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I’ll cry until you suspect my tears.
You’re not the only one who can turn it on
When you need it.
—Elvis Costello, “Suspect My Tears”
~~~
Twenty-five years ago, Cantor Fitzgerald occupied the 101st-105th floors of One World Trade Center—six stories higher than where, at 8:46 am in the morning of September 11, 2001, a hijacked American Airlines commercial flight would make impact at 450 miles an hour.
Although he’d been the head of that “very sharp-elbowed”¹ financial services firm since 1991, and a familiar figure on Wall Street for years before that, Howard Lutnick did not enter the wider public consciousness until that fateful Tuesday. Certainly that’s the first time I’d heard of him.
There was Lutnick on the news programs two days later, with his receding hairline and puppy-dog brown eyes and reassuring Long Island accent, sharing his tale of unimaginable woe: 658 of Cantor Fitzgerald’s 960 employees were dead, including Lutnick’s brother, Gary. Only dumb luck had spared Lutnick—September 11, 2001, was his son Kyle’s first day of kindergarten at the exclusive Horace Mann School.
At a moment when the city was reeling, struggling to make sense of what we’d just witnessed—the initial shock beginning to wear off, replaced by grief and anger and puzzlement and survivor’s guilt and mournfulness; but also, on the other hand, an overwhelming feeling of love and compassion and desire for communion I have not experienced before or since—Howard Lutnick gave voice to what many of us were feeling. He may have been a ruthless chief executive, a titan of Wall Street, but at the end of the day, he was a New Yorker, like us. His pain was our pain.
On September 13, 2001, Lutnick sat down for an emotional interview with Connie Chung. This is what he said about Gary Lutnick’s horrible death:
My brother was on 103rd floor. He worked for me. He worked at Cantor. And he called my sister just after the plane hit and he told her that—he said that the smoke was pouring in. He was stuck in a corner office. There was no way out, and the smoke was coming in, and he’s—he’s not good, and things are not good, and he’s not gonna make it. And he just wanted to say that he loved her, and he wanted to say goodbye, and tell everyone that he loved them. And then the phone went dead. So while I’m the head of the company, I’m trying to help my 700 employees who are missing their loved ones, I’m just another one of them. Just another one of them.
“Normally,” Chung picked up the storyline, “you would’ve been in your office on…the 105th floor, and yet you didn’t go in early that morning because of a critical decision you made.” Lutnick took the cue:
My little boy—I have a five-year-old, and it was his first day of kindergarten at Horace Mann.² So I took him for his first day of big-boy school. And because of that I was late getting down to the office, and therefore I wasn’t in the building. I was on my way to the building instead….
Lutnick then told of what happened later:
…I heard the sound. It sounded like another plane was going to hit the building, but it didn’t sound like it was far away, it sounded like it was right where the ceiling is above us. It was so unbelievably loud. Then someone screamed out, “Another one’s coming!” So I just turned around and ran. And I was running….
It was Number Two World Trade Center collapsing. So I’m standing underneath the building like an idiot. And I start running, and I’m trying to get ahead of the smoke. And then the smoke comes around the corner by Trinity Church, where I ran, knocks me down underneath the truck. And I’m sitting there in this black—the black is black that can ever be. I reached up. I tried to see if I could see. And I took my hand and I put it up and I actually touched my eye, because it was so much smoke, and I couldn’t even see my own hand. I couldn’t see my hand. I could feel the particles in the air, they were like this big. I could feel them going in. I wasn’t—I couldn’t think to like pick up my shirt and put—I was just sitting there thinking, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe by standing there I died.” So I just start walking, I just start walking straight, I just walk straight, and I just keep walking straight.
And I called my wife four hours later. She was hysterical crying. And so I understood why it took lots of people a long time. I’m a pretty together person, and four hours, I walked. I just walked north. I just kept walking….
All of that resonated with New Yorkers—especially, for me, the part about the aimless walking. By 10 am on 9/11, everyone was out in the street on what was, weather-wise, an absolutely gorgeous late summer day. There was nothing to do but walk. People in lower Manhattan were scurrying uptown, away from Ground Zero, while people further uptown—like me, who watched on my boss’s TV at the AP’s offices at 50 Rock—were drawn downtown, to try and help. The bridges and tunnels were all closed. The subways didn’t run until later that afternoon. Cabs drove around in circles. It took my wife and I four hours to make it home to Astoria.
At the end of the interview, Lutnick beautifully articulated his compassion for his lost employees and their families:
I don’t know of a single one of my employees who got down [from the top of the tower]. Zero. Zero. And it’s really sad, but I think we’re all pulling together with the view—we want to make things happen for them. We need to take care of them. We need to figure out how to take care of them, and give them more. And take care of them. I think it’s gonna be a different kind of drive that I’ve ever had before. It’s not about… It’s not about my family. I get to kiss my kids. I get to kiss my kids tonight, but other people don’t get to kiss their kids, and I just have to help them.
And I watched that interview, and I thought, “Jesus. This poor guy. He’s heartbroken, he’s devastated—it’s written all over his face—but he’s doing all the right things. Good for him.”
After that, I didn’t think about Howard Lutnick for almost 25 years—until his old Upper East Side crony Donald Trump nominated him for Commerce Secretary.
Lutnick is now 65 years old. He’s grown a beard, which neatly offsets the receding hairline, and the streaks of gray in his salt-and-pepper hair become him; he looks more distinguished now, professorial. Financially, he’s done very well for himself. He has a personal net worth of $3,000,000,000—give or take a few million. And he still speaks in the affable, heart-on-his-sleeve manner I remember from the Connie Chung interview.
Only now, in the second Trump Administration, we’ve learned something we could not have known and would not have suspected in 2001: Howard Lutnick is a world-class liar. If lying were an Olympic sport, he’d be partying with Kash Patel in Milan. Even in a West Wing ensemble that includes some of the most shameless, fork-tongued gaslighters on the planet, Lutnick stands apart; he is the Meryl Streep of mendacity. Just this week, he went on CNBC and remarked, with the same apparent sincerity that he displayed on Connie Chung, that there have been no American fatalities in the war with Iran—a lie so egregious that even Trump saw fit to comment upon it.
Lutnick’s sudden re-emergence in the Trump Redux has always struck me as fishy. Seriously: Why did Trump choose Lutnick, of all people, to be in his Cabinet? And why did Lutnick accept?
Why would a 65-year-old billionaire CEO of a major financial firm even want to be Commerce Secretary? Doesn’t that seem like a demotion? Like, how many Secretaries of Commerce can you name?
And why would Lutnick want to hop onboard the Titanic now, in the Trump sequel, which every sentient human in the world knew would be a disaster?
What is Howard Lutnick doing here?
Perhaps the answer lies in the proximity between the announcement of Lutnick’s Cabinet selection (November 14, 2024) and of Cantor Fitzgerald paying a $6.75 million civil penalty to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that the firm caused “two special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) that it controlled to make misleading statements to investors ahead of their initial public offerings (IPOs)” (December 12, 2014).
Or maybe, with the walls closing in around him, Donald felt the need to surround himself with as many Epstein alumni as possible.
Certainly there’s more to Lutnick’s relationship with the late child sex trafficking pedophile than he’s let on. Especially when, as Jamie Bonkiewicz pointed out on X, one of the creepy rubber masks decorating the sterile walls in the dental room of Epstein’s compound on Little St. James bears a striking resemblance to a certain Commerce Secretary:
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On December 10, 2001, the features writer Meryl Gordon, who is a professor of journalism at NYU, wrote a profile of Lutnick for New York magazine. The Cantor Fitzgerald CEO’d had an eventful, up-and-down three months, punctuated by his ill-fated decision on September 15th—less than a week after the attacks—to suspend the direct deposits of his still-missing-and-presumed-dead employees. You know, the ones he’d wept for so passionately on TV literally two days earlier.
Gordon writes:
Who is Howard Lutnick and what is his greater purpose? These questions are part of our public need, both empathetic and voyeuristic, to plumb the depths of his company’s tragedy. For Lutnick embodies much about New Yorkers on September 11. He started that day a Wall Street buccaneer, a hugely successful, legendarily aggressive striver who was personally worth as much as a half-billion dollars. By the 13th, he’d become the accidental survivor who was crying on Connie Chung about how it felt to lose so many people and to run for his life. By the 15th, he was the Dickensian villain who’d cut off the widow’s mite, the paychecks of the dead, to assure the bankers of his sangfroid. By October 10, he had announced a munificent and detailed financial plan for the families. By then, not many people knew what to believe about Howard Lutnick.
That remains true. There was then, and is still, something Jekyll-and-Hyde about Howard Lutnick. With this guy, we get the full spectrum—all 88 piano keys. He can project deep empathy and compassion, while at the same time gaslighting the American people on behalf of some of the worst humans to ever walk the earth. As Gordon put it at the time,
All the elements of his personality are out there: He’s likable, he’s irritating, he’s furious that his motives are being challenged, he pushes people hard but then teases them, he’s smart and self-aware yet also in denial. “It’s not sad here. It’s not sad here. It’s not sad here,” he insists of his current workplace, a remark that makes his co-workers affectionately roll their eyes. But in the next moment, he’s overcome by sadness. He’s a man who keeps going forward because forward is the only direction open to him.
What to make of all this now, a quarter century later?
It is true that Lutnick continued to call and visit the families of his employees who died that day. It’s true that, as Gordon reported, “Lutnick’s financial package [for the families] is relatively good: ten years of health insurance rather than five; a share of 25 percent of the partners’ profits over a five-year period—a total package worth at least $100,000 per family.” It’s true that he set up and endowed a charitable foundation—the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund—and put his sister in charge of it.
It is also true that on Lutnick’s watch, Cantor Fitzgerald sued American Airlines for negligence—because on 9/11, AA failed to [checks notes] prevent its plane from being hijacked. Which seems, to me, like a dick move.
Dick move or not, Cantor won a $135 million settlement from AA in December 2013. The lion’s share went to the firm’s partners. As best as anyone can tell, no one pocketed more of the settlement money than Howard Lutnick. As Fox News reported at the time:
Speculation in the firm suggests Lutnick took anywhere from $15 million to $25 million from the settlement. A spokeswoman for Cantor would not deny he was entitled to receive millions of dollars, and neither she nor Lutnick would deny the speculated amount.
“All of the money for the business interruption recovery relating to the American Airlines case went either to strengthen and support the overall business, or to the over 600 Cantor Partners, precisely proportionate with the exact stake in the company, Mr. Lutnick included,” the spokeswoman said. “For five years, Cantor’s Partners provided 25% of the firm’s profits to the 9/11 families, a total of at least $180 million, in addition to ten years of health benefits.”
Lutnick declined to comment.
A senior executive at Cantor said the manner in which the settlement was distributed, including the chunk of money Lutnick received, is entirely appropriate since Cantor never promised family victims a portion of the money in the first place. The executive described the case against American Airlines as a “business interruption lawsuit” since Cantor’s offices were destroyed in the attack, meaning it was appropriate for the company to keep the money.
Both Lutnick’s decisions to halt the missing employees’ paychecks and to pocket so much of the AA settlement money remain a sore subject for many of the Cantor Fitzgerald 9/11 families.
As we approach the 25th anniversary of the attacks, we should not ignore the fact that, however opportunistic the circumstances or justifiable the business decision, Howard Lutnick personally made tens of millions of dollars off of 9/11.³
Not many people can make that claim.
Who is Howard Lutnick and what is his greater purpose?
Twenty-five years later, we still can’t answer Meryl Gordon’s questions—and given his role in the Administration, they’ve grown exponentially more urgent.
When Lutnick appeared with Chung two days after 9/11, I took everything he said at face value. We were all so traumatized, and he seemed so sincere. But now? After watching him lie so effortlessly for a solid year and a half on behalf of a treasonous Nazi rapist who is clearly evil and working for our adversaries? A billionaire buddy of both Trump and Epstein who shamelessly lied about bringing not only his children, but his friends’ children, to a notorious child-sex-trafficking pedophile’s rape island?
You’ll excuse me, but I now doubt every word that’s ever come out of Howard Lutnick’s mouth—whether last week on Squawk Box or 25 years ago on Connie Chung. For all we know, that 2001 interview was the pièce de résistance of a world champion deceiver.
That’s how far my faith in him has fallen. I no longer give Lutnick the benefit of the doubt about anything. True, you’d have to be a serial-killer-level psychopath to lie, under those circumstances, and on national TV, about that. But knowing what we know now—I mean, are we sure he’s not?
In the wake of 9/11, the much-despised Rudy Giuliani became America’s Mayor. He dined on that for years, noun-verb-and-9/11’ing his way to fame and fortune. Heck, the Queen of England even made him an honorary knight! But that persona was always bogus. As it turns out, Giuliani was a piece of shit before, during, and after the attacks—and, however reassuring his presence felt to us New Yorkers on September 11th, mayoral decisions he made regarding the location of the city’s Office of Emergency Management command center (he inexplicably overrode everyone else and insisted it be at the WTC) and the walkie-talkies used by the NYFD (the Motorola ones he chose after what amount to a no-bid contract didn’t work properly in the buildings on 9/11) wound up contributing significantly to the ultimate 9/11 death toll.⁴
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By brazenly and alacritously carrying water for Donald Trump—and, by extension, the Kremlin—Rudy Giuliani squandered the ample goodwill he accumulated in 2001. America’s Mayor was exposed as a fraud: a pathetic drunk; a credibly accused rapist, whose scummy sexual predation was on full display in the Borat sequel; a sad loser addressing a media scrum outside of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, as cheap hair dye oozed onto his sweaty forehead. That Rudy was the real Rudy.
I suspect that the Howard Lutnick we’ve seen for the last 18 months—the Howard Lutnick who keeps Donald Trump company on the daily, the Howard Lutnick who stands behind him grinning during the idiotic Oval Office pressers, the Howard Lutnick who went with him to the Knicks game, the Howard Lutnick who appears on TV and winsomely gaslights the country about Trump’s shit economic policies, the Howard Lutnick who brought his wife and kids to Epstein’s rape island and lied about it, the Howard Lutnick who removed Cantor Fitzgerald’s missing-but-not-yet-confirmed-dead employees from the payroll four days after the towers fell, the Howard Lutnick who exploited a national tragedy to line his own bloated pockets—is the real Howard Lutnick. That he, like his fellow 9/11 hero Giuliani, has always been a piece of shit. That the tears he cried in that 2001 interview were of the crocodile variety.
A quarter century after 9/11, I mourn all those who lost their lives in the attacks, including Gary Lutnick and the 657 other Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died that horrible day. But I do not weep for Howard Lutnick. Not this time. Once was quite enough for that guy.
Lutnick only survived the fall of the towers by dumb luck—by divine intervention, one might argue. And how has he elected to spend the years he was miraculously gifted? By dutifully serving Donald Trump—an unequivocal monster, serial sexual predator, and abominable traitor who has done more harm to the United States than even Osama Bin Laden.⁵
For shame.
Photo credit: Screenshot of Lutnick during Connie Chung interview, September 13, 2001.
Note: This piece is a condensed, edited, and repurposed version of a longer deep dive I wrote about Lutnick back in February.
As the New York Times put it.
I have been unable to confirm that the first day of kindergarten at Horace Mann in 2001 was September 11th, as Lutnick claims. Sometimes kindergarten starts later than the other grades, to ease the little ones into the routine; that may have been the case here. Also, even if the official start date was earlier, September 11th may have been Lutnick’s son’s first day of “big boy school.” Furthermore, Lutnick announced to the world why he was late on Connie Chung; if he were lying about that, one of the disgruntled Cantor widows would likely have called him out by now.
As to the conspiracy theory that Lutnick was the guy who made bank off “put options” on the airlines, there is no evidence to support that claim. The SEC report identifies the Goldman Sachs employee—the “influential airline industry analyst [who] lowered his earnings estimates for several major airlines” five days before the attacks—as one Glenn Engel, but does not disclose the names of the “CEO of the adviser and the trader” who purchased the put options. That’s a little bit sus, for sure, but it might just be that Engel gave the SEC permission to be named and the others did not. In any case, the CEO is not Howard Lutnick. Cantor Fitzgerald did not “manage several hedge funds” or “have a total of $5.3 billion under management” in 2001; although it has since expanded its suite of services, at that time the firm dealt primarily in government securities. If there’s compelling evidence that Lutnick purchased put options on the two airlines, I have yet to see it. That the “put options” narrative is being amplified by RT, the Russian state news service, is further indication that there is no there there.
As Dan Collins and Wayne Barrett write in their book Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11:
If the center had been elsewhere, all the dramatic visuals that turned the soot-covered Giuliani into a nomad warrior would instead have been tense but tame footage from its barren press conference room, where reporters had been corralled prior to 9/11 for snowstorms and the millennium celebration….Had he been able to get into and operate from a command center he says he “headed” for shortly after 8:46 that morning, he might have been more effective, but he also would have been less inspirational.
Information about the fishy af deal with Motorola can be found in Chapter 7 of that book, “The Sound of Silence.”
That might sound controversial, but if we go by body count, it’s not even close. More than half a million Americans died preventable deaths due to Trump’s negligent pandemic response. When we roll in ICE and Iran, and the DOGE cuts, and all of the hardship brought on by his stupid trade policies, the number only swells. And we still don’t know what will happen because of Donald antagonizing Canada and shitting on NATO.
