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SEIZED:  A CEO's Reflections on the Killing of Main Street Banks in America

Digital 1st Edition  (214 pages)        

Available at Apple Books (.ibook), Amazon/Kindle (.epub)

Richard S. Cupp and Marie W. Woolf

Getting smarter about banks or, at least, more familiar is what really prevents banking crises. Richard S. Cupp, a nationally-respected bank CEO credited as one of our foremost turnaround experts of troubled community ("Main Street") banks, and Marie W. Woolf offer a riveting corner office memoir detailing his most illuminating and dramatic engagements over a remarkable decades-long career. This sharp, candid look into an unusual banking niche has a very poignant twist late in the game, in which Woolf was deeply involved. Written for Americans outside of "Too Big To Fail"—Main Street—caught in and at risk of something that should never have happened, and never happen again.

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Excerpt:

     
      A commercial jetliner explodes into the north tower of the World Trade Center. 
       I experienced 9/11 from nowhere near New York, but absolutely personally.
It is important to me to give special space, by way of tribute, to outstanding advisors, business partners and friends, particularly Herman Sandler, CEO and co-founder of swashbuckling New York investment bank Sandler O’Neill + Partners, LP who, in a critical moment at VCNB, were unhesitatingly generous in a sector where “generosity” is for saps.
       ...Yet four years later, at the age of only 57, Herman was unable to save himself. Sandler and another co-founder, head of investment banking Christopher Quackenbush, were among the sixty-six employees of Sandler O’Neill who died when its primary offices on the 104th floor of 2 World Trade Center—the south tower—were hit on September 11. No one who knew and worked with them in that day can easily speak of them.
       Characterized as “a firm founded by friends who hired friends,” the Sandler ethic both before and after the tragedy (paying out full salaries and bonuses to surviving family members through the rest of 2001 as if the employees were still alive, extending full benefits for five years to all of the families, establishing a foundation to pay for the college education of their children) was thoughtful, to say the least. I knew many of the Sandler professionals warmly, as well as principals at Sandler competitor Keefe, Bruyette & Woods who also perished in the tragedy.
       ...In 1993, sitting in the bar of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for the first of what would be many conversations with Herman, I knew him only by reputation as a guy of uncommon esprit de corps and thoughtfulness, who would stop you from making bad decisions. 

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