The newlyweds had planned for their party to be casual and low-key—cushions on the floor and a buffet. Dorn wore a strapless Missoni dress that was asymmetrical and calf length. Walker—tall, bespectacled, a “cuddly bear,” some friends said—rather typically and charmingly cannot recall what he wore that night.

The last thing the couple wanted was to be perceived as grandiose. In fact, Walker had instructed their friend, party planner Bronson van Wyck, “Just make sure we don’t make it into Page Six,” the gossip page of the New York Post. The public outrage over the $3 million extravaganza hosted by Blackstone Group CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman for his 60th birthday on February 13, 2007, was still echoing throughout New York City. The star-studded, 500-guest event held at the Park Avenue Armory, featuring performances by Rod Stewart (who was paid $1 million) and Patti LaBelle (who sang “Happy Birthday”), had been an ill-timed disaster of self -congratulation: Blackstone’s stock had fallen steadily ever after and was then teetering at $18 per share, nearly half of its value a year earlier. And now, all of Wall Street was suddenly standing on the edge of a precipice, and everyone—especially those in attendance at the Walkers’ party—were acutely aware of it. “We wanted people to come and go when they wanted to, and not force them to sit down for a formal dinner,” Dorn said. The band—a Neil Diamond cover band, Super Diamond—was chosen by Walker in order to keep the mood light.

Just months earlier, on March 17, Bear Stearns had imploded, and was scooped up by JPMorgan Chase, which paid $2 per share (that was eventually elevated to $10 per share with the aid of a $29 billion government nonrecourse loan); the rescue operation had stunned the financial market. Worried eyes were now staring at the next domino in Wall Street’s Big Five: Lehman Brothers. Walker had moved to the bank only two years before from the larger, more capitalized (and therefore safer) Goldman Sachs.

Since March, most of Lehman’s senior management had been working nights and weekends, furiously trying to shore up their balance sheets. That weekend, many of the guests at the Walkers’ “second wedding” had come directly from the Lehman offices on 745 Seventh Avenue at 50th Street. Most, like David Goldfarb, Lehman’s global head of Strategic Partnerships, Principal Investing, and Risk, had met their wives at the office and had simply grabbed their jackets from the backs of their chairs before heading hurriedly, their minds elsewhere, out the door. Even Walker hadn’t been home much recently; on the day of the wedding party, Nancy Dorn had gone to a movie by herself. The June earnings were due in two days. As the new 41 -year-old CFO, Erin Callan, worked on them (she did not attend the party), her colleagues knew they’d be announcing Lehman’s first losses since spinning off from American Express—$2.8 billion. They were deeply concerned.

“Everyone was stressed that night—we felt badly for George,” Goldfarb said. “We were more tired than downbeat. No one at that time had any inkling that we would go down. We just knew we had a lot of work to do.” Despite the tumult, nearly all the core senior management team of Lehman came to the party. Longtime chairman and CEO Dick Fuld was there with his wife of nearly thirty years, Kathy, 56, then the vice chair of the Museum of Modern Art. Sticking close to them were Joe Gregory, Lehman’s president, and his second wife, Niki, a beautiful Greek-born brunette. Then there was the urbane, silver-haired Tom Russo, Lehman’s chief legal officer. Famous for his charm and eloquence, he was nicknamed “the Mayor of Davos” because, as one colleague put it, “he arrives first and leaves last” at the annual financial powerhouse conference in Switzerland. Beneath his twinkling eyes is a steel core—after Lehman Brothers collapsed, in late September, Russo would offer his consolation to Lehman Europe by way of a terse telephone call, in which he told them: “You’ re on your own.”

“Never be fooled by Tom’s charm,” a colleague said. “He’s as tough as anyone when he wants to be.”

The last member of Fuld’s inner circle in attendance that night was Scott Freidheim, whom Fuld looked upon almost as a son. Freidheim, then 41, is the son of former Booz Allen & Hamilton vice chairman and former CEO of Chiquita Brands International, Cyrus Freidheim. Scott was yanked out of Lehman’s investment banking unit in 1996 and appointed managing director, office of the chairman. He quickly rose to the top echelons of the organization, which earned him as many enemies as friends.

Most of the executive committee was there: Hugh “Skip” McGee (the head of investment banking), Herbert “Bart” McDade III (head of equities), and Ted Janulis (mortgages). Also present were Steven Berkenfeld (chairman of the investment banking committee) and John Cecil, the small, earnest former McKinsey director who had risen to become the CFO of Lehman in the late 1990s and who, though he had left Lehman in 2000, was still being paid as a consultant. Also gathered were a large number of senior executives of NeubergerBerman, Lehman’s asset management division, commonly referred to as its “crown jewel.”

Months earlier Joe Gregory had taken Walker aside. “You know, you didn’t have to invite all these people,” he said. “Remember: These are just the people you work with. They are not your friends.”

Gregory was the only person at Lehman who had been at the firm longer than Fuld. Their careers began in the early 1970s when Lehman was one of the leading advisory mergers and acquisitions (M&A) houses on Wall Street, before it became a bond and mortgage shop.

Fuld and Gregory had fought in what became known as “the Great War” of 1983 and 1984, an epic battle for control of Lehman between their professional mentor, the bond trader Lewis “Lew” Glucksman, and Peter G. “Pete” Peterson, the former commerce secretary. A preening sophisticate who dominated luncheons with his prattle, Peterson was widely disliked by the relatively blue-collar traders for his patrician demeanor. Glucksman and his traders won the Great War and ousted Peterson, chiefly because by the mid-1980s the traders were making more money than the advisory bankers aligned with Peterson. But the fight cost the firm dearly. Top banking talent fled and revenues plummeted, making it vulnerable for a takeover by the newly merged entity of American Express Shearson in April 1984. Peterson hadn’t left without implanting a lethal sting. It was greatly in his financial interests to get Lehman sold. In fact, it was greatly in the interests of pretty much all the senior investment bankers to get it sold. This was precisely what happened, as detailed in a 1986 saga chronicled by Ken Auletta in Greed and Glory on Wall Street. Glucksman was offered a $15.6 million noncompete buyout fee (on 4,500 shares). He and most of the other partners took the money and ran.

And Gregory and Fuld began their ascents into the ruling elite of the new Lehman Brothers.

Andrew G.C. Sage II, a former employee, told Ken Auletta, “Bobbie was not much of an investment banker. He wouldn’t know a preferred stock from livestock, but he was a hell of a psychologist.” Under him, Lehman became the gentleman’s banking house.

“The partners at Lehman were all men of stature,” Felix Rohatyn, the banker who kept New York City from the throes of bankruptcy in the 1970s, told Auletta. “They were principals. You dealt with them as owners of a great house. You felt that if there was any such thing as a business aristocracy, and at the same time a highly profitable venture, that was it.”

The firm’s stellar reputation survived Bobbie’s death in 1969. Many of its M&A bankers in the 1970s and early 1980s are still famous, still the icons of their profession. Their ranks included Eric Gleacher, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Peter Solomon, J. Tomlinson “Tom” Hill, Robert Rubin, Roger Altman, and a young Steve Rattner; they all achieved great success—and wealth—after leaving Lehman Brothers. It was infighting—typical in the firm’s last half-century—that brought Lehman low enough to be bought by Shearson American Express in 1983. And through that strange marriage (“Shearson taking over Lehman is like McDonald’s taking over ‘ 21,’ ” a Lehmanite told Bryan Burrough and John Helyar for their 1990 book, Barbarians at the Gate), Lehman stewed. And schemed. Its Lehman Commercial Paper Inc. (LCPI) unit grew to eclipse Shearson’s own department, and provided enough momentum for Lehman Brothers to finally spin out once again, its egos intact.

As for Fuld and Gregory? It had taken immense grit, courage, and a warlike mentality to restore the burnish to the once golden brand. They had defied the naysayers who believed that a tiny bond shop would never survive the Mexican peso crisis of 1994; and they did the same again through the Russian crisis of 1998. They had weathered rumor, had survived scandal, and had even ousted their longtime colleague, T. Christopher Pettit, to preside over a fully fledged global investment bank.

Since Lehman, in their hands, had gone public and had grown from 8,500 employees to 28,000, the stock price had risen by a factor of 16. The partners were all rich. In 2007, Fuld was named CEO of the Year by Institutional Investor magazine in the Brokers and Asset Managers category. The bank was once again competitive, once again a respected force on Wall Street. They weren’t now going to let it go down just because of an asset and housing crisis. They had survived 9/11, when their three floors of offices in the World Trade Center had been destroyed and their headquarters in the nearby World Financial Center badly damaged. They’d been through far worse.

Gregory and Fuld slipped away early. This was not unusual—Fuld had never been much of a party guy. He was famous for showing up at in-house cocktail parties for ten minutes and then leaving to be with his family. “We’ re going to be fine,” Fuld told a stranger who approached him just before he left the party. And if worse came to worst, he believed, the U.S. government wouldn’t let Lehman fail.

We’re going to be fine.

Lehman’s resurgence was led by Dick Fuld—and four men known as “the Ponderosa Boys.” This was a now badly outdated reference to Bonanza, the popular TV series in the early 1960s about an intrepid rancher and his sons, each of them born to a different wife. Lehman’s Ponderosa Boys were T. Christopher “Chris” Pettit, Joseph M. “Joe” Gregory, Thomas “Tommy” Tucker, and Stephen “Stevie” Lessing. Each morning at 5 A.M. they’d meet at Lessing’s house in Laurel Hollow, on Long Island’s north shore, for the 45-minute drive in to Wall Street.

They took turns driving. Chris was the tallest and oldest of the group, the clear leader. Tommy was his sidekick and confidant—his blond, good-looking best friend since kindergarten. Stevie was the youngest—and the chubbiest—but he exuded charm. He’d married well and it showed. Joe was the wild card. A man as nervous as he was voluble, lithe, with long hair, huge glasses, and rope bracelets, Joe looked completely out of place on Wall Street, and in that carpool. He looked like he ought to have been in a rock band, not a bank. He looked like Barry Gibb.

Betsy Schaper, a media publicist who grew up across the street from him, remembers that he was doted on by his parents and was a local heartthrob. “Everyone wanted to date Richie,” she recalled. He was good-looking, straightforward, masculine.

Dick excelled in athletics at Wilbraham & Monson Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts—but otherwise left little impression on the faculty there. “If you’d asked me back then, ‘ Is this a man with burning ambition?’ I would have said absolutely not,” said Schaper.

Fuld next studied at the University of Colorado, and his legacy there had nothing to do with his efforts in the classroom. He stood out mostly for the reckless passion he brought to parties, and for the fierce loyalty he showed his friends, and demanded in return.

Even then, he had grit, and didn’t back down. There is an oft-repeated story of the time he was expelled from his college Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). One officer delighted in tormenting Fuld during weekly inspections about the shine on his shoes. This officer would step on Fuld ’s shoes and then send him back to his dorm to shine them again. During one such inspection, Fuld returned from a second round of shoe polishing to find the officer tormenting a fellow cadet in a similar fashion, even stomping on the young man’s foot until he dropped to the floor in pain.

“Hey, asshole,” Fuld said. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

“Are you talking to me?” the officer asked, astonished.

“Yes,” Fuld said, and the two men started fighting.

After they were separated, Fuld was summoned by his commanding officer. “Do you want to know my side of the story?” Fuld asked.

“No,” came the answer. “There’s only one side to the story.”

With that, Fuld was kicked out of the program for insubordination, thus ending what he had hoped would be a career in the Air Force.

He graduated in 1969, with a degree in international business.

Later that year, Lehman partner Herman Kahn told Paul Newmark, then a senior vice president and treasurer of Lehman Commercial Paper Inc. (LCPI), that the grandson of one of his clients was coming to work at the firm. Newmark was not surprised—such friendly inbreeding had been common practice at Lehman Brothers for a long time.

“My son, my cousin, my . . . you know. Anyone who was a relative could get a job at Lehman Brothers,” Newmark says. “People at Lehman said Dick Fuld’s grandfather was an important man. No one was going to turn down his grandson. And anyway, Dick’s father had accounts at Lehman. That’s how he got the interview.”

Fuld got the job, and was sent to LCPI, which was run by the infamously intimidating head trader Lew Glucksman.

Glucksman would hurl objects across his office when he was in a bad mood, which was quite often. Newmark once saw him rip the shirt off his back in anger—and, on another occasion, throw a 20-pound adding machine. An ex-Naval officer and the son of a lamp manufacturer, Glucksman was increasingly riled by the fact that his unit was generating more than half the firm’s profits, but his traders were openly derided by the investment bankers—a well-born, well-educated, and well-groomed elite comprising most of the firm’s 77 partners, and led by CEO Peter G. Peterson. The bankers looked down on the traders and never paid them as well as they paid their fellow bankers. But as the capital markets grew, so did trading instruments and the opportunity for Glucksman’s division to make even more money, which only increased the tension within the firm.

Glucksman quickly took a liking to Fuld. “Dick was a very bright guy,” recalls Newmark. “If you were a good trader working for Lew Glucksman, you had it made.

“Lew loved people who would sit with him from 6:30 in the morning till 10:00 at night,” Newmark says. Glucksman’s home life had almost entirely evaporated following a divorce, so “people who were willing to spend 14, 15 hours” with him “were the ones who . . . went to the top.” Fuld rose quickly under his mentor.

Fuld and Glucksman were in many ways alike. Both were taciturn, ruthlessly competitive men who swore loudly, and often, in and out of the office. Both thought the most effective tool for managing a trading floor was fear. Both were swift, instinctive traders—never hampered by details.

According to a Lehman partner, in those early days when Fuld participated in the morning traders ’ meeting, “everyone would say what they wanted to say, and Dick would say, ‘I like it. Buy it.’ So everyone would go back to their desks and buy everything, you know? Basically, everybody did what Dick said—they made money because Dick was right often enough.” Almost no one dared cross Fuld and take an alternative view, because if they lost money on a trade he hadn’t sanctioned, there was “hell to pay,” according to this trader.

Glucksman had an us-versus-them mentality, and “them” included Lehman’s investment bankers. In those days, the traders would put their positions on five-by-seven-inch cards on a wall so that everyone could see what had been bought and sold. The color of the ink indicated which type of security it was. According to a senior person at LCPI, if ever the traders heard that Arthur Schulte, Lehman’s partner responsible for trading, was on his way over from One William Street (Lehman Brothers’ headquarters) to 9 Mill Lane (then the headquarters of LCPI), the cards were quickly pulled off the board. There were limits to the total value of their positions, and at midday those positions might be higher; essentially, they were hiding their volatility, how much risk they were taking on a daily basis.

When Arthur left, the cards went back up. “It was a game,” says Newmark, “that was ingrained in people. That’s how Glucksman ran his business.” It was a game that taught these traders they “had to hide the facts.” It was also a very profitable game. And Dick Fuld was good at it.

One anecdote starring him quickly turned into legend.

It was the 1970s. Fuld was an associate trader and needed a trade signed by Allan Kaplan, then a partner and banker in charge of the commitments committee, to move forward. He went to see Kaplan, who was on the phone and motioned for Fuld to wait outside.

Fuld came in anyway, and said, “I need you to sign something.” Kaplan again signaled for Fuld to wait for him outside.

Fuld did not budge. “I know, but I need you to sign this.”

Kaplan continued with his phone conversation and Fuld barked at him again. An irritated Kaplan got off the phone. Who was this annoying young guy? Didn’t he know you couldn’t just barge into an office on the banking floor, much less interrupt a phone call? Fuld explained he had a trade that needed Kaplan’s signature before he could make it.

Kaplan decided to teach the impudent trader a lesson in protocol.

He motioned toward his desk, strewn with paper. “You see all these piles on my desk? When they are gone, I will sign your paper.”

Fuld leaned across the desk and cleared it in one sweep. Papers flew across the office as Fuld said, “Now may I have your signature?”

Kaplan was astonished, but he signed. The legend of Dick Fuld—the gorilla—had begun.

And Boshart had.

A joke went around Lehman after Boshart was hired that “if you could jump up and touch the ceiling you’d be hired.”

It was not surprising that 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.

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 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.