September 11, 2001 Attacks
Cantor Fitzgerald's corporate headquarters and New York City office, on the 101st-105th floors of One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan (2-6 floors above the impact zone of a hijacked airliner), were destroyed during the September 11, 2001 attacks. Seconds after Cantor's building was struck by the plane, a Goldman Sachs server issued an alert saying that its trading system had gone offline because it wasn't able to connect with a Cantor server. Cantor Fitzgerald lost over two-thirds of its workforce, considerably more than any of the other World Trade Center tenants or the New York City Police Department and New York City Fire Department. CEO and chairman Howard Lutnick, whose brother was among those killed, vowed to keep the company alive, and the company was able to bring its trading markets back online within a week. On September 19, Cantor Fitzgerald made a pledge to distribute 25 percent of the firm's profits for the next five years, and committed to paying for ten years of health care, for the benefit of the families of its 658 former Cantor Fitzgerald, eSpeed, and TradeSpark employees (profits which would otherwise have been distributed to the Cantor Fitzgerald partners). In 2006, the company completed its promise, having paid a total of $180 million (and an additional $17 million from a relief fund run by Lutnick's sister, Edie).
Before the attacks, Cantor handled about one-quarter of the daily transactions in the multi-trillion dollar treasury security market. Cantor has since rebuilt its infrastructure, thanks in part to the efforts of its London office, and now has its headquarters in midtown Manhattan. The company's effort to regain its footing is the subject of Tom Barbash's 2003 book On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal.
On September 2, 2004, Cantor filed a civil lawsuit against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for allegedly providing money to the hijackers and Al Qaeda, one of a number of organizations to do so. It was later joined in the suit by the Port Authority of New York. Most of the claims against Saudi Arabia were dismissed on January 18, 2005.
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