John Gutfreund — the Wall Street legend made famous in Michael Lewis' 'Liar's Poker' — has died.
Gutfreund was the CEO of Salomon Brothers when Lewis began his career there. He spent a total of 38 years at the firm.
In Liar's Poker, Lewis recounts his four-year stint at Salomon Brothers, the now-defunct Wall Street investment bank where the mortgage bond was invented.
Lewis' detailed explanation of how Salomon reaped massive profits from the explosion in mortgage bonds is instructive.
It was his depictions of the larger-than-life personalities like Gutfreund, the jungle mentality, and other elements of the unsavory culture that really made the book a hit, however.
We've compiled 10 moments from Liar's Poker that capture exactly why the book became an instant classic.
Editor's Note: Former Business Insider writer Luke Kawa contributed to an earlier version of this feature.
The scene where the bank's CEO John Gutfreund challenges John Meriwether to a hand of Liar's Poker for $1 million.
The limits of reckless gambling on the Street were defined in the book's opening scene.
John Gutfreund proposed playing one hand of Liar's Poker, which requires gamesmanship and knowledge of probabilities highly valued by the traders, for $1 million. His opponent, John Meriwether (widely considered the firm's best player) didn't want to beat the CEO, so he got the boss to back off by saying he'd only play for $10 million.
Source: Liar's Poker
The scene where Lewis describes how miserable his friends are as analysts.
Lewis describes a friend working as an analyst who "was so strung out that he regularly nipped into a bathroom stall during midday lulls and slept on the toilet. He worked straight through most nights and on weekends, yet felt guilty for not doing more. He pretended to be constipated—in case someone noticed how long he had been gone... Many analysts later admit that their two years between college and business school were the worst of their lives."
Source: Liar's Poker
The scene with the one trainee too terrified to step on the Salomon trading floor.
"...a third, by far the most interesting, couldn't bear to step off the elevator and onto the trading floor. He rode up and down in the rear of the elevator every afternoon. He meant to get off, I think, but was petrified. Word of his handicap spread. It reached the woman in charge of the training program. She went to see for herself. She stood outside the elevator banks on the forty-first floor and watched with her own eyes the doors open and shut for an hour on one very spooked trainee. One day he was gone."
Source: Liar's Poker
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