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that for us.”
    The Ponderosa Boys were driven, competitive risk takers, unafraid of peers with better resumes and sharper suits—and they were completely united. Between 1984 and 1995 they were the architects of what would become the new Lehman Brothers. Their tiny division fought for its life and grew into an investment bank whose values would reflect, for a short while, what those men dreamed of creating: a firm that encouraged a militaristic loyalty and a hardscrabble resourcefulness exemplified by the credo “The Trader Knows Best” and a selfless embrace of the “one firm” mantra.
    In 1980, as they looked around Wall Street and saw the excesses of the era, Tucker and Pettit made a pledge to one another—they swore they would never turn into assholes if they made money.
    They would be unique. They would be the good guys of Wall Street.

Chapter 3

The Captain

“Team,” “team,” “team” . . . I’ m not sure Chris Pettit uttered a sentence that didn’t mention the word.

    —Ronald A. Gallatin, former Lehman partner

A pickup basketball game delivered Chris Pettit from the Vietnam War. He had served nearly three of his required eight years of military service after graduating from West Point and hoped to eventually study medicine. He had received two bronze stars for valor while in Vietnam. He piloted a small motorboat for the Mobile Assistance Training Team, and his wife, Mary Anne Pettit, remembers his letters describing the fear he felt as he trolled up and down the river with the Vietcong watching from both banks. He believed he would die at any moment.
    After six months in Vietnam, Pettit was ready to go home. His good friend and high school lacrosse rival, Lieutenant Ray Enners, had been killed in an ambush, and the futility of teaching military maneuvers to the South Vietnamese was wearing on him. He wanted to go back to Long Island, back to his wife.
    In tenth grade, he’d started dating Mary Anne Mollico, a pretty, auburn-haired cheerleader and gymnast at Huntington High School, where Pettit had been a top athlete and scholar. They married six years later, in 1967. Though they were poor, Mary Anne regarded their marriage as a “fairy tale.” Chris was, it seemed to those who knew him then, a prince of a man. There was something about him, they recall, that held your attention—when he looked at you, it was as if he saw straight into your soul. He was a man other men and women instinctively followed.
    Pettit had chosen West Point over Harvard because it offered a salary, and he knew his family needed the income. Additionally, Pettit wanted to play for the West Point lacrosse coach, James F. Adams, who was a legend in the sport. At West Point, Pettit was the academy’s leading scorer and team captain, and was twice named to the All-American team. He graduated with honors in 1967, the year General Westmoreland declared U.S. victory in Vietnam. After two and a half years of training at the Nike Hercules Missile Battery Site in Zweibrucken, Germany, Pettit was shipped off to Vietnam.
    When Mary Anne received a telegram at their home in Huntington, New York, in May 1970, she assumed the worst. She and Chris had planned to spend his upcoming R&R together in Hawaii, and Mary Anne now feared that that wasn’t going to happen. Her hands shook as she opened the envelope, and read: “Captain Pettit has suffered a severe hematoma to his right thigh, and it ‘s traveling toward his heart. We have to Medevac him to Japan.”
    It was only a bruise—a nasty bruise that felt as if he’d broken his femur, but still only a bruise. He’d caught a knee from another player while fighting for a loose basketball at district headquarters in Vietnam, and a week later was in Japan being diagnosed by Captain Marvel, a marvelously named Army doctor who assured him, “We’ ll fix you.”
    But Pettit didn’t want to be fixed—at least, not in order to return to combat in a war he no longer believed in. He wanted