Post 9/11, deal makers walk away from Wall Street

By Melissa Lee

The terrorist attacks that took down the neighboring Twin Towers affected Wall Street in nearly every way imaginable.

One of the most profound effects is the soul-searching that steered some of the Street's most driven deal makers and most incurable workaholics onto new career paths.

Lisa Della Pietra, Ney Melo and Connie Duckworth are among those who surrendered adrenaline-fueled jobs in the nation's financial capital to follow a more personal path.

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Before 9/11, Della Pietra was earning more money than she ever dreamed possible as a stockbroker at H.C. Wainwright.

"The more you have, the more you want," she now says of her career at one of the nation's oldest investment banks. "You get caught up in the stuff and the materialistic things in life."

Those concerns started to melt away when she received a phone call from her 24-year-old brother, Joseph, on the morning of Sept. 11, shortly after a jetliner rammed into Tower One at the World Trade Center.

Joseph Della Pietra was on the job at Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage that occupied Floors 101 through 105 in the North Tower. He called his older sister a second time to reassure her he'd be OK. But none of the 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees at their desks that morning survived.

"I think there are some days that I'm still in shock and I don't believe that Joey's gone," Della Pietra says.

Also gone is Della Pietra's Wall Street ambition. The aptitude she once exhibited in selling stocks is now put to use raising money for her high school alma mater's 9/11 scholarship fund. Her brother is one of 11 graduates of the Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, N.Y., who perished in the terrorist attacks.

"I'm poorer now and I've gone through more pain than I did in my entire life," Della Pietra says. "And I'm the happiest I've been."

A tango virtuoso

Since 9/11, Ney Melo has danced to a different beat.

Melo worked in lower Manhattan as a banker for Lehman Brothers (LEH, news, msgs). An elevator in which he was riding on the morning of Sept. 11 became stuck between floors in the chaos following the terrorist attack.

"If I get out of here alive, I'm never doing this job again," Melo vowed to himself.

Melo walked out of the building and never looked back. He and a partner, Jennifer Bratt, now run a school to teach the "close-embrace" tango style that evolved from the milongas, or dance parties that are a nightly occurrence in Buenos Aries.

Ripples from 9/11 are also being felt in Miami's South Beach, where Connie Duckworth has come to sell wool rugs woven by Afghan women. The project is the work of Arzu, a Chicago-based nonprofit founded and run by the former Goldman Sachs (GS, news, msgs) executive to help Afghanistan's women and children.

Arzu, which means hope in Dari, puts Afghan weavers in touch with agents who provide materials and guidance on pattern and color that translates into rugs marketable in the West at higher prices.

In return, the weavers put their kids through school and take literacy classes.

"Weaving for Arzu is often the difference between life and death," Duckworth says. "It allows (the weavers) to put food on the table. We have families that are eating meat for the first time, literally, in years."

During her 20-year career at Goldman Sachs, Duckworth became the company's first woman sales and trading partner. Two years after 9/11, she published a primer on starting a business, entitled "The Old Girls Network: Insider Advice for Women Building Businesses in a Man's World." Duckworth serves on the U.S.-Afghan Women's Council, a public/private partnership established in 2002 by Presidents Bush and Karzai.

Like so many others, she is weaving together a life that has taken unexpected shapes and colors since the 9/11 tragedy.