All His Office Mates Gone

Of all the anguished New Yorkers who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center, Howard Lutnick was perhaps the hardest to watch on TV, especially for anyone who has ever known responsibility for a lot of people. Lutnick, 40, is CEO of the bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which appears to have lost as many as 700 of its 1,000 Trade Center employees, those who were at work last Tuesday between the 101st and 105th floors of the north tower–just 10 floors above where the hijacked jet plowed in and exploded at 8:48 a.m.

Lutnick would normally have been at his desk on the 105th floor at that hour. But on Tuesday he dropped off his five-year-old son for the first day of kindergarten–“big-boy school,” as Lutnick, in tears, described it last week on ABC News. He arrived at the Trade Center to see it in flames.

As the north tower’s workers began streaming out of stairwells and into the streets, Lutnick asked which floors they had come from. “And someone would say, ’55,'” he recalled. The number kept rising, along with his hopes. What Lutnick didn’t know was that the inferno below his employees had sealed off all avenues of escape. A group of them were gathered around a speakerphone talking to colleagues in the U.S. and overseas when the jet struck. Chaos erupted, and the line went dead. Other workers, including Lutnick’s younger brother Gary, phoned their families to tell them goodbye.

When the building began to collapse, Lutnick sprinted north to escape the avalanche of debris. When he finally emerged from the dust and smoke, he realized what the future would be like for him and his 320 surviving workers in the New York City area, plus 1,150 more worldwide. “We’ve got to make our company be able to take care of my 700 families,” he said.

The community of traders in government bonds is a small one, and Cantor has long been its key player, facilitating deals between buyers and sellers who often like to keep their identities from one another. It is a high-pressure business, with inhuman hours and often with millions of dollars riding on a phone call. One source of Cantor’s success is its close-knit character. Many of the veteran brokers had worked together for years, and the intense atmosphere and enormous financial responsibility bred deep friendships.

Many families of the missing frantically hung leaflets, posted messages on the Internet and tried to contact other employees before, as the days went on, hope dissipated. Rachel Aron, a former Cantor employee who left two years ago, lost her stepfather as well as her husband, whom she had met at the firm. Their first anniversary would have been Sunday. Joseph Coppo, 19, the namesake of his father, who perished with close friends and co-workers of 25 years, attended a gathering for Cantor families Thursday night at Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel. “I went down to talk to my dad’s colleagues,” he said, “and realized that none of them were there.”

For the remaining Cantor employees, the work to do is enormous, but they have already begun. The bond market reopened on Thursday, and two-year Treasury-bill interest rates dropped to their lowest historical levels as investors sought put their money in an old standby.

“Our plan is to not let those bastards get us down,” said Ken Pforr, a vice president in Cantor’s municipal-bonds unit. Besides, as Lutnick observed, the survivors now have a lot more people to take care of.

–By Eric Roston