Posted on: Saturday, September 15, 2001

The September 11th attack
Top bond brokerage lost 670 employees

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — First there were screams, then a voice: "I think a plane just hit us."

Suddenly, the conference call connecting employees of one of the nation's leading bond brokerages in New York, Los Angeles and London went dead.

The West Coast and London employees would soon learn that they had been distant witnesses to the initial strike against the World Trade Center towers.

Cantor Fitzgerald LLP employed about 1,000 people at its New York headquarters, occupying the 101st, 103rd, 104th and 105th floors of the trade center's north tower.

American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building at about the 90th floor at 8:45 a.m. Tuesday. No one from the floors the company occupied is known to have survived the crash, subsequent inferno and building collapse.

The company's horrific death toll: an estimated 670 employees.

At least 320 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who apparently weren't in the office at the time of the attack were confirmed safe.

"We have lost every single person who was in the office," Howard Lutnick, the company's chief executive officer, told an NBC "Dateline" reporter.

"We don't know of any, not a single one person, getting down from the 101st to the 105th floors where our offices were. Not a single person."

His brother is believed to be among the dead.

Lutnick was spared because he was late for work Tuesday — deciding to take his 5-year-old son to his first day of kindergarten.

"That means I get to be alive," Lutnick said. "And anybody who got there early doesn't get to. It's unthinkable."

On the conference call, employees in the company's other offices listened in horror to the screams in New York before the line went dead.

"Probably 100 people got phone calls after the plane hit. They called their family, they called their mother, they called their wife and said, 'We've been hit by a plane and we're evacuating.' That was the common thing," Lutnick told NBC. "My brother called my sister a little later and said smoke was pouring in, there was no way out and he was not going to make it."

"... There's 700 of my family — 700. I can't say it, 700 of my family... There's so many of them. People lost their son, their daughter. People would come up to me and say, 'I only have one daughter.' What do I do? It's too many, too many, too many."

The company employs some 2,300 people nationwide and is considered key to the U.S. government bond market. The company's trading systems in the United States have resumed operations since the attack.

The company, Lutnick said, is like family. And it was as a family that the surviving New York employees decided to return to work this week, operating out of makeshift offices.

Lutnick promised that those who perished will never be forgotten.

"Everything's different...," he said. "We're going to take care of the people, the families we lost. I had a very young staff — the average age was young 30s — so we've got a lot of people to take care of."