Although Fuld stands no more than five feet ten inches tall, he has an intimidating presence, a definite asset in the kill-or-be-killed environment that Glucksman fostered. He has jet-black hair and a broad, dramatically angular forehead that hoods dark, deep-set, almost morose eyes. A fitness buff and a weightlifter, Fuld looked like someone you didn’t want to take on in a fight, and he had the intensity to match. With his gaze fixed on the green early-generation computer screens in front of him, he would grunt out his trades in staccato, rapid-fire succession.
Within Lehman, Fuld earned a reputation as a single-minded trader who took guff from no one. One day he approached the desk of the floor’s supervisor, Allan S. Kaplan (who would later become Lehman’s vice chairman), to have him sign a trade, which was then a responsibility of supervisors. A round-faced man, cigar always in hand, Kaplan was on the phone when Fuld appeared and deliberately ignored him. Fuld hovered, furrowing his remarkable brow and waving his trade in the air, signaling loudly that he was ready for Kaplan to do his bidding.
Kaplan, cupping the receiver with his hand, turned to the young trader, exasperated. “You always think you’re the most important,” he exploded. “That nothing else matters but your trades. I’m not going to sign your fucking trades until every paper is off my desk!”
“You promise?” Fuld said, tauntingly.
“Yes,” Kaplan said. “Then I’ll get to it.”
Leaning over, Fuld swept his arm across Kaplan’s desk with a violent twist, sending dozens of papers flying across the office. Before some of them even landed, Fuld said, firmly but not loudly: “Will you sign it now?”
By this time, Fuld was known within the firm—and increasingly outside of it—as “The Gorilla,” a nickname he didn’t discourage. Years later, as the firm’s chief executive, he even kept a stuffed gorilla in his office, where it remained until Lehman had to evacuate its Lower Manhattan headquarters across the street from what had been the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Several years after he started at Lehman, Fuld noticed a fresh face on the mortgage desk. While Fuld was dark and brooding, the new guy was pale and affable. He quickly introduced himself—a gesture Fuld appreciated—sticking out his hand in a manner that suggested a person comfortable in his own skin: “Hi, I’m Joe Gregory.” It was the start of an association that would endure for nearly four decades.
In terms of temperament, Gregory was Fuld’s opposite—more personable, perhaps, and less confrontational. He looked up to Fuld, who soon became his mentor.
One day Fuld, who even as CEO upbraided executives over how they dressed, took his friend aside and told him he was sartorially objectionable. For Fuld, there was one acceptable uniform: pressed dark suit, white shirt, and conservative tie. Glucksman, he explained, could get away with soup stains on his tie and untucked shirt tail, but neither of them was Glucksman. Gregory set off to Bloomingdale’s the following weekend for a wardrobe upgrade. “I was one of those people who didn’t want to disappoint Dick,” Gregory later told a friend.
Like Fuld, Gregory, a non-Ivy Leaguer who graduated from Hofstra University, had come to Lehman in the 1960s almost by accident. He had planned to become a high school history teacher, but after working a summer at Lehman as a messenger, he decided on a career in finance. By the 1980s Gregory and three other fast-track Lehman executives were commuting together from Huntington on the North Shore of Long Island. During the long early-morning ride, they discussed the trading strategies they’d try out on the floor that day. Within the firm the group was known as the “Huntington Mafia”: They arrived with a consensus. They often stayed around after work and played pickup basketball at the company’s gym.
Both Fuld and Gregory advanced quickly under Glucksman, who was himself a brilliant trader. Fuld was clearly Glucksman’s favorite. Each morning Fuld and James S. Boshart—another rising star—would sit around with Glucksman reading his copy of the Wall Street Journal, with Glucksman providing the color commentary. His bons mots were known as Glucksmanisms. “Don’t ever cuff a trade!” he’d say, meaning don’t bother picking up the phone if you don’t know the latest stock quote.
Glucksman’s unkemptness, they had come to realize, was a political badge of sorts, for Glucksman seethed with resentment at what he regarded as the privileges and pretenses of the Ivy League investment bankers at the firm. The battle between bankers and traders is the closest thing to class warfare on Wall Street. Investment banking was esteemed as an art, while trading was more like a sport, something that required skill, but not necessarily brains or creativity. Or so the thinking went. Traders had always been a notch lower in the pecking order, even when they started to drive revenue growth. The combative Glucksman encouraged this us-against-them mentality among his trading staff. “Fucking bankers!”was a constant refrain.
Once, Glucksman heard that Peter Lusk, a successful banker in Lehman’s Los Angeles office in the 1970s, had spent $368,000 to decorate his office with crystal chandeliers, wood-paneled walls, and a wet bar. Glucksman immediately got on a plane to the West Coast and went straight to Lusk ’s office, which was unoccupied when he showed up. Horrified by the decor, he rummaged around a secretary’s desk, found a piece of paper, scribbled a message in block letters, and taped it on the door: “YOU’RE FIRED!”
He didn’t leave it at that. Glucksman returned to the secretary’s desk, grabbed another piece of paper, and wrote an addendum to his previous message, taping it right below: “And you will pay Lehman Brothers back every cent you spent on this office.”
In 1983 Glucksman led one of Wall Street’s most memorable coups, which ended with an immigrant—Glucksman was a second-generation Hungarian Jew—deposing one of the most connected leaders in the industry: Peter G. Peterson, a former commerce secretary in the Nixon administration. During their final confrontation, Glucksman looked Peterson in the eye and told him he could go easy or he could go hard, and Peterson, who went on to co-found the powerful Blackstone Group, went easy. Glucksman, who became more diplomatic with age, never liked talking about the clash. “That’s kind of like talking about my first wife,” he remarked years later.
Glucksman’s tenure as the head of Lehman was short-lived. Eight months later, on April 10, 1984—a day Fuld called the darkest of his life—the company’s seventeen-member corporate board voted to sell out to American Express for $360 million. It had been Peterson’s loyalists who had initiated contact with American Express, making the deal, in effect, a countercoup. And it prevailed for more than a decade, until the original insurgents fought back and won.
Shearson Lehman, as the newly combined investment arm was known, involved merging Lehman with AmEx’s retail brokerage operation, Shearson. The idea was to combine brains and brawn, but the relationship was troubled from the start. Perhaps the biggest mistake the corporate parent made was not immediately firing the Lehman managers who had made it clear that they thought the whole deal had been a big mistake. At the time of the merger, Fuld, who was already a member of Lehman’s board, had been one of just three directors to oppose the sale. “I loved this place,” he said in casting his dissenting vote.