The Devil's Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers
"Lehman Brothers, the oldest partnership on Wall Street, was always a brilliant but cursed child. Its life, and death, tells us why it was a magnet for talent, and why it was toxic. There have been a slew of terrific books on how Wall Street brought the economy to its knees, but in The Devil's Casino, Vicky Ward does something unusual. She takes the reader inside. Not just inside the financial instruments, but inside the culture that sired them; inside the families, including the spouses and...
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They were the Rat Pack of Wall Street. Four close friends: one a decorated war hero, one an emotional hippie, and two regular guys with big hearts, big dreams, and noble aims. They were going to get rich and prove that men like them—with zero financial training—could more than equal the Ivy League-educated, white-shoe bankers who were the competition. They were going to create an institution for others like them—hungry outsiders—and they were going to win, but not at the cost of their souls. In short, they were going to be the good guys of finance. These four men were determined to rebuild the broken brand of Lehman Brothers, America's oldest partnership, which had imploded in 1984 and was consumed by American Express and Shearson. For a decade or so, they drove into the office from the same middle-class town in Long Island at 4 a.m. They became known as the Huntington Mafia and the Ponderosa Boys. At first, their unity and their grit were undefeatable. The men atop American Express and Shearson—supposedly their bosses—found they were no match for the defiant team spirit that confronted them in Lehman Commercial Paper Inc., which, in 1990, became known simply as Lehman. Under their watch, Lehman Brothers started to grow and became independent again in 1994. But, along the way, something went wrong. The men slowly, perhaps inevitably, changed. As Lehman Brothers grew, so too did the cracks in and among the men who had rebuilt it. Until it all came undone on September 15, 2008. Investigative writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor Vicky Ward takes you inside Lehman's highly charged offices. You’ll meet beloved leaders who were erased from the corporate history books, but who could have taken the firm in a very different direction had they not fallen victim to infighting and their own weaknesses. You will encounter an unlikely and almost unknown Marcus Brutus, who may have had more to do with Lehman’s failings than anyone—including Dick Fuld, considered by many to be the poster child for the mistakes and greed of all bankers. What Ward uncovers is that Lehman may have lost at the risky games of collateralized debt obligations, swaps, and leverage, but that was simply the tail end of a much bigger story. "Little Lehman" was the shop known to be forever fighting for its life and somehow succeeding. On Wall Street, it was cheekily known as "the cat with nine lives." But this cat pushed its luck too far and died—the victim of men and women blinded by arrogance. Come inside The Devil's Casino and see how good men lose their way, and see how a firm that rose with the glory and bravado of Icarus fell burning in flames—not so much from the sun, but from a match lit from within. The Washington Post - Stanley Bing Vicky Ward's The Devil's Casino is an able new entrant into this crowded genre…It chronicles the sad and messy end of the House of Lehman in a relatively terse and fast-moving 270 pages…Ward carefully and skillfully tracks the last 25 or so years of the great, doomed enterprise, and her portrait of a business entity is often engaging, spicy and amusing.
Prologue 1Pt. 1 The Ponderosa BoysCh. 1 A Long, Hot Summer 11Ch. 2 The Beginning 17Ch. 3 The Captain 25Ch. 4 The "Take-Under" 35Ch. 5 Slamex 47Ch. 6 The Phoenix Rises 57Ch. 7 Independence Day 67Ch. 8 The Stiletto 81Ch. 9 The Ides of March 89Ch. 10 Eulogies 97Pt. 2 The Echo ChamberCh. 11 Russian Winter 107Ch. 12 Lehman's Desperate Housewives 127Ch. 13 The Young Lions 135Ch. 14 9/11 141Ch. 15 No Ordinary Joe 157Ch. 16 The Talking Head 173Ch. 17 The Sacrificial Ram 183Ch. 18 Korea's Rising Sum 191Ch. 19 The Wart on the End of Lehman's Nose 199Ch. 20 Damned Flood? 217Ch. 21 Closing the Books 229Epilogue 235A Note About the Sources 241Notes 247References 255Acknowledgments 257Index 263
\ Graham Bowley…well researched, chatty, lively…as she charts the rivalries of life on Wall Street, Ward entertains with rich detail…The book skillfully depicts the lives lived in the background of great clashing events. And it also hints at what Wall Street has become since the crisis, at the apparent dominance of two survivors, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.\ —The New York Times\ \ \ \ \ Stanley BingVicky Ward's The Devil's Casino is an able new entrant into this crowded genre…It chronicles the sad and messy end of the House of Lehman in a relatively terse and fast-moving 270 pages…Ward carefully and skillfully tracks the last 25 or so years of the great, doomed enterprise, and her portrait of a business entity is often engaging, spicy and amusing.\ —The Washington Post\ \
