Vicky Ward Likes to Tell Icky Stories

Someone with a masters degree in English from Cambridge University, like Vicky Ward, has no business talking to Imus, a master cowboy. But this unlikely duo found common ground in their mutual appreciation for salacious stories, like the one Ward tells in her book, The Devil’s Casino, about the bigwigs at the new defunct Lehman Brothers. Just how she came into the icky details of drugs and backstabbing is a subject of great interest itself.

She received a call one day asking if she was the Vicky Ward working on a book about Lehman, and quickly said yes. “Well, you need to see some documents I have,” said the voice on the other end of the line. This person also told Ward they would write the “definitive story of Lehman” themselves, but feared it would spell disaster for his career.

“I didn’t know what he was going to hand over,” she said, but agreed to meet this man by herself, at 7am on a Saturday morning, someplace 90 minutes outside Manhattan.

Though she was a bit nervous, Ward’s a tough cookie, having dealt with mercenaries in Africa and received death threats in the past. “I had done enough due diligence on this guy, and I knew he was legit,” she told Imus. “He had actually worked at Lehman. The chances of me ending up dead in a ditch were about .5 percent. But, you never know.”

The risk was surely worth the reward, as the documents handed over to Ward were invaluable firsthand accounts of the last 25 years at Lehman Brothers, kept by senior members of its staff.

“The diaries were commissioned in the hope that everyone would remember things that one man wanted them to remember,” she said, referring to Joe Gregory, the number two guy at the firm. The result was not what he had in mind, nor was it anything he wanted to go public.

“They wrote down stories of backstabbing and betrayal,” said Ward. The diaries also divulged tales of rampant rule-breaking, competitiveness, and lying that dated back to the 1970s.

And not much has changed since Lehman’s collapse in 2008, and the undoing of other large firms like Bear Stearns: just last week, the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with knowingly selling bad mortgages to clients for the profit of a hedge fund. Goldman insists they were under no obligation to tell their customer what they knew.

“Really, what we should see in the financial reform bill, it should stop bankers from making immoral choices,” said Ward, who knows of several “boutique banks” that are now cautioning employees to use better judgment.

It raises the age-old question of whether morality can be legislated. If that’s the case, the entire cast of the Imus in the Morning program is in even more trouble than Wall Street.

-Julie Kanfer