On September 11, one company lost 658 employees in a single morning.
Not one person who was at their desk survived.
The ones who were not at their desks spent the next five years working to feed the families of the ones who were.
The company was Cantor Fitzgerald. A bond brokerage. Floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower. The plane hit between 93 and 99. Everyone above the impact was cut off. Nobody above the impact came down.
Cantor had 960 employees in New York. 658 were in the office that morning. All 658 died.
The chairman, Howard Lutnick, was not there. He was late. It was his five-year-old son's first day of kindergarten, and he had walked the boy to the classroom door.
His driver came into the classroom. A plane has hit the Trade Center.
Lutnick's younger brother Gary, 36, worked on the 104th floor. His best friend Doug Gardner, 39, was on the 105th. His sister Edie's morning meeting had been canceled. She was the only one of the three siblings not on her way in.
Gary called Edie from the 104th floor, after the plane hit. He told her he loved her. He told her to tell Howard. The smoke was coming in.
Then the line went dead.
Lutnick spent that day and night at the hospitals, going from bed to bed, looking at faces, looking for his people. He did not find any of them. There were none to find.
In the first days, the company did something that got it attacked from every direction.
It stopped the paychecks.
There was no company. Two thirds of it was dead. The trading floor was gone. The office was a hole in the sky. There was no revenue to pay anyone with. Lutnick said so, publicly, and the reaction was brutal. A CEO who had lost his own brother was being called heartless on national television.
Four days after the attack, on September 15, he went on Larry King Live, still in pieces, and made a promise in front of the country.
Twenty-five percent of the company's profits, for the next five years, to the families of the 658. And ten years of health insurance.
He was ridiculed for it. How does a company that no longer exists pay anybody anything, let alone make promises?
Here is what the survivors did.
Forty-seven hours after the towers fell, Cantor was back trading U.S. Treasury bonds. Through its London office and an electronic platform, run by technical staff who had walked in from the street. The bond market reopened on September 13 and Cantor was on it, because if there were no profits, there would be nothing to give.
Roughly 300 people had survived. They went back to work in borrowed offices, at borrowed desks, next to empty chairs. Some of them had lost a brother, a wife, a fiance, a father, on the same floor they had worked on.
They worked anyway. For five years.
Edie Lutnick took over the Relief Fund, seeded with a million dollars of her brother's money three days after the attack. She sat at a desk twenty hours a day writing checks by hand. Thousands of them. To widows. To parents. To new mothers whose husbands would never see the baby.
Five years later, the promise was kept. Roughly 180 million dollars went to the families. The health insurance ran for the full ten.
And they did not stop.
Every September 11 since, Cantor Fitzgerald has given away its entire revenue for the day. Every dollar the firm makes on the anniversary. Employees give their day's pay on top. They call it Charity Day. Some years it raises twelve million dollars in one day.
The people who were not at their desks that morning have spent twenty-five years working for the ones who were.
Gary Lutnick was 36 years old. His brother posted a photograph of him yesterday, on the 25th anniversary, and wrote that Gary was killed for being an American and going to work.
He is the Secretary of Commerce of the United States now. He still runs the fund.
658 people.
Nobody above the fire came down.
The ones below it have been carrying them ever since. 🇺🇸