Customer Reviews

The Devil's Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I spent 33 years at Lehman. As a VP and only a foot soldier, I witnessed from a distance much of what transpired at Lehman. I saw Dick, Chris, Joe, et al. "grow up" in the business. I saw and heard much of the yelling and screaming and phone tossing and banging on the desks over the years. Until, we became more civilized as we got down to the business of "one firm" and making money. While reading The Devil's Casino I enjoyed being able to match the faces to most if not all of the characters. I am in no position to pass judgment on anyone, nevertheless it does not diminish my disappointment in the actions by many of those I knew so well.
I'd like to share two anecdotes about Chris Pettit. In one of his town hall meetings he said to the sales and trading team, and I'm paraphrasing, Come in each day write a few tickets, make some money and if your not being productive at 4:30 pm go home to your family get a good nights rest and come in the next morning ready to do it again. Don't rush out an by the Ferrari and the home in the Hamptons just yet. Another and more personal anecdote occured during the 1987 stock market crash. As horrible as Oct 19, Black Monday, was for me, Tueday Oct 20, 1987 was horrific. I was responsible for funding the Money Market business. We were short prior to the crash in a rising interest environment. Until the Fed came in and provided liquidity forcing interest rates much lower. We had to scramble to cover our shorts and even got long the market. We needed to finance these positions when many repo customers and banks were running for the hills. Nevertheless we got the job done and successfully funded the firm. At 6 pm that evening as the dust was clearing I felt a hand on my shoulder and as I looked up there was Chris Pettit saying to me "good job". Senior management should never have left the trading floors. The ivory tower did not suit them. I'm sure things would have been different. The book was a quick and fun read. Life goes on.

I bought this book after watching the author on Imus In the Morning. He had read the book and raved about it several times on shows after the interview.

Not having any direct or indirect knowledge about Lehman Bros, I had no idea how accurate the author portrayed its downfall. I read the book because it promised to be a captivating and entertaining account of high powered people being brought down thanks to greed and hunger for power.

The first three quarters of the book were well written and easily comprehended by anyone, regardless of their familiarity with stocks, bonds, and all the rest. However, the last 50 or so pages were more obscure and far less interesting to the average reader. It almost seemed as if the author just wanted to pad the book's length and/or was anxious to bring it to an end.

What really threw me was the author's Note About the Sources at the end. She used an old tape recorder for her many interviews, and then had to re-interview some of the same people because of its faulty performance. She acknowledged even having "bungled" the operation of her replacement recorder.

This kind of sloppiness for a first time writer might be understandable, but Vicky Ward is not a beginning writer. Her credentials include investigative reporting, so you would think she would have been better prepared before setting off to write a major book on a major event.

She says she "had no idea of what it takes to write a book." After digesting these caveats, I realized that what I had just read may or may not be totally accurate and frankly I felt cheated by all the hype this book received.

This book is long on gossip and short on facts. More important, it offers irrelevant conjecture rather than any kind of insight based on what happened at Lehman Brothers. I've been eagerly reading many of the books on the financial crisis and this is the worst so far. Even Lawrence McDonald's book on Lehman, which was bloated with insignificant details, delivered more. Don't waste your time. There are too many other good books out there ranging from the well-known (Too Big To Fail) to the more obscure (Uncontrolled Risk).

I've always enjoyed reading Vicky's articles and comments when she's on TV. And when she claims to have had access to private notes written by the very Lehman principals at the heart of the fiasco, it looked like a "must read"...

I first read the Vanity Fair excerpt (about the travails of being a Lehman wife). It's interesting and amusing (in a Page 6 kind of way), and I assumed the whole book would be more of the same. It does seem that most of the culprits (and their wives and families) have been permanently disgraced and are no longer welcome as VIP members of exclusive foundations, clubs, and charities. However since they still have the multi-million dollars (in some cases hundreds of millions), it's hard to be very sympathetic.

Unfortunately, most of the book seems to be a rehash of several other books (esp. Charlie Gasparino's) that are already out there. I find the whole Lehman mess hard to understand (though I think I have figured out most of it), and didn't find this book's explanations particularly clear.

To be fair, she does give credits to these books in the appendix and footnotes, and I suppose many readers of this book haven't and won't read any others.

I agree with some other observations that the book seems to have been rushed to print before the whole Lehman fiasco fades from memory. The Valukas Lehman Chapter 11 Examiner's report (released after this book came out) gives many more details on all the Lehman financial shenanigans. And, since most of them though dubious were actually legal, one suspects this won't be the last messy bankruptcy to have a bunch of books written about it....

I also read the Vanity Fair article and was really looking forward to reading it.I'm somewhat disappointed. The author made me wonder about her perceptions from the getgo..actually the bookjacket, when Huntington is referred to as a "middle class" town. It is anything but middle class. Upper middle class with pockets of huge wealth is more like it. It might not be important except so much of the culture of Lehman Brothers, according to her, was based on the Huntington mafia. Pettit, Tucker and Lessing grew up there as well as living there as adults. So, it would have been nice is that area was portrayed more accurately. Also I expected more in the way of how Tucker and Pettit became estranged. It was such an important relationship. Anyway, it's a good read, but did not live up to the excitement I felt reading VF

Lehman's fall was catastrophic and the firm's story before the mortgage conflagration was epic. Unfortunately for those waiting for a well written piece of serious journalism covering it, this is another, however better connected and stylish, version of the MacDonald book. Ward clearly was seduced by senior members of the firms previous administration and they employ her to tell the story of how righteous the firm was before Fuld and Gregory. It doesn't take a historian to know that the modern history of the firm begins with Fuld. The author, Ward, is a so very charming, well-spoken, seductive and snarky--catnip to the chat shows but she tends to dismiss, ignore or mis-attribute the astounding success through the 80s and 80s , instead casting it in the salacious light of planes, shopping trips, spouses and gossip. WHICH--would make a great book for the average People Magazine reader. For anyone with more than a passing interest in the business world it is not.

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I read the excerpt from The Devil's Casino in Vanity Fair and was intrigued by the different spin on the Lehman story. Vicky Ward tells an amazing, insightful tale of the history of the corporate culture and the people that made Lehman what it was. After finishing The Devil's Casino, one thing seemed very obvious...Lehman's fall was inevitable and it was a long time coming. What a great read!

...so very wrong, at once-great Lehman Brothers. Ward writes an interesting and readable report of the Lehman saga, from the 1970's to its bankruptcy in October, 2008, which nearly brought the US's economic system down with it. From Dick Fuld, once president of the firm, to its 28,000 employees, every one associated with Lehman was badly hurt by the company's demise.

Ward doesn't spare feelings in her well-researched book. She writes about the rivalries in Lehman management, as well as the wasting of money on corporate perks and bonuses. She seems to have interviewed most of the upper management team, as well as others in the NY financial community. Many people, from company employees to stockholders, lost large sums of money. It's not easy to understand how big money/big players can be so cavalier with the sums they were playing with on a daily basis. Ward makes it slightly more understandable, but nothing can make it more moral.

I was at Lehman Brothers for 17 years, right up to the end. Vicky Ward's book is a gathering of gossip from sources who are bitter about the way they were treated by Joe Gregory. She loses all credibility when she gets really basic stuff wrong: the year of the firm's 150th anniversary, the location of the New Jersey headquarters (Hoboken? Really? She couldn't have asked anyone who ever workd there, and she mentions it a few times.) I know the people she quotes by name (I won't name them here) and their assessments of Joe Gregory are suspect at best. But it's Ward's assessment I find most troubling. She describes him as toxic at one point, referring to her own impression of him. An impression formed strictly on the basis of what other people say. It's interesting that those other people -- the only ones who let her quote them -- come off better than anyone else. Hmmm ... coincidence?

I also saw the hype on TV and bought the book. It doesn't live up to the hype but it does provide some insight. If she has all this inside information, including secret diaries, she either didn't share it or the information isn't a "blockbuster" like she portrays when promoting the book. There probably are better books out there but after this one I'm burned out on the subject.