.
His voice breaking, he added: "We have a new class of partners here -- these families. I have to take care of these families."
Commitment to the victims
Cantor managed to reopen for business so quickly among such anguish and loss through a combination of luck -- some of the most crucial people survived -- resiliency, commitment to the victims and leadership by Lutnick.
Some key technology department employees were meeting outside the office on Tuesday, and a few others had slept in after working late the night before. Since the disaster, about 50 employees have converged at the company's bunker-like backup computer facility in Rochelle Park, NJ, 37km from the destroyed towers. They have worked almost around the clock, napping on floors, to weld an electronic bridge over the gaping hole in the firm's computer systems.
The backup facility was set up after the 1993 terrorist attack on its home office, and the firm more recently arranged a second backup link through its London office.
But the critical ingredient, Lutnick insisted, was the conviction among the stricken survivors that the best way to help the widows and families so suddenly left in their care was to keep the firm alive and profitable.
Lutnick, 40, says he is not leading the Cantor employees in the company's revival. "There is no such thing," he said. "All I can do is follow."
Lutnick might not seem a likely candidate for such nurturing leadership. During his tenure at the scrappy, sometimes sharp-elbowed firm, regulators have more than once accused Cantor of cutting too close to the edge of market rules. He consolidated his claim to the chairmanship in a bitter battle with the widow of his mentor, B. Gerald Cantor, the colorful founder of the firm who died in 1996.
Before that fight was settled, lacerating insults had been hurled into court by both sides and Wall Street was trading gossip about what some saw as Lutnick's insensitive treatment of Cantor's grieving wife.
But Lutnick is not being cited for insensitivity now -- certainly not by the anguished relatives gathered in the lavish family service center he established in the second-floor ballroom of the Pierre last Wednesday.
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