The Fixer: Roger Corrado

The Wall Street Fixer: Roger Corrado

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00:00:00 Roger Corrado: New York people won't bow down to anybody. Nobody's going to knock us down, you know? It's just like -- we just get up, dust ourselves off and fight, and keep going.

Jenny Pachucki: From the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, this is Our City. Our Story. a series where New Yorkers talk about their city, what it means to be a New Yorker, and how September 11th changed that. I'm Jenny Pachucki.

00:00:25 Roger Corrado is one of those old-school Italian guys who was born and raised in Hoboken. He's a big guy with a big heart, and has recently retired from a successful career trading on Wall Street. He may not see himself this way, but as far as New Yorkers go, Roger Corrado could be straight out of Central Casting. This is a point of personal fascination to me. How do New Yorkers see themselves as New Yorkers, and what exactly does that mean?

00:00:52 I think people from outside of the city have their ideas of New York characters. What's a "New Yorker" to you?

Roger Corrado: I think the most surprising thing that people would say, and maybe you realize this too, is how actually courteous and friendly New Yorkers are. I think people come to New York with the fear for the first time that it's like a rough-and-tumble type town. The problem being maybe our accents are a little -- you know, and I did some CNBC work when I was vice chairman of the exchange; I did TV.

00:01:20 And It's funny; they used to tell me, "You have to tone down your accent." And I would be like, "What accent?"

Jenny Pachucki: Corrado talked about his long relationship with the World Trade Center. He watched the towers rise from Hoboken, and when he was 19 he started working on Wall Street. By September 2001, he was working as the vice chairman of the New York Board of Trade in an office located in Four World Trade Center.

What do you remember about the World Trade Center?

00:01:48 Roger Corrado: From '81 to 2001 I was literally working in Four World Trade Center. Four World Trade Center was literally attached to the South Tower, so it was pretty much -- what does that span? About 20 years of my life in the Trade Centers. We did

a lot of business; companies I had worked for were housed in the Towers. I did go to the World Trade Center. I did go to Windows of the World. I took my children to the observation deck.

00:02:14 So it really was a structure that was a part of me, growing up as a kid, remembering basically the Towers going up, and then spending 20 years of my working life in them. Let's just say they were something very special in my life.

Jenny Pachucki: This relationship with the World Trade Center and so much more would change on September 11, 2001. But actually, Corrado's September 11 story started on Monday, September 10.

00:02:44 Roger Corrado: I went to a Yankee game the night before. There was big sports going on; the Yankees were doing well. Roger Clemens was going for his 20th victory against the Red Sox that day, and the Giants were on Monday night playing in Denver, so it was a big sports night. But we went out -- we meaning a group of traders that all worked with me in Four World Trade Center. We met at Yankee Stadium.

00:03:09 And people don't realize because the morning of September 11 was a spectacular, gorgeous day -- no humidity, it was crystal clear, blue skies -- so people don't realize the night before there were terrible

thunder showers. It was really a lot of rain and everything, and it probably just cleared the way for such a beautiful day for the next day. But for my thing, it was like we got rained out of the game so we wound up going to a steak place. We probably drank too much.

00:03:37 Jenny Pachucki: This is a story that I have so often heard. People who were rained out of the Yankees game resorted to watching the New York Giants play the Denver Broncos. It was an away game in Denver. The game went late, past midnight on the East Coast, and there was a lot of action in the fourth quarter. So consequently, the morning of September 11, a lot of people were running behind. And this is one of those mornings when running 20 minutes late to work could -- and did -- mean the difference between life and death.

00:04:06 Roger Corrado: So I was running a little late. I mean I had taken my kids to school. I was probably -- you know, I would always meet a couple of friends in this neighborhood bagel store, which is still there on 7th and Washington in Hoboken. But that morning, my phone was going off and I was getting messages, and I didn't even pick up. So now I hop in; I take the one call which was from an associate of mine who was already in our offices at Four World Trade on the ninth floor,

not on the trading floor. We had a private office upstairs, one floor above.

00:04:35 And he had informed me that a small plane hit one of the towers, the first tower. So I think he, as anybody else who then I spoke to, thought it was just an accidental thing, you know? No suspicions even arose at that point. So I proceeded to hop in my car and rush down to the PATH trains in Hoboken. Now I parked my car literally right by the entrance to the PATH trains.

00:05:00 I'm running over to get on the train, and I hear the roar of a jet, literally over our head, and proceeded to watch it just smash right into the second tower.

Jenny Pachucki: He got in touch with the people in his office while he still had cell reception, picked up his kids from school and took them to his father's house, and then went to the local cigar store that he had designated as the meeting point for the people in his firm. Luckily, everyone survived.

00:05:27 After that, he found himself asking the same question that so many New Yorkers were asking themselves at that moment. "What do I do now?"

Roger Corrado: You know, I guess the first thing as an exchange or as an individual, you want to be resilient. Think of it like -- I guess you want to be battle ready, you want to be

proving, like, "Okay, you just did something terrible to us, but we're still standing."

00:05:53 You know, we had a recovery facility, which we had built in 1994; we had purchased space in Long Island City, Queens, because of the bombing from 1993. So now we were already making a move to send over our tech guys and get the Verizon people set up. We were actually ready to trade Tuesday night by 10:00 p.m., so if we had to have an emergency session -- because we were world markets.

Jenny Pachucki: The September 11 attacks were attacks on United States symbols.

00:06:23 Terrorists targeted places that represented our centers of capitalism, military, and likely our government. And the threat to Wall Street was very real. The market didn't open on September 11, and it remained closed until Monday, September 17 -- the longest closing since 1933. Lower was like a war zone, and the effort to reopen Wall Street and prevent the collapse of the economy was monumental.

00:06:50 It involved the work of multiple agencies and individuals, from the sanitation workers who cleared the area of dust and debris, to those who worked to restore power and utilities, to the NYPD officers who greeted workers as they arrived. On the morning of

September 17, six days after the most significant terrorist attack in our country's history, first responders rang the and NASDAQ opening bells.

00:07:15 Roger Corrado: Come Monday, it was kind of like back to business. So Monday the 17th we literally opened our -- we went that weekend. I mean you're talking only a few days after the 11th, so we went on Saturday and Sunday. You tested your phone lines. We had to devise, being -- let's say in the World Trade Centers we had let's say 20 trading pits; in the recovery place we had three trading pits. So now you had to do almost like a coal miner shift.

00:07:43 You had to come in shifts, so would be let's say from 11:00 to 12:00, and would be from 12:00 to 1:00 and orange juice would be like from 3:00 to 4:00. I guess, in a sense, that also helped me, because if I didn't have that, if we didn't have the recovery facility -- if you were like, "Okay, what are you doing now?" "Oh, take some time off and sit at home." I'm not that type. You know? I mean we had to prove -- and it probably goes back to one of your first questions. What's a New Yorker like? That's what a New Yorker is like. I mean it's the truth.

00:08:13 New York people won't bow down to anybody. You say New York? Nobody's going to knock us down. We

just get up, dust ourselves off and fight, and keep going.

Jenny Pachucki: Corrado's story at its core is the story of the resilience of New York, and the resilience of those in the city who worked to assure that the terrorists would not accomplish their goal of doing lasting damage to the economy and to the American spirit. It's one of those often forgotten stories of triumph.

00:08:41 The 9/11 Memorial Museum is not a place that Corrado had wanted to go, prior to last summer when we met. And when he finally did visit, 14 years later, it evoked a wealth of memories that he wasn't expecting.

Roger Corrado: You know, everyone close to me and my family could see that it still bothers me. Obviously it does. I don't know; I guess it's something that you'll never forget, you know, and you didn't want to come to open up any bad memories. But I honestly felt like it was some good memories, too.

00:09:10 So I really appreciated coming today and seeing that. You know, you forget a lot of the good times you had by the one day. We had a lot of fun in there. We had a lot of good friends. We did great business. You know, it was a big part of my life. It defined pretty much who I was. And I miss that. I don't think the were ever the same after that day. I don't know that I

intentionally avoided it; things take time. For me it took 14 years.

00:09:36 Jenny Pachucki: From the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, this is Our City. Our Story. I'm Jenny Pachucki, series host, writer, and producer, with executive producers Michael Frazier and Carl Cricco.

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