Six Months Later

Six Months Later – March 10 2002 – Adam Geller, AP Business Writer
© Copyright 2002 Adam Geller All Rights Reserved.

NEW YORK — Tacked to the wall, just over Charlie Lechner’s shoulder, is a small photo of the man he calls “really, really special.”

It is the closest Lechner will get to bringing back Mario Nardone, the best friend who worked beside him on the agency bonds desk until the morning of Sept. 11.

Lechner now looks out over a buzzing new trading floor spread across a space the size of a football field where one of every seven people is a new hire — several hired and trained by Lechner himself.

This is the place Lechner and his co-workers at Euro Brokers Inc. have arrived at, six months after they fled Tower 2 of the World Trade Center — holding tight to memories but focused on moving their company forward.

“We want it,” Lechner says, explaining his company’s resolve to resurrect itself. “This is what we do, we’re brokers. And as long as there’s business out there we’re going to go out and get it.”

There are thousands of other Wall Street workers who know firsthand the task set before Lechner and his colleagues. They work for scores of companies displaced from the World Trade Center, including a relatively small number of firms whose ranks accounted for most of those who died in the terrorist attacks.

Monday will mark a half year since Sept. 11 and, for the companies that were very nearly wiped out, the months have yielded feats of recovery that would have sounded like business fairy tales in the days after the disaster.

In the past few weeks, Cantor Fitzgerald, with 658 employees killed in the attack, announced that its eSpeed subsidiary earned its first quarterly profit ever. In late January, Sandler O’Neill and Partners — back in business despite losing 66 of its 148 Trade Center workers — reopened its equity desk and was flooded with buy and sell orders.

The parent company of Euro Brokers, which lost 61 from a roster of 309, recently announced that its business in November — the most recent month for which it has reported results — had rebounded to nearly 90 percent of the monthly volume before the attack.

“I can tell you, I’m looking forward to the day when I can put out a press release that says: ‘I’m done’,” said Michael Corasaniti, who has interviewed more than 500 job applicants since he was hired in October to rebuild a decimated research department at Keefe Bruyette & Woods.

The interviews have bolstered a department, which numbered 28 people before the attacks, from nine survivors to a roster of 30, with two more to come.

But Corasaniti and other executives, quick to emphasize their companies’ successes, do not pretend that things have returned to the way they used to be. Even six month’s of miracles can’t do that.

“If I were to say 9/11 didn’t affect me, I’d be a liar,” said Gil Scharf, chairman and CEO of Euro Brokers. “It makes you work harder. It makes you work a little differently, and at the end of the day, you have to get back to business.”

Doing so has required people to do things well beyond the scope of a mere job.

When executives at Aon Corp., which lost 175 employees, found new space in midtown Manhattan in late September, they knew it would require sweat to piece together a new office. They just didn’t know how much.

“Because it was difficult to get trucks into New York, we had people loading up the backs of their cars shuttling things into New York City — computers, desktops, laptops and servers,” Aon spokesman Stephen Ban said.

Euro Brokers began its rebuilding effort the Sunday after the attack, when Scharf called his surviving managers to gather in empty office space that would become the company’s new, temporary home in lower Manhattan. They arrived to find military helicopters patrolling overhead. On the ground, soldiers ordered a group of executives to move first in one direction, then another, as they dealt with feared bomb threats.

When the group did make it upstairs, they found a space with a few desks and no computers. A couple of days later, 40 phone lines had been installed. In the old office, there had been 3,000.

In the months that followed, traders worked over the din of demolition crews, who loaded the mangled steel from the Trade Center on to barges just below the new office’s windows. When workers dropped an enormous steel plate into place one morning, the reverberating boom sent frightened workers to the floor, until a few went to the 16th floor windows and assured others it was not another attack.

In the months since, workers at rebuilding firms have moved forward on adrenaline diluted by grief. Aon workers did not attend their last funeral for a dead colleague until Feb. 11. At Euro Brokers, the trading floor turned silent in mid-December when televisions flashed a report that the wife of one of their dead colleagues had committed suicide.

But overlapping the grieving, the adrenaline began to produce results. On the Euro Brokers’ desk that deals in repossessed Treasury bonds, executive Ed Keslo — who began work at the firm Sept. 10 — gradually began to replace the nine brokers lost from a staff of 20. In January, the desk had its best month ever.

At Keefe Bruyette & Woods, Corasaniti’s analysts resumed putting out the company’s daily e-mail bulletin on Oct. 15. In late November, about three weeks behind schedule, they completed the firm’s quarterly “bank book” — a thick volume containing detailed analysis of bank performance — which has now been issued without interruption for 38 years.

When two Rhode Island banks announced a merger in November, one of them hired Sandler O’Neill as its adviser and the other brought in Keefe.

The accomplishments do not mean the rebuilding is done. Many of the companies are still working out of temporary space in makeshift conditions, and say moving to permanent offices will be one of the leading goals of the coming months. Most still have at least some hiring to do. All still have psychological wounds that require healing.

Passing an arbitrary anniversary date will not solve any of those challenges. But Euro Brokers’ employees have grasped hold of the date as a chance to reinforce their commitment to the family of lost colleagues. On Monday, the firm will donate all brokerage revenues generated by its offices in New York, London, Mexico City and Stamford, Conn. to its relief fund.

“We’ve got a lot of angels looking out for us,” Keslo says. “And we’re going to take them along for the ride.”