ON TOP OF THE WORLD: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal, by Tom Barbash. HarperCollins, 282 pp, $25.95.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, an unsuspecting 5-year-old named Kyle Lutnick saved his father's life by starting kindergarten. Howard Lutnick took his son to school that day and so arrived at the World Trade Center just as the disaster was unfolding. Had he reached his workplace a few minutes sooner, Lutnick would surely be dead. Instead, he emerged ghostlike from the rubble, covered in ash and forced to confront a world in which 658 of his firm's partners and employees were killed - including his brother and his very best friend.
You have perhaps heard of Howard Lutnick; he is the driven chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, a heavyweight securities firm that was headquartered in Tower One, and as bad as the events of Sept. 11 were for him, in some ways his own personal inferno was only beginning.
Tom Barbash, a writer who knew Lutnick from college, soon found himself enlisted to help his friend chronicle subsequent events. But pulled in a thousand directions and desperate to save the firm, Lutnick had no time for memoirs, so Barbash wrote the book alone. The results of this fallback plan are a poignant mix. "On Top of the World" is a sensitive and heartbreaking account of how Lutnick and his surviving colleagues coped with the mass murder that terrorists had visited on them. And yet, from the snippets of Lutnick's voice that we get here, we can only long for the memoir he never wrote.
This takes nothing from Barbash, whose approach is admirably self-effacing; except to the extent that he is determined to rehabilitate the reputation of a man he sees as having been harshly used, the author mostly just describes what he sees and lets people speak for themselves. His restraint amplifies the book's enormous emotional power.
But the center of this story is the astonishing Lutnick, a product of Syosset and Jericho who found himself orphaned and impoverished soon after arriving at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. His life turned around when he hooked up with Bernie Cantor, who founded the firm Lutnick would come to run. A brilliant businessman and art collector, Cantor helped create the modern bond market, and his timing - the booming deficits of the Reagan years unleashed a torrent of Treasury bonds - was exquisite. His firm was a securities powerhouse so close-knit that, among the survivors, says Lutnick, "we had 20 families who lost not one child, but two."
The story of Lutnick and Cantor, caught here only in snatches, is as compelling as any old-fashioned novel about the rise of an ambitious young man and the father figure who rushes into the vast void that is his life. "Bernie wasn't just teaching me the business," Lutnick recalls. "He was teaching me how to live, how to wear fine suits and how to pick them out. He taught me about wine, and how to use multiple sets of china and cutlery at dinner; where to go on vacation; taught me about art, and the protocol at an auction house. He spent long hours teaching me about Rodin. We spoke 15 times a day."
After Sept. 11, Lutnick resolved to save the firm to help the surviving families (his own wealth was mostly tied up in Cantor as well). To keep the place going, he cut off paychecks for the "missing" employees after Sept. 15 and pledged to the families 25 percent of Cantor's profits for the next five years, plus a decade of health insurance. And he put into the business $1 million from his own pocket.
But in the simple-minded and emotionally greedy world of television, which at first fawned over Lutnick after he cried on the air, the decision to cut off paychecks made him a villain. Nor was television around when Lutnick and colleagues in London, Conn., and elsewhere - working day and night under unimaginable emotional strain - somehow got Cantor Fitzgerald back on its feet.
Lutnick is presented in these pages as a tragic figure, buffeted by the media even as he struggles to cope with his own terrible grief as well as the sorrow and rage of the thousands of survivors. He has to haggle over bonuses with parents and spouses, decide which of nearly 700 funerals to attend, shut down parts of the company that can't be resuscitated and cope with competitors glad for a chance to trample the writhing body of the wounded king. In its new offices, the firm is plagued by bomb threats. At every spare moment, Lutnick is on the phone absorbing someone else's suffering. Finally, he takes down a Bible and re-reads the story of Job.
Howard Lutnick is not a choirboy. He became president of Cantor at 29 and battled his mentor's wife for control of the company. Bosses have to do ugly things, and with his lavish offices and sleek clothes, his great wealth and glamorous wife, he was easy to resent. Someone I know who was in more or less the same business says Lutnick was a lightning rod on the Street long before Sept. 11.
Afterwards, Cantor and firms like it benefited from the forbearance of regulators and the loyalty of customers and lenders. Yet Cantor's survival post-9/11 - it returned to profitability in the very next quarter - was simply miraculous. To my friend (as well as to the author) that was owing mainly to Lutnick. He may have been feared and resented by competitors, my friend says, "but as a person, I give him a pass to heaven."