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Glucksman liked Chris Pettit, either. Pettit had joined the firm in 1977. As a former military man, Glucksman liked recruiting from the military. Pettit, with his commanding demeanor and distinguished military resume, was a natural fit.
    Tucker, Gregory, and Lessing—all seen as “Pettit’s men”—benefited from Pettit’s rise even though Pettit had joined the firm long after Gregory. The son of a lithograph printer, Gregory had never imagined he would end up on Wall Street. He’d been recruited by a family friend way back in 1968, and he’d spent his summers there as an intern in his teens.
    Steve Lessing was the youngest of the group. He joined in 1980.
    They all watched in awe as Pettit, with zero financial background, shot up through LCPI’s ranks. Pettit was made head of LCPI sales in 1980 and partner in 1982. He was now essentially the deputy to Fuld, with whom he got on very well.
    Newmark recalled that the partnership of Fuld and Pettit worked well in the early 1980s, particularly while Glucksman watched over both of them.
    “It was the type of firm in the eighties that you thought couldn’t be any better. It was Glucksman, it was Fuld, it was Pettit, it was a team,” Newmark said. “Lehman Brothers in those days was a team. And the team worked together, and we were all successful. We all got paid.”
    Tucker became Pettit’s deputy in sales while Lessing, a salesman, rose to be Tucker’s deputy; Gregory worked in mortgage securities in the 1970s and rose to become head of high-yield bonds and, in the 1990s, of fixed income.
    Gregory was always considered to be bright, although also unusually impetuous and emotional for a banker. He was sometimes seen openly crying in the office, which he tried to hide, and sometimes seen losing his temper, which he didn’t attempt to hide. He was, in those days, very much a Pettit man, constantly mocking the more taciturn Fuld. “Joe used to be considered a loose cannon,” recalls Robert “Bob” Genirs, a partner during this period. He remembers Fuld in particular shaking his head at some of the things Gregory either said or did. “Dick confided in me at times that he was skeptical of Joe,” says Genirs.
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    Before work each weekday morning, the Ponderosa Boys would stop off at a gym in lower Manhattan, just a short walk from their office, and, alongside business competitors from Goldman Sachs (including its future CEO , Jon Corzine, and Robert Giordano, its co-chief economist), run on treadmills and lift weights. They took pride in being the first through the doors of that gym, and were often greeted with the
Bonanza
theme music as they walked in. Liz Neporent, who was a trainer at the gym, had coined the nickname for the bunch, and assigned each of them a character from the show. “Tommy was the good-looking one—
Adam
; Steve was
Hoss
, and Joe, for obvious reasons was
Little Joe
. ” She said Chris, “the leader . . . always the first in, was
Pa
. ”
    Neporent came up with the idea because Lessing, the chubbiest of the group, was always the most reluctant to “do what he was told” when it came to personal fitness. While the others ran and lifted competitively, pushing each other, Lessing was often strolling on the treadmill. Occasionally, though, he’d crank it up to full speed for about a minute and yell, “Come on!” as he ran and “Yee-haw! Yee-haw!”
    Those screams were what gave Neporent her
Bonanza
theme: It sounded as if he was rounding up cattle.
    Neporent remembers that the four men were, by far, the most generous members of the gym. “Other bankers would give us a card with $20 in it for a holiday tip. These guys gave us thousands of dollars. They never knew it, but we really relied on their Christmas bonus to live. And sometimes if they called us out to their homes for a personal training session, they’d send a limo to pick us up. I remember stepping into this limo while my neighbors were gawping. No one else did anything like