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Tagged: Lehman Brothers

Plastic Surgery

Extreme Makeover: Wall Street Edition!

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Wall Street CEOs make a fortune, as you're undoubtedly aware. Even the chief executives of banks that have been bailed-out by Washington or have gone bust usually end up doing nicely. But despite the riches and perks these men have accumulated and massive egos they've developed along the way, few of them would do all that well in a beauty contest. Because it's high time that Wall Street take advantage of the miracle of modern science—and because we care, dammit—we took the liberty of contacting Dr. Anthony Youn, a board-certified plastic surgeon who has made appearances on Dr. 90210 and the Rachael Ray Show, to ask him what procedures he'd suggest these titans of finance consider if they want to look their very best. Dr. Youn's answers and cost estimates—and our commentary—is below.More

The Disgraced

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Dick Fuld Surrenders the Ridge | Big news for golf aficionados who also happen to be closely following the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. As Reuters reported last week, ex-Lehman CEO Dick Fuld gave up his membership at the Blind Brook Country Club in Purchase following his fall from grace last year. Our trusted source for all mogul-related golf news now tells us that Blind Brook isn't the only club that no longer has the pleasure of Fuld's company. He's also abandoned his membership at the Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale. Clearly, the situation has gone from bad to much, much worse.

Auctions

For Sale: The Lehman One-Year Anniversary 'Special'

145270It's been a year since Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, an event that rocked the financial markets around the world, unleashed a wave of panic, and changed Wall Street forever. Did you think the merchants of Lehman memorabilia on Ebay would miss out on this priceless opportunity to offer up "one-year anniversary specials" of Lehman-branded junk? Of course they wouldn't.More

Casting

Lehman Brothers: The Movie

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The movie about the fall of Lehman Brothers aired on the BBC last night. The Financial Times' Alphaville blog wasn't the least bit impressed with the "cringeworthingly hilarious" made-for-TV production. The "failed irony, bad acting and moral superiority," along with "overly earnest analogies to the movie Fight Club" and "a very sweaty OCD-obsessive clown-like Dick Fuld," gave it "the quality [of a] straight-to-video release," Izabella Kaminska reports. We'll leave it to you to decide how the filmmakers fared in terms of casting. From left to right: actor Henry Goodman as Morgan Stanley chief John Mack; and Michael Brandon as "brash tough-talking" JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Update: Dealbreaker has a clip of the movie here. [FT]

The Disgraced

Dick Fuld Will Not Be Defeated

144975It's been nearly a year since Lehman Brothers went bust, making it the perfect occasion to send a reporter to hunt down Lehman's former CEO, Dick Fuld. A Reuters correspondent managed to find him last Friday, looking tan and dressed in and well-rested at his "country house in a bucolic setting beside a river and amid tree-covered slopes in Ketchum, Idaho." So how's he doing?More

Wall Street

Joe Gregory Needs $233 Million in Cash, Label Maker

144620Joe Gregory, the cash-starved former president of Lehman Brothers, hasn't had much luck selling his oceanfront house in Bridgehampton. (He cut the price from $32 million to $27.9 million a few months back, although that hasn't helped any, apparently.) Time to move on to Plan B, it seems. Gregory is now asking a bankruptcy judge to pay him the $232,999.548.71 he says he's owed in deferred compensation "in the form of performance- and restricted-stock grants." Now that's rich, isn't it? He helped run the bank into the ground and now he'd like to get paid for his "performance"? We're not quite sure how Gregory came up with this $233 million figure, but we're inclined to think the judge should cut him a check for $19.99. That way Gregory can go to Staples and buy himself a Brother P-Touch 80 so when he makes outrageous financial demands in the future, he'll at least be able to affix a profession-looking label to the envelope. Just because you had a hand in the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history and your reputation is now ruined doesn't mean you can get sloppy! Gregory's handwritten submission to the court below.More

Hedge Funds

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Invest With Confidence | Leave it to a former employee of Lehman Brothers to come up with the worst name for a hedge fund ever. Edward Filippi, who once sold commodity investment products for Lehman, is the founder of Ground Zero Strategic Commodities: "Putting the words 'ground zero' in a hedge fund name may disturb many people, as it undoubtedly conjures up images of the site where the World Trade Center was destroyed nearly eight years ago." You think? [NYT]

Lawyers

The Best Legal Gig In Town

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Stephen Dannhauser, the chairman Weil, Gotshal & Manges, has every reason to be sitting smugly in his office chair in the middle of Midtown. Last week, a judge signed off on the firm's $55 million tab for the work Weil has performed in connection with Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy; this week, the firm submitted another bill for $45.2 million more. Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's pay czar, has suggested putting some sort of cap on Lehman's legal expenses going forward. Why? Isn't a $15,000 postage bill and $67,000 in business meal expenses perfectly reasonable? Ordering in dinner from Le Cirque every night isn't free, you know. [WSJ]

Wall Street

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Dick Fuld Returns to the Glare | As if former Lehman chief Dick Fuld wasn't enough of a villain as it is given his role in the investment bank's collapse last fall, it turns out he was a tax cheat, too. The Times reports today that the Bloomberg administration is accusing Lehman of failing to pay the city some $627 million in taxes between 1996 and 2008.More

Wall Street Wives

Goldman Haters Have Their Claws Out

143865Goldman Sachs has been accused in recent weeks of plotting to make a fortune from the collapse of the American economy and then plotting with Washington insiders to hand the banking industry a massive bailout. Are Goldman haters now plotting against the firm's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, and his wife Laura? A day after it was reported the banking chief had instructed Goldman employees to play it cool comes this doozy about Laura Blankfein's alleged antics in the Hamptons last weekend:More

Lawsuits

Sculptor Takes the Bull by the Horns

143649The sculptor who created the famous "Charging Bull" statue downtown has filed a lawsuit against Random House for putting a photo of the piece on the cover of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, a new book about Lehman Brothers' collapse. Arturo Di Modica, the sculptor responsible for the work, says Random House didn't have his permission to use a picture. The only problem? Di Modica never had permission to put the statue there in the first place:More

Failed Banks

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Lehman Brothers: The Store | Lehman Brothers has had an official Ebay store open since the beginning of July with proceeds from the auctions going to the failed bank's creditors. (Of course, items have been unofficially listed on the site since the bank's collapse last fall.) But now Lehman is taking it one step further: It plans to open a retail store next week at its 1271 Sixth Avenue office. "We are really excited to be able to offer this to the public because there is a demand," says a spokeswoman for the company. Better act quickly! Supplies are limited! [Bloomberg via Dealbreaker]

Exclusive

A New Target For the Man Who Brought Down Lehman

141177More than 1,000 hedge fund managers gathered at Lincoln Center today for the Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference, an event that raises money for charity as well as gives other members of the industry a chance to gleam investment recommendations from some of the brightest financial geniuses around. (Those who paid the $3,000-per-person fee this year were treated to talks by the likes of Jim Chanos, Mark Kingdon, Stephen Mandel, Peter Schiff, and Peter Thiel.) Last year's conference was a particularly dramatic affair. David Einhorn, the founder of Greenlight Capital, used the event as an opportunity to explain why Lehman Brothers was headed off a cliff. Those who heeded Einhorn's advice did well for themselves, of course: The bank went bust just four months later. Einhorn spoke at the annual confab once again today, although it's too soon to know if the poker-loving hedge fund manager took aim at another financial firm this time around. In the meantime, though, Einhorn's lawyers seem to have done just that. They've been busy trying to crush the other Greenlight Capital.More

Roundup

Wall Street: Thursday Morning

• New jobless claims are down, but a record number of people are collecting unemployment, which won't be good news for the markets today. [BN, WSJ]
• Bank of America is hoping to pay back the $45 billion in bailout money by the end of the year. And it looks like they might actually be able to do it. [DB, WSJ]
• Speaking of taxpayer money, GMAC is getting $7 billion of it. [WSJ]
• Hedge funds are back: They raked in $15.4 billion in April. [BN]
• The Justice Dep't is looking into shady behavior at Lehman circa '07. [WSJ]
• Britain's Serious Fraud Office is building a "warning system to help it spot hedge fund fraud." But only serious hedge fund fraud, obviously. [Reuters]

Resignations

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Fuld Steps Down From Non-Job | Former Lehman CEO Dick Fuld has officially stepped down as the bankrupt firm's "chairman," per a letter delivered last week to Bryan Marsal, the restructuring pro who assumed control of Lehman last fall. Finding someone to vastly overpay for a Park Avenue apartment isn't exactly part-time work, you know. [NYT/Dealbook]