Rebuilding after the loss

ANDREW CULLEN’S 9/11 story starts, like so many others, with the sunshine. The Scottish investment banker was early for work on 11 September, 2001, making his way to his office on the 89th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre well before 9am.

“It was a beautiful morning,” he says from his office in New York where, ten years on, he still works at the same firm.

“After the plane hit the first building I immediately left with three colleagues. We were on the 44th floor when the plane struck our building. We were blown out of an elevator. Eventually we managed to get down the stairwell.”

Cullen, now 41, is originally from Motherwell and moved to New York with his family at the age of 12. He still maintains strong links to the country of his birth. He speaks with a transatlantic accent that slips casually from pure Glaswegian to downtown Manhattan, and he comes back to Scotland for hiking and mountain biking trips several times a year. It was this Scottishness that drew him to another colleague at his investment bank, Keefe Bruyette & Woods, Derek Sword, a Dundonian and keen squash player.

“Obviously both being from Scotland we had a lot in common,” he says. “The firm was really small at the time and we had a very collegial atmosphere. Derek and I became very friendly. We did a lot of socialising together. It was very much encouraged, it was just the culture of the place.”

Sword never made it out of the World Trade Centre that day. At 27 the Scot – who had got engaged just ten days before – perished along with another 66 employees of KBW – more than a third of the company’s total workforce – including the chief executive’s son.

For those who survived, including Cullen, it has been a long road back. The panic and confusion of that day are still with him now.

“When myself and a colleague managed to get out of the building we ended up in a health club a couple of blocks away and they were showing what had happened on the news,” he says. “Until that point we had no idea a plane had struck our building. We had assumed that the other building had potentially fallen into ours. That was the only logical explanation based on the facts we had. It wasn’t until I saw it on TV that it struck me just what was going on.”

The following weeks and months were hard. “You’re not trained to go through something like that,” he says. “It’s very much a unique experience both emotionally as well as from a professional standpoint. Obviously we made a decision that we were going to rebuild the firm, and that brought with it a whole different set of tasks and responsibilities.”

It was at that point, that Cullen did something extraordinary.

“There was a lot of emotion around 9/11 and a lot of emotion around rebuilding the firm,” he says. “The employees became very close following 9/11 and as we began to allocate responsibilities I actually put up my hand and said, ‘Derek was a good friend of mine, he was from Scotland, I’ve never done that job in the past, but let me at least babysit it and take on the process of rebuilding it.’”

Taking on the job of his dead friend and fellow countryman was not, he says, the easy choice.

“Looking back I think it was a brave decision on my part. I could have gone back to doing what I was doing but I thought it was an area where I could seriously contribute to the rebuilding of the firm.”

Ten years on, he has. The company has swelled considerably, and is now three times the size it was before 9/11. Nearly three quarters of the firm’s 104 survivors have stayed with the company, a remarkable number in today’s fast-moving job market.

“I’ve had opportunities to take other jobs but there has been a personal bond to the firm. There’s a loyalty aspect to it that you often find is missing from the workplace today,” he says.

He laughs. “I tell people I’m just old enough to be old-fashioned.”

Cullen will spend tomorrow, the day of the anniversary itself, quietly.

“There are a lot of events going on around New York City, but I just prefer to do something very quiet. I’ll probably hop on my bike and go for a long bike ride and then come back and meet a couple of friends and grab a couple of beers.”

If Cullen’s 9/11 story has an ending, it is a hopeful one.

“I’m more inclined to do things sooner than I would have in past,” he says. “Before I may have put something off but now I’ll climb a mountain, travel to a new city or a new country.

“Nowadays, if I see something that I want to do I go ahead and do it.”