CHAPTER 1 / "Great Men"
Even among the great Wall Street firms--Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch--Lazard Freres & Co. stood apart, explicitly priding itself on being different from, and superior to, its competitors. For 157 years, Lazard had punched above its weight. Unlike other Wall Street banks, it competed with intellectual rather than financial capital and through a hard-won tradition of privacy and independence. Its strategy, put simply, was to offer clients the wisdom of its Great Men, the finest and most experienced collection of investment bankers the world had ever known. They risked no capital, offering only the raw Darwinian power of their ideas. The better the idea, and the insights and tactics required to achieve the result contemplated by it, the greater was Lazard''s currency as a valued and trusted adviser--and the larger were the piles of money the Great Men hauled out of the firm and into their swelling bank accounts. The lucky few men--yes, always men--at Wall Street''s summit have always been portrayed as ambitious and brilliant on the one hand and unscrupulous and ruthless on the other. But the secret history of Lazard Freres & Co., the world''s most elite and enigmatic investment bank, twists parts of this conventional wisdom into knots of unfathomable complexity. The Great Men chronicled herein amassed huge fortunes--to be sure--but they refused to admit to anyone, least of all to themselves, that their pursuit of these riches led to relentless infighting. Instead they spoke, without irony, of being part of a Florentine guild and of advice whispered to heads of state and to CEOs of the world''s most powerful corporations, while all the time attempting to preserve the mythical special idea that was Lazard. They also, to a person, craved an equally elusive chimera: the assurance that somehow, despite everything, they alone had remained virtuous.