I suppose I will go to my grave haunted by Black Monday, September 15th, 2008. We all knew it was coming. Most of us had known for a week, but that did not lessen the shock. We all awakened to the still shattering news that Lehman Brothers was no more. In the small hours of that dark Fall morning in New York, Richard S. Fuld, our isolated and obdurate Chairman, had filed for bankruptcy, ending 158 years of Wall Street, for what was, arguably, the finest merchant bank in American history.

It was so very clear to me, Bank of America, whose investment bankers spent more than 12 days with Lehman Brothers, many people I know, was mysteriously pulling away from Lehman well before that fateful weekend began. How they could spend 12 days analyzing Lehman and then buy Merrill Lynch in just two days, a $50 billion transaction, will always be to me one of the 7 mysterious wonders of the world?

The shock reverberated among Lehman’s 25,000 employees, but when I use the word ‘we’ I refer only to the men and women who had strived for more than two and a half years to save the great merchant bank from the follies of the 31st floor, where King Richard Fuld and his cohorts had resolutely steered Lehman head-on into a gigantic iceberg. It was pathetic really. Even the Titanic swerved.

The key players were Mike Gelband, Managing Director, Global Head of Fixed Income, Alex Kirk, Managing Director, Global Head of High-Yield and Leveraged Loan Businesses and my immediate boss and best friend, Larry McCarthy, Managing Director, Global Head of Distressed Debt Trading. Likewise, Richard Gatward, Managing Director, Global Head of Convertible Securities Trading, Christine Daley, Managing Director, Head of Distressed Debt Research, Dr. Madelyn Antoncic, Managing Director, Chief Risk Officer and myself.

Most of these brave leaders begged and implored our Chairman, and President Joe Gregory to change course, and in the end every one of us was fired, sidelined, moved away from the action, or somehow got rid of. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were watching the death throes of Lehman Brothers, as one by one, the greatest financiers in the building went.

All through that long and terrible weekend, all of us, now on the outside, were taking and receiving blow-by-blow calls, as Fuld and his cronies struggled to persuade the government to save them. September 15th started for us at around 5am, and my cellphone never stopped ringing. All day, and most of the following night. Three times I had to charge the battery. Over and over we called each other unable to believe what had happened, that Lehman Brothers was gone. I just remember there was so much to say, and so much which would never be said.

We, who had made the bank fortunes, mostly sat alone in our apartments dumbfounded by the news channels, watching our world crash around our ears. Nothing else seemed to matter. No other stories were even covered. On every channel the bank we all loved was being shown, surrounded by journalists, and engulfed by the sorrow and devastation which none of them understood.

I remember there was a threat of rain in the morning. Even the skies wept for Lehman Brothers, and as if to convince myself that it had really happened, I left my apartment and walked the six blocks to the old office just to witness that terrible day when chaos reigned outside 745 7th Avenue. I pushed my way through the journalists, my cellphone pressed to my ear, talking to my old boss Larry McCarthy. And I stood outside and stared up at the fourth floor, where we had battled away on the trading floor of the great bank for close to four years, shoulder-to-shoulder. I think I smiled to myself. For the good times.

But then, inevitably, I stared up to the 31st floor; that mysterious place where all the damage was done. And I’m not ashamed to say my eyes welled-up at the sheer stupidity of it. And I walked away, for the last time, with the shouts of reporters ringing in my ears. Did you work at Lehman Brothers, sir? What are you feeling now? What’s the mood like among the staff? Who do you blame for this? What are you going to do next? I was appalled by their sense of entitlement, sound bites as the collapse of Lehman Brothers heralded the start of the world’s economy crashing to its knees in the next twelve days. And they wondered what the bloody mood was like.

ONE YEAR LATER

The anniversary of that dark day approaches. In so many places the financial carnage remains - the subprime crisis that causes it, the commercial real estate crash which worsened it, still a billion acres of concrete unsold, unsellable, held together by government cash and promises. Great buildings remain half empty. The dust is clearing, but only slowly.

And yet, on this September 15th, 2009, I cannot avoid the feeling that while we have not yet reached the sunlit uplands of prosperity, we are at least climbing the hill, and no one’s out of breath. My little team, the ten people who could have saved Lehman, have dispersed now, to smaller, more manageable, and certainly more careful financial institutions.

Lehman Brothers has been largely absorbed by Barclays Plc, although the $660 billion debt may take years to unwind. We all still speak on a weekly basis, and I am obliged to say my new book, “A Colossal Failure Of Colossal Sense,” which charted the Lehman collapse, was a amalgam of input from every corner of the corporation, so many of the really big hitters, fired their penetrating observations out to the world through me and my new book. Suffice to say, when it was completed, I submitted it to all of them, and, understandably, none of them made a change. I felt a bit like Princess Diana. For wasn’t it that well-loved member of the Royal Family who fed her story out through her close friends and into Andrew Morton’s book a dozen or so years ago? Well, I operated in a similar mode.

I shall be spending most of this autumn promoting the new book, but I have been given a position in a new and very conservative financial organization. By nature, I am sometimes bear, and I have remained skeptical about the latest bull market during which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has surged by 3000 points. But I’m optimistic that the world will recover as quickly as many are hoping. And on this September the 15th, I shall be very busy broadcasting and interviewing, trying not to be too nostalgic, nor too complacent, since I am always reminded of the heartbreak of those 25,000 people, the Lehman faith full all over the globe.

The Lehman collapse cost me much of my savings, seven figures, but I intend to get it back. All of my group are working again. We’re still on the line, one to another, just like the old days, still swapping information, swapping warnings, trying to be helpful. Just a group of old comrades who once fought and died together.

September 15th will always be a date in infamy, and every time I glance into the glass exterior of 745 7th Avenue, I still see the haunted face of Richard S. Fuld, architect of so much misery. I always try to persuade myself that the Lehman collapse is all behind me. But it will never be behind me, and I expect I’ll take that stroll round to the old building sometime during the day, and glance up again. Just for the good times.