Free The Devil's Casino by Vicky Ward Page B

Hill.
----
    The appointments had come about almost organically. Fuld was the head of the toughest traders in Shearson Lehman while his counterpart in banking, Hill, had shone among all the bankers. Hill was in the mold of the famous Lehman bankers of yore. He was known to be one of the toughest fighters on the Street. Immaculately dressed, his hair slicked back, Hill was the ultimate smooth -talking barracuda as banker.
    One former Shearson Lehman executive says: “If Tom Hill were not actually as good a banker as he was, he still would have been hired by Central Casting. He absolutely looked the part. He went to the right schools, had the right physical build—in every way, shape, or form, this was your classic investment banker. He knew everybody from business school, knew everybody from the country club.”
    Hill’s sublime arrogance left many people cold, if not mortally wounded. Many sources say he has since matured into one of the most effective and liked investment bankers on Wall Street (an impression confirmed by this author who met with Hill twice). But back then he was young and hard -edged. A mutual friend once sent a young Harvard MBA to be interviewed by Hill, who reportedly told the young man he clearly did not have the “drive and energy” required to be a success in investment banking since he was making only $200,000 a year at his current job.
    Hill came by his arrogance honestly. A senior Lehman executive says, “Tom went from being a very, very good cutthroat—because that’s what you’ re supposed to be as a mergers and acquisitions banker—to actually running the investment banking area.” It was Hill who drafted the blueprint with both the Shearson Lehman board and the Amex board that branded the Lehman divisions as “one firm.”
----
    In an effort to show that this realignment was not mere lip service, once Hill and Fuld were appointed co-heads of Lehman in 1990 (Hill was responsible for banking; Fuld for fixed income with Chris Pettit as COO ), Hill built one office next to Fuld’s on both the trading floor and another on the banking floor. The goal was to cement the idea of Shearson Lehman as one firm, with no more feuds between the bankers and the traders.
    And for a while it worked, in part because Dick Fuld needed it to work. He knew he had to learn what Tom Hill knew, how to
be
him, if he was ever to make it to the top echelons of Wall Street.
    Over the next two years, according to one insider, Fuld studied Hill so intensely “he should have been given a postgraduate degree in learning how to become Tom Hill. He had studied and studied and studied Tom Hill. If you walked into a meeting in Dick’s office between 8:30 and 10:00 in the morning, Tom would always be sitting there, they would both have their nail clippers out, and they would both be filing and clipping their nails at almost exactly the same time.
    “I really believe that if Tom had regular bowel movements at 9:15 in the morning, and that’s what an investment banker’s supposed to have, [Fuld] would have followed him to the men’s room.
    “And as bright as Tom is, I don’t really think he believed—understood—that he was really like an animal in the zoo that was being studied. Dick was able to take mannerisms that he saw in Tom; he was able to take the essential personality.”
    These were lessons Fuld knew were essential for him to learn if he was one day going to lead an investment bank of his own. And to do that, he’d have to get rid of Shearson and American Express—and Tom Hill and Chris Pettit.

Chapter 6

The Phoenix Rises

Do you honestly think, given what you know about Dick
    Fuld, that he tried to save my job? Of course he didn’t. He
    needed me gone.

    —J. Tomlinson Hill, Vice Chairman of the Blackstone Group

O ne of the biggest challenges Dick Fuld, Chris Pettit, and the other senior people at Lehman embraced during their years under Shearson and American Express was not just to protect their