New York Observer
Richard Fuld Jr., who recently sold off 16 works of art at Christie's, is not the only former Lehman Brothers executive selling off his assets. The financial firm's former president, Joseph Gregory--who has already sold his apartment at 610 Park Avenue for $4.4 million and the private helicopter that he used to commute to work every day from Huntington, N.Y.--has had no luck getting rid of the eight-bedroom Bridgehampton mansion he placed on the market in September for $32.5 million (half a million dollars less than his 2007 salary), reports Page Six Magazine. And now, desperate to make a profit off the property, Mr. Gregory is even considering renting the mansion in which he has stayed a total of 14 days since buying it in 2006.
"A few years ago, you'd be hard-pressed to find a home like this for rent," Corcoran's Susan McGraw Keber told the magazine. (Mr. Gregory's wife, Niki, doesn't seem too worried; she's reportedly been spending thousands at the Americana Manhasset mall.)
According to this week's New York Magazine, Mr. Fuld and Mr. Gregory were quite close at one time--that is, before Mr. Fuld sat down for lunch in June with a half-dozen of Lehman’s senior investment bankers at the private dining room on the 32nd floor of the firm’s Seventh Avenue headquarters.
From the article:
“I’ve given you fourteen years of earnings. I have one bad quarter. This is how you respond?” Fuld shot back. The veins on his neck popped.
But the bankers pressed their case. Actually, they wanted two heads. They would spare Fuld the indignity of a coup, but they wanted him to fire Joe Gregory, Lehman’s president, and Erin Callan, Gregory’s protégée, whom he’d made CFO and who had been the public, sunny face of Lehman as it spiraled down. Firing Gregory would be personally devastating to Fuld, as the bankers knew. Over three decades at Lehman, the two had rarely sat more than a hundred feet from each other. Professionally, they were complements: Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.
“If it’s not Joe, then it would be you,” said another banker. “And that would be a disaster.”
And so Mr. Fuld got rid of Mr. Gregory. But ultimately it was not enough to save himself--Mr. Fuld was "terminated" in early November--and now he just cannot understand why he has been so "demonized":
“He feels betrayed,” said one friend. At night, Fuld has trouble sleeping. Most of the time, he lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, in one of his five houses. He can wander through the twenty rooms, eight bedrooms, the poolhouse, tennis court, squash court. Mostly, he sits and replays Lehman’s calamitous end. “What could I have done differently?” he thinks. “In certain conversations, what should I have said, what could I have done?” How, he wonders, did it all go so disastrously wrong?
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