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The hard-charging CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald has a case of survivor’s guilt he can’t escape. It haunts him in the form of a nightmare in which he repeatedly relives the trauma of 9/11.
It’s the one dream Howard Lutnick can’t escape. It’s taken a decade to shake the rest, which plagued him after 658 of his employees were killed in the attacks.
He described the vision in a wide-ranging and emotional interview with The Post to commemorate the 10-year anniversary.
“The dream is: I was looking uptown, and I could see the plane, and I knew the plane was coming, and I knew that if I ran to the elevator, I could get out,” a tearful Lutnick began.
“Then, on the way to the elevator, I would always see people, and I would grab them, hysterically try to grab them and drag them to the elevator, [yelling] ‘We gotta go! We gotta go now!’ ” he said in a choked voice.
“And they always say something, argue, go slow or talk, and we never make it to the elevator, and just as the plane hits the building, I wake up in that sweaty nightmare fashion,” he concluded.
It’s still too much to bear. After finishing, he broke down in tears.
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Lutnick, 50, famously cheated death on 9/11 by taking a rare morning off for a family milestone — escorting his son, Kyle, to his first day of kindergarten at the exclusive Horace Mann School.
When he heard about the planes’ striking the towers, the Long Island native sped downtown, where financial-services giant Cantor Fitzgerald’s 960 employees occupied the 101st to the 105th floors of the north tower.
“I’m standing at the doorway of One World Trade Center, and the second [tower] collapses,” he said in his third-floor Midtown conference room. “If the first one collapses, I’m gone then.
“So I start running. I’m running in a suit and tie and shoes, and I look over my shoulder, and there’s this black cloud, tornado, hurricane chasing me” as he dove under an SUV to safety.
He has spent the decade since trying to look forward — compensating the victims’ families, attending countless funerals, rebuilding the company.
The notoriously tough Lutnick never sought help from a therapist or medication, relying instead on friends and family to get through the toughest days.
He’s still wracked by his own policy of hiring people who were related. As a result, many families lost more than one loved one.
“Everyone in the company had someone who was on their top-three list of most important persons,” Lutnick said.
His older sister, Edie, a lawyer, survived because she was coming in late that day. But beloved brother Gary was at his desk at 7:30 a.m.
Ironically, that same close-knit culture also may have been the firm’s saving grace.
“I leaned on my employees to get me through this,” he said.
“I didn’t want to work; I didn’t want to rebuild the company. The only thing that brought me back was to help our friends and family.”
Asked if he considered himself a hero, he teared up and replied: “I’ve never been asked that before,” adding that he’d rather be called “a friend of the families.”