Free The Devil's Casino by Vicky Ward

management of Amex and Shearson. Despite the open arrogance of Pettit ‘s people, it was impossible to deny their talents.
    By 1990, Tucker had risen to the top of all of Shearson Lehman fixed income sales; Lessing was Tucker’s deputy, and Joe Gregory was made head of mortgage-backed securities sales. The Ponderosa Boys and Dick Fuld were the face—and brains—of Shearson Lehman fixed income.
    “A group of us had grown up together and worked together a long time,” Lessing said later. “We were strong. We had a certain culture. We kept pushing.”
    Lessing’s version of “pushing,” according to someone who worked for him, meant that he spent a lot of his day climbing onto his desk and shouting “Sell!” to whip up enthusiasm. He wasn’t considered the brightest at the firm. “They only put him on the operating committee—a committee formed of around 20 people in senior positions—so that they could talk business in the car,” someone senior to Lessing said. said. But he did have a knack for charming clients.
    Fuld was increasingly isolated from the trading floor, even though his office was right next to Pettit ‘s.
    One person remembered watching Fuld’s secretary, Marianne Burke, work through a stack of L.L. Bean receipts. Fuld would have an assortment of L.L. Bean polo shirts spread across his desk—two of almost every shade, and whatever he didn’t like he’d have Marianne return. “He orders them in two different sizes and then makes up his mind,” she explained. The story wound its way across the trading floor and through the halls: This was how Fuld frittered away his workday, ordering from the L.L. Bean catalog.
    One of the people who made most of the rude jokes about Fuld in those years was Gregory, who was known to be both a hothead and a chatterbox. “When I first met Joe back in 1980,” Lessing would later say, “he was a young ball of energy—clean-shaven, constantly in motion, the fastest man who had ever been on a calculator in the history of mankind. But he had one problem: He looked very young.”
    Gregory went to the Virgin Islands in the mid-1980s and came back with a beard. He grew it in hopes of looking older, more commanding, and thereby more appropriate for running the trading desk. Though it didn’t have the desired effect—his colleagues still remembered his baby face—it became a kind of signature. In a world of clean-shaven, immaculately groomed men, Gregory’s beard was a power play, a defiant sign of his confidence.
    He was also known for fits of road rage. “There was one time when a cabbie cut us off in Manhattan, just by the South Street Seaport,” Tom Tucker says, “and Joe railed at him from the car. The cabbie pulls over. Joe gets out of the car. The cabbie pulls out a tire iron, and Joe starts to go after him. And we’ re like, ‘Joe, get in the car! You idiot!’ ”
    Colleagues wondered if it was tremendous insecurity that made Gregory so susceptible to emotional fits. “We wondered if he could never get over where he had come from and where he got to,” says one. “It was as though he’d moved up so far beyond his dreams, he really had no idea who he actually was.”
    One of the many people lashed by Gregory’s temper was bond salesman Craig Schiffer. Schiffer was bright and bold; he had a habit of skipping his boss’s morning meetings, and eventually this irked Gregory so much that in the early 1990s he went to Pettit and demanded that Schiffer be fired. Pettit talked to Schiffer, and then told Gregory they couldn’t let him go. Gregory, according to someone in Schiffer’s department, went berserk. “He screamed at Craig like I’ve never seen. Joe appeared to be furious that he had lost, that he wasn’t able to get rid of Craig. It was unbelievably threatening.”
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    Fear was very much the management style of that era, and it began with Fuld.
    In 1989 Pettit sent Dick Dorfman—who covered the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)