Ten years and a lifetime ago, Howard W. Lutnick was a prince of Wall Street. Forty years old, and already the head of a powerful financial house, he could peer down on rivals from his office on the 105th floor of One World Trade Center.
Then — you know the rest. American Airlines Flight 11 struck Tower One. Three out of every four people who worked in New York City for Mr. Lutnick at the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald died that September morning — 658 in all. Among the dead was his younger brother, Gary.
That Howard Lutnick survived was, he concedes, blind luck. Some people died because they happened to be at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Lutnick lived because he happened to be taking his son, Kyle, to his first day of kindergarten.
And so Mr. Lutnick, who ran Cantor Fitzgerald then and, remarkably, still runs it today, became an unusual, and unusually public, 9/11 survivor: the executive who cried on national television and then quickly began making hard-nosed — some said hard-hearted — business decisions. Four days after the attack, with the nation stunned and ground zero smoldering, Mr. Lutnick cut off paychecks to the families of his employees, before anyone even knew just how many had died.
And yet, since those dark days, Mr. Lutnick has defied those who said he and Cantor were finished. He has rebuilt his firm, and then some. And many of those who criticized him at the time — notably, spouses and parents of Cantor employees who had died — now say he did the right thing. By almost any measure, it is a remarkable turnabout. Perhaps more than any other company...
Find out more at http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/the-survivor-who-saw-the-future-for-cantor-fitzgerald/?ref=business
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