Like many executives in London, Gerard LaRocca, the global chief of operations for Barclays Bank's investment-banking arm, was speaking on the phone with a colleague in New York when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
"He told me to turn on my television set," LaRocca said, "and as an American and a New Yorker I could not believe what I was seeing."
His first thoughts were for the 1,200 Barclays employees at 222 Broadway, a block from the trade center. They evacuated their building safely, but many were unable to get to the Barclays disaster recovery site 13 miles to the west in Rutherford, New Jersey, because the Hudson River bridges and tunnels were closed. There would not have been room for them all anyway -- the temporary location can accommodate only about a third of the normal work force.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Suddenly without a full-service New York office, Barclays did what many global financial institutions did after the terror attacks: It turned to London to pick up the slack.
The ties between Wall Street and the City, as London's financial district is known, have never been stronger. Large American investment banks have spent heavily here in recent years to expand their operations and acquire smaller British rivals. And British institutions like Barclays have built big presences in New York. When disaster paralyzed the world's financial capital, the strength and resilience of those ties made London the first place many executives looked for support, even at firms with satellite offices in Boston or Chicago.
Barclays employees in London switched into overdrive on Sept. 11. Many volunteered to work double shifts to clear and settle trades. Notices went up on industry Web sites alerting clients that derivative transactions would be processed in London. Phone calls were routed through the London switchboard. And a 24-hour crisis center at the Barclays headquarters in Canary Wharf fielded inquiries from securities regulators and journalists about whether Barclays would be ready when exchanges reopened.
Similar tales are heard all over the city, of employees setting aside trans-Atlantic intramural rivalries and cultural differences to do something, anything, to help colleagues in America.
The London office of Cantor Fitzgerald was crucial in putting the firm, which is missing two-thirds of its New York staff after the attack on the World Trade Center, back in business. Lee Amaitis, chief executive of Cantor's international operations, said he was torn between grieving for lost friends and colleagues and bracing the company for the resumption of trading in Treasury securities two days after the attacks.
Much of the challenge was technological: the disaster severed communications lines connecting clients with eSpeed, Cantor's electronic trading platform, which is used to handle more than half all trades in US government bonds.
Technicians in Cantor's London office began working around the clock. They sometimes slept on floors or desk chairs. They did not go home until eSpeed was running smoothly again. Many were young support staff members earning moderate salaries far below the massive paychecks of top executives.
Amaitis called them heros. "They did it without being asked," he said. "They did it for their colleagues on the other side of the ocean."
Richard Moore, global foreign exchange manager for Citigroup, was on a business trip in New York when the terrorists struck. Unable to return to London for two days while trans-Atlantic flights were grounded, Moore telephoned and e-mailed clients from Citigroup's offices in Midtown Manhattan, redirecting corporate customers to do their currency trading and hedging through Chicago and institutional investors to London.
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