Kindergarten saves broker's life

NEW YORK - Howard Lutnick, chief executive of bond brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald, didn't make it to work on time because he took his son to his first day of kindergarten.

And thus, he was not counted among 700 New York-based employees of the company's World Trade Center headquarters who perished in Tuesday's attack when American Airlines Flight 11 en route from Boston to Los Angeles sliced through the north tower.

Cantor is one of the world's largest fixed-income interdealer brokers. Of its more than 2300 employees worldwide, about 1000 occupied floors 101 to 105 of the World Trade Center's north tower. About 700 of those employees, including Mr Lutnick's brother, who worked on floor 103, are believed to have perished. About 270 survived.

"I didn't go in early that morning," a teary Mr Lutnick told ABC-TV.

"My little boy ... it was his first day of kindergarten. I took him for the first day of big boy school and because of that I was late to the office."

Mr Lutnick said he was on the way into the building when all hell broke loose. He stood by the door asking people to call out their floor numbers as they ran out. Ninety-one was the highest number he heard before the other tower collapsed.

People were screaming and running out of the building and he saw the second tower collapse above him.

"I turned around and ran," he said.

"I was standing underneath the building like an idiot," he said. "I touched my eye. I couldn't see my hand. I could feel the particles in the air ... I was just standing there thinking that I can't believe it.

"Four hours I walked. I just walked."

Mr Lutnick said he spoke to two employees who were badly burned and hospitalised. He was praying for them "to pull through and be strong."

He said that Cantor employees in Los Angeles and London were on conference calls with employees in New York at the time of the attack and listened in horror as people screamed before lines went dead. "They couldn't go down, they couldn't go up," he said.

The incident, said Mr Lutnick, has permanently changed him.

"My view of business is different. I need to try to be successful in business so I can take care of 700 families who are dreaming to find someone.

"I have a different kind of drive. ... I can kiss my kids tonight. But other people won't get to kiss their kids."

To that end, Mr Lutnick posted his home telephone number on his company website and has been taking calls from relatives of his employees at all hours of the night. "Women are calling me ... They don't know how to pay their mortgage and they don't know what they're going to do," he said.

About 200 other New York-based employees want to work, he said, because they want to stay occupied.

"It's amazing," he said, of his employees. "Three hundred people lost all their friends. They lost the person to their left, the person to their right. They call me up and say 'I want to go to work ... I can't stay home.'

"I have to do something," Mr Lutnick said, "for the 700 families.

"Seven hundred families ... seven hundred families. I can't say it without crying."

- REUTERS

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