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job for that guy!’ ”
    Pettit was blunt and honest with people, and revered for it. He also had a knack for spotting talent. Jim Vinci was an accountant for what was then Coopers & Lybrand and had been hired to update Lehman’s antiquated operational systems. He had a reputation for being mean, pig-headed, and tough--and knew it. He had never met Pettit when he was summoned to his office in the mid -1980s, when Pettit was Fuld’s number two.
    “I was six months into my tenure there,” Vinci recalls. “He calls me into his office, and he says, ‘Jim? I’ve heard you’ re the biggest asshole we’ve ever hired.’
    “I was thinking, ‘Okay, this is going to be a good meeting. . . . I think I can probably go back to my old job . . .’ And then Pettit says, ‘ But I’ve also heard that you’ re one of the brightest people we ‘ve ever hired.’ He added, ‘I came across your sort in the military. And so what I’ m going to do is save you. You’ re going to come work for me. ’” Vinci quickly morphed into Pettit’s chief of staff.
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    Pettit remained untainted—or so it seemed for many years—by his swelling paycheck. His four children all attended the same public school he had attended in Huntington. The moment he got home he’d rush to help them with their homework.
    “We would have all the kids coming over—their parents would drive them over—because he was the only one who could figure out our chemistry homework,” says Lara. “And he’d be doing this at eight o’clock at night, right after he got back from work, trying to sit with a text book, figuring it out.” He rarely missed a game played by any of his children. “I remember him running to catch the last quarter, his tie flying behind him—he was late because he’d been caught in traffic on the way home from the office,” says Mary Anne. Once he arrived, everyone knew he was there because he shouted and cheered louder than any other parent.
    On weekends he hung out with his family and with the Tuckers, the Lessings, and sometimes the Gregorys. Occasionally the Fulds, Dick and his beautiful blonde wife Kathy, came out from their apartment in the city. “Be on your best behavior, because my boss is coming,” he’d say to the children, who remembered liking Dick and Kathy Fuld. “She was so pretty,” says Lara.
    Dick took photographs of them all sitting in the Pettits’ backyard with the children and their pets: two golden retrievers and two cats.
    The romance of Dick and Kathy Fuld was by now part of Lehman lore. Kathleen Bailey, a statuesque blonde, the youngest of eight Catholic siblings, had been hired in the 1970s to work on the sales desk. Fuld had not wanted to hire her. “She’s too pretty—she’ ll distract someone and marry them and will be no use to the firm,” he had said.
    He was partly right. “We all pretended not to notice that when Dick traveled for work Kathy would be going, too, but no one was fooled,” recalls Paul Newmark. They got married on September 24, 1978, the day after Fuld was made partner. Kathy converted to Judaism for her husband, and the couple had three children, Jacqueline and Chrissie, twins, and Richie. To the amusement of the Lehman staff, once they were married Dick called his wife “Fuld.”
    Pettit’s simple lifestyle was a dramatic contrast to that of most of his Lehman peers, the majority of whom in the early 1980s were on LBKL’s banking side. They were men with last names like Gleacher, Altman, Rubin, Solomon, and Schwarzman. They were famous for their brains, their smooth talk, and their tough negotiating skills; but most of all they were guys who’d made money—lots of it (although
they
believed there was much more to be made, and in many cases, they were right). They had multiple houses, large domestic staffs, and as they got richer, many of them traded in the first wife for a younger one.
    Pettit took all this in and told Mary Anne, “I only want to do this for 10