Bleeding Green: The Fall of Fuld

Lehman Employee: Fuld 'Broke Our Heart'

Green -- Lehman's official color -- was reserved for use by Lehman workers and their families; black and blue were for everyone else. Today, more than a third of the scribbles on the portrait are in green. Among the green messages, presumably directed at Fuld: "25,000 unemployed; I hope you are happy," "Your employees bled green for you," "You are a coward" and "You broke our heart."

Other messages were less polite, including some crude interpretations of Fuld's first name.

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Perhaps the most tangible sign that Fuld's star had fallen, however, came with a change of venue -- the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Fuld was "banished" from his corner office in Lehman's Seventh Avenue headquarters and instead moved to a Sixth Avenue building, where he and other Lehman executives who weren't offered jobs at Barclays will continue to work through Lehman's bankruptcy proceedings.

To say that Fuld was in a dramatically different position one year ago would be an understatement roughly the size of Lehman's bankruptcy itself.

Last March, he was named in Barron's list of the world's 30 best CEOs. The magazine dubbed Fuld "Mr. Wall Street," praised him for his passion and recognized him for turning "a bond shop into an elite investment bank."

Under Fuld's stewardship, Lehman's net income increased more than six times over, from $647 million in 1997 to $4.2 billion 10 years later. That year, Fuld himself received more than $70 million in salary, stock options and other compensation, according to the compensation firm James F. Reda and Associates.

He was credited with bringing new success to the 150-year-old firm by expanding the firm's services well beyond bond trading to include work on multibillion-dollar merger deals and asset management, among others.

Fuld "is the most intense person I've ever met in my life," said Bruce Foerster, who served as the head of Lehman's global equities syndicate from 1992 to 1994. "When he walks into a room, it's electric. He's electric."

That electricity could be intimidating.

"You weren't easygoing around Dick Fuld," Foerster said. "You took a couple of extra breaths of air before you started talking to him just so you had some extra oxygen in your brain."

But "the gorilla," as he was known by some, was not too tough to express emotion.

In 2003, when accepting a "Bank of the Year" honor at an awards gala in London, Fuld's voice cracked as he gave an emotion-laden speech, according to the Financial Times newspaper.