Wall Street veterans were filling up a terrace bar overlooking New York’s Bryant Park on a mild Tuesday evening in May when two women clinked glasses.
(Bloomberg) — Wall Street veterans were filling up a terrace bar overlooking New York’s Bryant Park on a mild Tuesday evening in May when two women clinked glasses.
“Chin-chin,” said Janine Shelffo, who was a tech, media and telecom banker at Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette before the longtime Wall Street firm was bought in 2000. “Credit Suisse gobbled up the best firm on Wall Street and destroyed it.”
Her former colleagues have been throwing reunions for themselves since just after Credit Suisse swallowed their firm. This was the first since the Swiss giant’s fall this March, when the bank that had taken over theirs was itself swallowed by a bigger rival.
“The only thing I felt when I read about Credit Suisse was jubilation,” said Beth Chartoff, who had been a retail and consumer banker. It’s not so much that she was really rejoicing, she added, yet the collapse offered something like vindication.
Bankers are in the business of crafting narratives about companies, so it makes sense that their own end up with such distinct portraiture. Even long-gone finance firms maintain reputations for, say, genius, chaos, luxury, dullness or, in the case of DLJ, fun. Many of these investment bankers, who made money arranging takeovers, found that they despised what happened when their jovial bank was absorbed. The sting can last decades.
Karen Fenn, who oversaw the administrative assistants at DLJ and has helped run the reunions, remembered Credit Suisse as a cold place. “People were not friendly,” said Fenn, who grew up in Mill Basin and still has the South Brooklyn accent. “We see more than the professionals think.”
At the other side of the terrace, by the bar, a waiter offered bites of mushroom quiche to bankers. “We had a culture. We liked each other,” said Hal Ritch, who had been co-head of M&A. “You walk into that place…,” he began to say about Credit Suisse, before Larry Schloss interjected.
“You watch yourself,” said Schloss, who ran DLJ’s merchant-banking unit.
“It wasn’t the font of all happiness,” Ritch finished.
“Let me say it better,” Schloss proposed. He explained that DLJ’s statement of principles included a command to have fun. “We got to Credit Suisse and they laughed at that,” he said. “But we took it seriously.”
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Before the deal, DLJ had become Wall Street’s top junk bond underwriter, gaining the kind of foothold in the market that hadn’t been seen since the heyday of Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert. After Drexel collapsed, many of its bankers went to DLJ — though Drexel, too, has its own close-knit network.
Michael Boyd, DLJ’s general counsel, brought a vintage tote bag to the bar, a throwback to the infamous merger between AOL and Time Warner.
This March, UBS Group AG agreed to buy Credit Suisse for about $3.25 billion, a relative pittance for a globetrotting lender.
Bob Fleischer, who worked in DLJ’s financial-institutions group, felt bad for Credit Suisse. Lee LeBrun, now a longtime banking executive, felt nothing. Another veteran said he thought about Credit Suisse the way he thought of the jugglers who were practicing just below the terrace bar — in other words, not at all. Vince DeGiaimo avoided negativity by focusing on DLJ’s “esprit.” W. Patrick McMullan, a Mississippi-raised banker who brought an oversized bottle of 1992 cabernet sauvignon to share, suggested that he was simply glad he’d gotten out with most of his money.
Some Credit Suisse alumni remember it warmly, calling it a place that also fostered loyalty and camaraderie. Likewise, DLJ wasn’t always easygoing. Decades ago, investment-banking executive Brian Mullen authored the “too busy” memo to colleagues, encouraging a 96-hour-per-week industriousness that, in retrospect, suggests DLJ couldn’t have been fun for everybody all the time.
At the party, senior banker Larry Lavine said he stayed at Credit Suisse for a few years after the takeover. “I tried to make it work,” he said at a table. “It wasn’t fun.”
Nearby was a 27-year-old who works in banking and came to the party as a guest. She said she wasn’t exactly sure what DLJ had been. She knew it was a bank. She just wasn’t sure what had become of it.
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