New Book: The Rich, But Desperate, Housewives of Lehman's 'Huntington Mafia'

A new book by Vicky Ward, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine,  details the extravagant lifestyles of a tight-knit group of four young couples living in Huntington, all the husbands Lehman Brothers executives.

The Lessings,  the Tuckers, the Pettits, and the Gregorys were often referred to as the "Huntington Mafia" because they all lived in Lloyd Harbor.

The book, called The Devil's Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers and published by Wiley, is excerpted in April's Vanity Fair.

Lehman President Joe Gregory bought a helicopter to commute to Manhattan and then a seaplane when he found out he couldn't fly in inclement weather. His wife, Niki, "loved the clothes and the jewels that her husband lavished on her,"  eads an excerpt from the book in the magazine. "She was known to take trips to Los Angeles just to shop. She gave Lehman wives tours of her vast shoe closets in their Huntington home."

As described by the publisher, "the husbands were the Rat Pack of Wall Street. Four close friends: one a decorated war hero, one an emotional hippie, and two regular guys with big hearts, big dreams, and noble aims. They were going to get rich on Wall Street. They were going to prove that men like them with zero financial training - could more than equal the Ivy-League-educated white shoe bankers who were the competition. They were going to create an institution for men like them -- men who were hungry and untrained and they were going to win, but not at the cost of their soul

In short, they were going to be the good guys of finance.

Under their watch, Lehman Brothers started to grow and became independent again in 1994. But something had gone wrong on the journey. The men slowly, perhaps inevitably, changed. As Lehman Brothers grew, so too did the cracks in and among the men who had rebuilt it.

Ward takes you inside Lehman's highly charged offices. You'll meet beloved leaders who were erased from the corporate history books, but who could have taken the firm in a very different direction had they not fallen victim to infighting and their own weaknesses. You will encounter an unlikely and almost unknown Marcus Brutus, who may have had more to do with Lehman s failings than anyone including Dick Fuld, who has widely been considered the poster-child for the mistakes and greed of all bankers.

What Ward uncovers is that Lehman may have lost at the risky games of collateralized debt obligations, swaps, and leverage but that was just the end of a bigger story. "Little Lehman" was the Wall Street shop known to be forever fighting for its life and somehow succeeding. On Wall Street it was cheekily known as "the cat with nine lives." But this cat pushed its luck too far -- and died, the victim of men and women blinded by arrogance. Come inside The Devil's Casino and see how good men lose their way, and see how a firm that rose with the glory and bravado of Icarus fell burning in flames not so much from a sun, but from a match lit from within."

Vicky Ward has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2001, specializing in investigative reporting. She has profiled, among others, Jean-Marie Messier, Carly Fiorina, CIA agent Valerie Plame, businesswoman Louise MacBain, Morgan Stanley, the late Bruce Wasserstein, counterterrorism expert Rich-ard Clarke, François Pinault, the Getty, the Guggenheim, Fairfield Greenwich Group (a Madoff feeder fund), Brooke Astor, and Kate Moss. Ward is a weekly columnist for the Huffington Post and a contributor to CNBC. She was previously the executive editor of Talk magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the London Times, and the Daily Telegraph. A native Briton, Ward was the runner-up for the Catherine Pakenham Award in 1994, Britain's most prestigious award for young women writers. She holds a master's degree in English literature from Cambridge University and has lived in New York City since 1997.