Books: “The Devil’s Casino” dishes on Lehman Brothers; Dick Fuld dipped his pen in company ink (and married her), was highly interested in his staffs’ marital situations; he drew the line at procuring hookers for clients; When the firm finally adopted casual Friday’s Fuld said “It is a dark day for the firm”

Vanity Fair has an excerpt of a new gossipy book on Lehman Brothers, The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers,  by Vicky Ward.   If you were a Lehmanite, the firm pretty much owned you.  If you were the wife of a Lehmanite, you were on your own.  Reminds me of the movie “The Firm”…..

Dick Fuld, also known for his family-first philosophy, went to great lengths to ensure that nothing like Pettit’s affair ever happened again at the firm. His own marriage, to the former Kathleen Ann Bailey, a statuesque blonde, the youngest of eight siblings from a Catholic family on Long Island, was famously happy. He’d met Kathy when, against his will, she joined Lehman’s trading desk. “We can’t hire her—she’s too pretty,” he’d complained after her interview. “She’ll distract someone and marry them and will be no use to the firm,” he had said.

The person turned out to be him. She converted to Judaism, and they married on September 24, 1978, the day after he made partner. They had three children: twins, Jacqueline and Chrissie, and a son, Richie. Colleagues noted that he’d interrupt any meeting to take a call from his wife. To their amusement he called her “Fuld.” (The Fulds declined to comment for this article.)

On trips to Asia, when, after dinner, others would visit geisha houses, he always went back to his hotel. A story well known at Lehman was that he had once enraged a big client by refusing to find prostitutes for him after dinner…..

……For all the senior-executive wives, says one of them, there were “unwritten rules.” If you were married to a Lehmanite, you belonged to the firm. Fuld used to acknowledge as much when executives became managing directors. In a welcoming ceremony with spouses present, he would thank them for all the “canceled dinners, weekends, and vacations” they were about to experience.

Karin Jack knew what was required of her as her spouse rose in the company. “I mean, Brad didn’t do one single thing for 20 years that wasn’t Lehman Brothers,” she recalls. “Not a postcard, nor a Christmas present, nor a phone call to his family. I did everything, unless it had a Lehman stamp on it. As a Lehman wife, you raised your kids by yourself. You had your babies by yourself in the hospital. And then you were supposed to be happy and pretty and smiling when there was an event, and you really would have liked to strangle somebody,” she explains.

Lehman’s Desperate Housewives - Vanity Fair

Tags: Bankruptcy, Books, Dick Fuld, Gossip, Implosions, Joe Gregory, Lehman Brothers, Wall Street Wives