"The Devil's Casino" is Our Kind of Book
Vicky Ward, author of The Devil’s Casino, shared with Imus today the riveting tale of four best friends from Long Island who rebuilt the now defunct Lehman Brothers up from the ashes in the late 1980s, only to be destroyed years later by its success.
A contributing editor at Vanity Fair and columnist at the Huffington Post, Ward’s goal in writing The Devil’s Casino was to make it appealing and approachable to people outside the financial community. She more than met that objective by focusing on what she called “the heart” of the book: diaries given her by a top-secret, Deep Throat-style source at a coffee shop 90 minutes outside of Manhattan. 
“I got a phone call very early one morning, and a voice said, ‘Are you the Vicky Ward writing a book on Lehman?’” she recalled. She said she was, and the voice replied, “I’ve got some documents you need to see.”
Her “very legitimate” source provided documents that were essentially 20 years worth of memos dictated by Lehman executives who had been planning to write their own memoirs. Never published due to conflicting stories, Ward said their disclosure would have been disastrous for the firm.
“It showed what a weird cult it was,” she said. “You could be fired at this firm for being too clever, you could be fired for looking down at the floor too often, you could be fired for being too fat, in one case.”
The story she tells in The Devil’s Casino is that of four men from the affluent suburb of Huntington, New York, who started out with nothing, no financial training, and rose quickly within the ranks at Lehman and “really kept it together” after it was acquired by Shearson/American Express in 1984. One of them, Chris Pettit, is credited with keeping the “tiny” unit of 450 people at Lehman together during the takeover.
“He was a real leader, the go-to guy on a daily basis,” said Ward. When Lehman was spun out as an independent in 1994, Dick Fuld, who was “nominally” the CEO at the time, saw Pettit as a threat. “He used the three best friends to turn on Chris Pettit,” Ward added. They ousted him in 1996, and he died in an accident a year later.
As for the rigid codes of behavior often imposed at Lehman, Ward said they derived from a “one firm” mantra adopted by Lehman employees when they were fighting against what they saw as the “oppressors” of Shearson/American Express.
“There was a great sort of French Revolutionary spirit,” Ward said. Once Lehman spun out on its own, however, that mentality “turned very dark, and it meant that loyalty was valued over ability.”
One chapter in particular in The Devil’s Casino highlights the tribulations endured by wives of Lehman employees, who were expected to “just grin and bear it,” often giving birth on their own, moving houses on their own, and participating in arduous company-wide events like mountain climbing trips.
But life was no less stressful for their husbands, who were prohibited from disagreeing with the people at the top of the firm. “You can’t run a business without hearing everyone’s different opinions,” said Ward. “It’s a very, very unhealthy way to run a business, and it’s not sustainable in the end.”
It certainly wasn’t: Lehman filed for bankruptcy in 2008, its parts either dissolved or sold off to other investment banks. The story, though wildly entertaining for our purposes, is actually quite sad, in Ward’s opinion.
“When I finished the book and I put my pen down—this is going to sound a bit ridiculous—I almost cried, because I felt like it was such a timeless story in many ways,” she said. “It was a morality tale, and although it was written about Lehman, a subject that’s still very fresh in our minds, it almost could have been written about a group of men in any industry, anywhere. Because it’s really about how what makes you good makes you bad.”
Though he was by no means authorized to do so, Imus offered his impressive guest a job at Fox, saying, “You can do whatever the hell you want.”
-Julie Kanfer
vicky ward 
Reader Comments (3)
i watched your show on fox this A.M. 3-24-10 you had the lady that wrote
the book( The Devil's Casino) Vicky Ward
,then you said maybe fox should hire her
then she said that she could fix coffee for you..NOW you need to
(on camera,have her come walking up to you and serve you a cup of coffee)
it would be GREAT T,V.OR YOU WOULD CATCH ALL KINDS OF HEELL !!!!
im sure your staff came up with this all ready AND you shot it down
HOPE NOT !!!!!!!!!..
impressive guest HOPE 2 see more of her soon ! !
They like Classy, smart and well spoken blondes at fox new,sure 2 see more of her,(USE HER 4 (TALKING) POINTS..