Euro Brokers 9/11

The Local Planet – December 20, 2001 – January 2, 2002 Issue
Writers: A.A. Quong and Jessica Ullian

The temporary trading floor at Euro Brokers was humming in late November. Brokers were jumping to their feet and shouting trades into the phones.

It was a lot like business as usual, except for a few things like unpacked boxes and a sign that read “Euro Brokers – Please remember we are guests. Clean up after yourself”

Euro Brokers is a 500 – person international brokerage firm that lost its 84th floor office when the twin towers collapsed. Sixty-one people, nearly a fifth of the New York branch in World Trade Center 2, died.

“We’re trying to get back to routine, but you cant help but be affected,” said Roger Schwed, 43, the company executive vice president and general counsel. “We’re not going to forget the people we lost”.

In his new office in lower Manhattan, in space on loan from Prudential Securities, Schwed said that on September 11, Euro Brokers determined who was alive and who was missing. They set up an emergency hotline and a special in-company web site. In time, they would create a relief fund. They held a company-wide meeting on September 17, and a memorial service on October 8.

People came back to work at their own pace. Some came the next day, others not until the end of November. Those who came back first worked without sleep to find office space and then to set up desks and phones on a makeshift trading floor. “We were setting goals in eight-hour increments’ said Walter Danielsson, 44, who is vice president of technology. “Its not a question of if we could rebuild, but if we would” he explained “Its not an easy thing to decide to walk into the office every day and look at 60 empty chairs.”

Life at Euro Brokers is by turns competitive and jocular. Brokers often go together to bars and bring their families to dinners and basketball games. “We know every detail about everybody,” said T.J. Masonius, 35, a manager in the capital markets and derivatives department.

David Lessing, 39, who works with Masonius, made it out of the tower, but the man who sat next to him at the desk did not. Danielsson used to get coffee every morning with a man whose name he never knew, Masonius worried about the children of his dead friends and colleagues.

“Thanksgiving’ he said ‘was just brutal. All these wives, what do they have to be thankful for?”

In the beginning, Masonius, said, brokers told each other stories of what happened to them that day. Now, on a Friday afternoon when business starts winding down, someone will say, ‘If Woody had been here, he would have done this.” Pictures of lost employees adorn the trading desks. The unspoken rule in the weekly office betting pool is that the winner gives half of his or her share to the Euro Brokers Relief Fund.

“You have a purpose,” said Schwed. “A commitment to making things work for the families of all those who did not survive”.