Cantor emerges from terror attack crisis

JUST A few weeks before last 11 September, Howard Lutnick threw a big party in the English countryside to celebrate his 40th birthday. The chief executive of American broker Cantor Fitzgerald traditionally spends his summers in the UK, away from the oppressive heat and humidity of Manhattan in August - and this was an occasion for colleagues from both sides of the Atlantic to mingle and chat away from the pressures of business.

Many guests came from the London office in Tower Hill and others flew from New York where Cantor's headquarters could be found - on the 101st, 103rd, 104th and 105th floors of the World Trade Centre's North Tower.

It was the last time that staff in London saw many of those who worked in New York. Cantor Fitzgerald lost more of its people in the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers than any other single company, ensuring a deeply unenviable place in the history of that day - 658 of the 1,000 traders and support staff who worked for the firm in the WTC were killed, including 14 Britons.

Of those who survived, only a handful escaped the building. The lives of others were saved because they decided to fetch breakfast from a deli outside, or because, like Howard Lutnick - who had taken the early part of the morning off to escort his children to kindergarten - they had appointments elsewhere in Manhattan.

Eight months on, the London branch of the company has overcome its deep shock to focus instead on raising funds for the victims' families. This month, staff aim to generate $1m (£686,000) through the Race-A-Million campaign - partly by way of an auction at the ultra-glamorous Monaco Grand Prix on Sunday - money that will be matched by Lutnick and Lee Amaitis, chief executive at the Tower Hill office, out of their own pockets.

Indeed, that London office in America Square has played a vitally important role in the aftermath of 11 September, as a focal point for grieving relatives in those first few weeks, and as a powerhouse for the fundamental rebuilding of the company.

'We watched on television just as soon as the first plane hit,' said Amaitis, 'and then tried to call, but couldn't get through. Our guys were up so high - I knew pretty much everyone who died, we were very close to them. My best friend was in that building. We went into survival mode. It felt like we were under attack, even here. What was incredible was that nobody asked what they had to do, they just did it. Our trading systems remained open and probably in the first 15 minutes, or half an hour, transactions were still going on. At that time we were still working with a glimmer of hope, that everybody was maybe going to be okay - but when I saw those towers go down, I knew our guys were gone.'

The challenge from a business point of view was to re-route all trading connections lost in Manhattan back through London and Asia, via the internet and through other corporate and banking systems. 'We had a back-up tool in the States, but no people. We had to get everybody here to quickly learn the US side of the business, in terms of systems and operations, and connect a back office in a single day. I guess we had 70% of our clients connected within 24 hours.'

Staff in Tower Hill worked for two days without sleep, while traders' partners and spouses set up makeshift offices and manned telephones in London to search hospitals and crisis centres in New York. Lower Manhattan phone lines were still down at that point, so relatives in the US called London for help.

'There were some very tough calls,' added Amaitis. 'I wasn't allowed to travel to New York because I was needed here and because flying was difficult then. I would sit here late and make calls to the US to see how people were doing, specifically to the families I was closest to. All I could say was that things were going to be as good as they could be, and that we'd do our best to help them.'

More than 1,300 children lost a parent who worked for Cantor and, initially, the US Press rounded on the company for halting salary payments within four days of the attack. Amaitis defended the decision: 'It wasn't that we weren't going to pay people, but that we were thinking of better ways to get money to them. We immediately decided as a company that we'd give 25% of our profitability to them over five years and set up a relief fund over and above that.'

The City rallied to help Cantor, with 'spectacular' financial donations and crucial business support from clients. The firm received personal cheques from members of the British public, too, and £10 notes folded into envelopes. 'We weren't a well-known firm in the UK,' said Amaitis, 'and I guess we'd be pegged as City boys or Wall Street boys who play hard. We've been labelled as bullies before - we're in a very competitive world. But we were a very young firm too. Most of our guys in the WTC were between 30 and 40. People saw those devastated families and children and felt close to us.'

The $1m raised this month will be added to the $18m already in the Relief Fund pot in New York. Each family gets $5,000 and each child $1,500 in a continuous cycle, just as soon as the funds are there.

In Manhattan, Lutnick's sister Edie runs the fund-raising side of Cantor Fitzgerald with a core staff of 12 volunteers, though '350-400' have helped out at some stage, including some who have come from Europe specifically to offer their services.

People do what they are good at. One volunteer waits outside the David Letterman talk show each night and asks celebrities to sign shirts and posters to be auctioned on internet site e-Bay. 'She's got Tom Cruise, Cameron Crowe and Matthew Broderick,' said Edie proudly. 'It's fantastic each time a donation comes in - it's like a holiday for us.'

But New York starts to feel isolated too, she said, 'because people elsewhere move on, and we don't. The majority of New Yorkers wake up every day and 11 September is part of their existence.'

For Edie, the counselling she has offered to relatives and the enthusiasm she brings to fund-raising come very much from the heart. Howard escaped the WTC attack, but their brother Gary, who also worked for Cantor, did not. He called Edie from his office just after the first plane hit, to say goodbye. A memory like that, you feel, provides all the incentive to raise as much money as possible and all the empathy one needs to deal sensitively with relatives.

As she said: 'I'm one of them, so I know exactly what they're going through. And I know that the pain hasn't gone away.'