Excerpted fromThe Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers,by Vicky Ward, to be published this month by Wiley; © 2010 by the author.

On Wall Street, they pay you so much that they own you. You know? So it’s different. They have your soul. You gave it to them for the money. —Mrs. Bradley Jack

The senior executives at Lehman Brothers, the storied Manhattan financial firm that was founded in 1850 and went bankrupt in 2008, were expected to have wives. And, if possible, they were supposed to be happy with them. If they were not happy, they were expected to pretend. In later years no one at the firm would ever forget what had happened to the late Chris Pettit, the longtime deputy to C.E.O. Richard “Dick” Fuld.

Pettit, good-looking, six feet two inches, a decorated Vietnam War hero, had been adored by the Lehman rank and file. Seen almost as a god, he was their real captain, instead of the more taciturn and less charismatic Fuld. But in the early 1990s, Pettit, a devout Roman Catholic, embarked on an affair with a woman at the firm.

Lehman Wives: A Family Album

This did not sit well with Lehmanites, especially as Pettit liked to emphasize moral values. He was the man who had banned Playboy magazine from the trading floor, and at a dinner for the senior executives in the 1980s he had said, “Now, look at this! Every single person here is with their original spouse. That is why we are successful. Because our word is our honor. We succeed in business because people can trust us.”

So when he broke his own code, it destroyed his career. His closest allies at the firm deserted him. These were Tom Tucker (head of sales), Pettit’s fair-haired best friend since kindergarten; Steve Lessing (Tucker’s affable deputy); and, perhaps most crucially, the hot-tempered fixed-income head, Joseph Gregory. Gregory, who, along with his wife, declined to comment for this article, disliked Pettit’s new mistress and once told Tucker that she was “evil.” (She in turn described Gregory to colleagues as “dumb as rocks” and “untrustworthy,” according to numerous sources.)

But it wasn’t just the men who were angered. Their wives were, too. Sandra Lessing and Heather Tucker especially were distraught at Pettit’s abandonment of his wife, Mary Anne, a pretty, auburn-haired former gymnast, who had been Pettit’s high-school sweetheart and had borne him four children. She had stuck with him through tough times when they were so poor they couldn’t afford blinds for the windows in their house. The Lessings, the Tuckers, the Gregorys, and the Pettits all lived close to one another in Huntington, on New York’s Long Island. They sometimes vacationed together, and for years the four men had carpooled to Lehman’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, stopping off before work at the gym, where they’d been nicknamed the Ponderosa boys—a reference to the popular 60s TV show Bonanza. At the office and outside of it they were sometimes known as the Huntington Mafia.

But with Pettit’s affair, the group split apart, and the men began to drive in separately. The women continued to support Mary Anne, who always believed her husband was coming back. She kept his clothes in the closet and his slippers under the bed.

Joe Gregory had already fallen out badly with Pettit at the end of 1994 over the Mexican-peso crisis. Pettit had accused Gregory of not keeping close enough watch over his division and jeopardizing the firm with a $5 billion exposure to the peso, which suddenly looked as if it might be de-valued. But by the fall of 1995, fixed income was doing better, and Gregory wanted to fire the heads of the less profitable equities and investment-banking divisions. Pettit did not agree. “Show me better candidates,” he retorted.