SEVEN

Harry Ramos and Victor Wald: The Courage of Strangers

For the most part, the victims of September 11 didn’t know each other, though they passed each other in the lobby, or sat next to each other on the plaza outside at lunchtime in nice weather, or they rode the elevators together and then went into different offices. And then when their places of work were hit by terrorist-commandeered planes, they helped each other, and they died together, and in a few cases it turned out that they sacrificed themselves for each other. Such was the case with Harry Ramos and Victor Wald, two men in the New York financial world who couldn’t have been more different—and, in a way, couldn’t have been more alike.

Wald was an Orthodox Jew, born in 1952, who spent just about his entire life within a twenty-block radius of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was a serious man, not the kind of man to go out drinking with colleagues, heavyset and bearded, so impassioned about what he regarded as the hostility of the world to Jews that he was once—though no longer—an active supporter of the extremist, anti-Arab leader of the Jewish Defense League, Meier Kahane.

Ramos, of Puerto Rican ancestry, was exactly the kind of man who did like to go drinking with the guys. Where Wald was overweight and serious, Ramos was slim, a natty dresser, and a natural comedian. His brother Henry says that Harry was so naturally gregarious and entertaining that his bosses and customers used to pay his way to Las Vegas just to have his company. He even got a ringside seat at a Mike Tyson heavyweight championship match that way. “He loved schmoozing,” Henry said. “And he was good at it. He loved his job.”

In fact, there was a kind of sociological similarity between Victor Wald and Harry Ramos, an up-from-modest beginnings ambitiousness about them that landed them both high in the sky in offices in the south tower. Victor, born in Manhattan, had parents who were Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria; Harry, born in Brooklyn, had parents who immigrated from Puerto Rico. They both worked hard; they were family men, with two children each—two daughters for Victor, two sons for Harry. One of Harry’s daughters and one of Victor’s sons had the same name, Alex. Both Harry and Victor represented the Great American Mobility Machine, and the basic indifference of that machine—especially in the world of finance—to such matters as national origin or religious belief. They were individuals, in I. B. Singer’s sense of the word, not blended into any homogeneous mix.

There was an outsized quality to Wald, an intensity to him something close to voraciousness in the variety and quality of his many interests. His life fits a certain American archetype, like a character from a novel by Chaim Potok, the boy from a strictly Orthodox background who rebels against that strictness as a man even while remaining powerfully attached to the Orthodox traditions. He and his family were the kinds of Jews who strictly observed the daylong fast on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and then would break the fast by ordering in from unkosher Hunan Balcony or Empire Szechuan. The apartment he shared with his wife, Rebecca, and their two daughters was full of religious articles—mezuzahs hung in the doorway to each room; twenty menorahs gleamed from display cabinets alongside translucent glass vases bought in Jerusalem, and illuminated Torah manuscripts lined the walls of the hallway. But there was also a vast music collection, as weighted toward Bob Marley, the Who, Edith Piaf, and Harry Chapin as to Puccini and Debussy. Victor was an avid and serious stamp collector, and the bookshelves of the apartment were also crammed with binders whose spines bore such exotic name places as the Marshall Islands, San Marino, and Slovenia—some fifty volumes in all as of September 11, 2001, though from time to time he had sold previous collections in order to raise money for new ones. In the last months of his life he had developed an interest in feng-shui, which added to an interest in kabbalah, Jewish mystical interpretations of the holy scripts.

And so, Victor was passionate and large and full of benign contradictions. Even though he had more than a passing flirtation with the extreme anti-Arab Judaism of Meier Kahane, he was a great reader of American history, and, along with the binders full of stamps, the bookshelves contained a large library of biographies of the great statesmen and presidents as well as many works on the Civil War. Victor had taken trips to several of the battlefields—Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg. This sort of cultural and spiritual eclecticism was evident from an early age. Once as a youth he spent a week at a kibbutz in Israel where his job was feeding the turkeys. His supervisor told him to play classical music to soothe the birds, but Victor rebelliously played Led Zepellin instead, and he was not invited to return to that kibbutz.

Victor went from second through twelfth grades to the Jewish Ramaz Schools across Central Park. He played soccer after school in the park, did Jewish studies at City College as an undergraduate, and then got a master’s degree in both foreign affairs and business administration from Columbia University.

He was a smart and curious boy, immersed even then in history, already a Civil War buff, and yet he was a mediocre student because he simply didn’t pay very close attention to his studies. And then there was his attraction to Meier Kahane, who was rejected by most of the Jewish establishment, including most Orthodox rabbis, but Wald attended several demonstrations in his favor, even getting into fistfights with Arab counter-demonstrators on one or two occasions. But, Rebecca said, he mellowed by the time he finished graduate school and went to such demonstrations no more. Along with his stamps, he collected coins and baseball cards as well, all with a connoisseur’s eye for detail and a childlike pride in his collections. He was sickly at times, especially as a child when he once spent six months in bed with rheumatic fever, and as an adult he sometimes wheezed with asthma. In his middle age he was a stout 250 pounds. But when he was in school, he showed a certain muscularity. He even worked as a service processor during school breaks, delivering summonses and subpoenas to people who often didn’t want to get them. With the money he earned in one month he could fly to Europe and Israel for the remainder of the summer.

As he got a bit older, and especially after he graduated from business school, he became more interested in worldly success than in rabble rousing—though he did keep to his strong opinions on the Middle East and was always ready for a debate. He started professional life as an account executive for Gray Advertising, managing such high-profile clients as Cointreau and Club Med. But he had creative longings, a desire to be a writer, and after a year he took off to write a book, which he described as a biography of God. “It’s a cynical view of the Orthodox take on Judaism,” his wife, Rebecca, said of her husband’s neatly typed, but unpublished, two-hundred-page manuscript. “There were lots of references to the Torah.” And so it was that Wald joined the legions of people who try to realize a literary dream, to write the great American novel, and then, realizing that they probably don’t have quite what it takes, return to something more ordinary. In Wald’s case it was to return to advertising for a while. But then, a friend of his named David Landau came along to exert a major influence on his life.

Landau urged Wald to become a stock broker, where the real money was, and that’s what he did. He studied for the broker’s exam and then, in 1981, went to work for Prudential Bache at 666 Fifth Avenue. He liked it. The work was more gratifying, more interesting, than advertising, he felt, and the monetary reward was greater.

And then there was Rebecca Brandstetter, who was Landau’s cousin. Victor met her at a dinner hosted by Landau at Teacher’s Too, a well-known Upper West Side eatery, long since gone out of business. They seemed an unlikely match at first. Rebecca, who was nine years younger than Victor, who was thirty in 1982, thought he was too old. She thought he was too Jewish also, or at least he looked too Jewish, she felt. She moved to San Francisco only a month after meeting Victor, but he was ardent, not to be denied. He phoned her frequently for three months before going to San Francisco and proposing to her in September 1984. She accepted, and they were married the following March.

Victor was doing well, newly married and thriving in his new career, but he was also running into problems. A rapid climb up the ladder required a certain gregariousness that wasn’t natural to him. He didn’t belong to the boys’ club, drinking after work, cultivating managers and executives, playing the game of buddyship and conviviality, and that, in his view, led him to be passed over for advancements to which he was otherwise entitled.

He left Prudential Bache after the stock market crash in 1987 and moved to the Oppenheimer Fund. But he encountered the same problems there as he had at Prudential Bache. “He didn’t go out with the guys,” Rebecca said. “He came home.” Their daughters, Alexandra and Daniella, were born in 1987 and 1990. “It was very important to have family outings,” Rebecca said.

Wald made a risky move in 1995, trying to get away from the partial satisfaction of life at a major brokerage to win the fuller satisfaction of doing business on his own. He and several others started up their own specialty investment bank, Continuum Capital, with an office on Third Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. Wald became a minor partner in the new enterprise, but when one of the major partners withdrew his stake in Continuum the company effectively collapsed.

Wald then went to work for another brokerage firm, Coleman & Company, in 1999, but Coleman, like most firms dependent on Wall Street, ran into the market downturn of 2000 and 2001. For a time, Wald took his computer home and cleared trades in an office he set up in Alexandra’s room, not even going into the office. And, in 2001, only a few months before September 11, the principle partners at Coleman advised him to find a position at Avalon Partners, a stock brokerage that they had plans to take over, promising to make Victor a manager once they did.

And that is how Victor Wald went to work on September 11, 2001, taking the express elevator to the 79th-floor Sky Lobby in the north tower and the local to the 84th floor, where Avalon Partners had its offices. He took the subway from the Ninety-sixth Street station, only a block or so away from his apartment on Ninety-seventh Street, and, while it was a straight shot from there to Cortland Street, the World Trade Center stop, maybe twenty minutes altogether, he felt that his way of getting to work was something of a comedown for a man who used to be able to afford taxis in the morning. But his career had faltered somewhat and he had private-school tuition to pay for his two daughters and a new job that didn’t provide the same cash flow as the old one. Rebecca thinks he was depressed, though perhaps he was going through what is commonly called the mid-life crisis.

“In the past year he became frustrated,” Rebecca said. “He worked very hard, but we had a hard time making enough for tuition.”

And so, on September 11, Victor Wald went to work like many, maybe even most, middle-aged New Yorkers that morning, bearing the burdens of his responsibilities, anxious about money in a city where the expenses seem to come out of nowhere and you’re no longer young enough to start all over. Life doesn’t always fulfill all the expectations you have for it. But still, you make the most of it, and you try not to complain, and you know that you’re going to have to keep going, barring the unforeseen.

*   *   *

Harry Ramos worked only three floors above Victor, though the two men never met before September 11. Ramos had spent a couple of decades as a Wall Street trader and he had become a trusted pro—“his word was his bond,” as John DeVito, a senior colleague at his last job at May Davis put it—though he got to his profession by an indirect, almost accidental route. Harry was born in Brooklyn in 1955, the youngest of the four children of Napoleon and Bertha Ramos, who emigrated from Puerto Rico in 1937 and 1943. He grew up in the Fort Green projects, which is another way of saying that he came from modest beginnings, no silver spoons there.

“Harry and I, we’re about one and a half years apart,” his brother and best friend Henry said. “Our mother kept a close eye on us when we were growing up. All the other kids in the neighborhood would be going to the movies and our mom would always say no.”

But the two Ramos brothers, both skinny boys, would slip out of the house and go down to the movie theater anyway, crawling under the gates at the back door (where they put newspaper on the ground because men in the movie house came out there to relieve themselves) and watching their favorite kung-fu epics.

Harry graduated from Westinghouse High School in 1973. He was lively and active in his school years, a good dancer, the singer for a salsa band that once performed at Yankee Stadium after a game. He was also good with his hands. He built his own stereo equipment; he was a carpenter; he was also both a natty dresser and a jokester, a kid with a gift for making other kids laugh.

“He would make a joke out of anything,” Henry said. “He was very well liked. He touched a lot of people even back then. He would see someone sad and he would walk right up to them and talk to them to get them to talk about it, or even just to get their minds off of things.”

But Harry’s father, who worked in a hotel, died suddenly of a massive cerebral hemorrhage the year Harry graduated from high school, and Harry had to go to work. His handiness got him his first job, which was building display cabinets for the Rolex watch company. Then, in the early 1980s, a friend who had a job at the brokerage house Lehman Brothers asked him to join the stock trading team there. Harry did, not staying long at Lehman, but moving around to several different jobs on Wall Street, and doing well, making money.

Harry’s family moved to Staten Island in 1974, and Harry lived there while he was a bachelor. But one night he went to a party and saw a green-eyed eighteen-year-old named Migdalia Cruz, who, as it happened, was so morose over having broken up with her boyfriend that she had turned down a series of young men who had asked her to dance. Finally, her girlfriends, tired of trying to cheer her up, said, “If you don’t dance with the next person who asks you, we’re going to embarrass you.” The next boy was Harry.

“He was a great dancer,” Migdalia said. “He had a lot of hustle.”

When Migdalia told Harry that she was Puerto Rican, he made his decision, right then, on the spot. “I have to marry you then,” he said, startling her, almost scaring her away, “because I’ve been looking for a Puerto Rican girl with green eyes.” He even took out a photograph and showed her that his two brothers had both married green-eyed Puerto Ricans.

Migdalia, thinking this was a little forward, considered giving him a fake phone number so he couldn’t call her, but she didn’t, and the two then dated for eight years before they got married in 1986. They had two boys, Eugene Harry in 1996 and Alex George just a few months before September 11.

What Victor Wald couldn’t do was Harry Ramos’s forte. He was a born schmoozer, a natural at corporate socializing and fitting in. When he joined the May Davis Group, a minority-owned investment bank, in 2001, he didn’t like the office he was given. But rather than complain, he found a storage space that was vacant, and he built a new workspace himself. It was on the 87th floor of the north tower, and he got to work early.

“The guys on Wall Street used to call Harry ‘the Godfather,’” Henry said, “because he was always dressed so sharp. I mean he would buy a new suit every few weeks, and a new $75 tie! Some of his bosses and customers would take him to Vegas for the weekend, all expenses paid because he was pure entertainment. Like he would get to go to the Tyson fight, ringside seats. They used to call him ‘mobile comedy’ because he was just that, he was mobile and he was funny.”

On the morning of September 11, while Victor Wald was morose on his way to the 84th floor of the north tower, Harry Ramos was his usual cheerful self as he set off for the 87th floor. Henry drove him from his home to Pennsylvania Station in Newark as he did every morning. But Harry too had a few things on his mind. Migdalia had recently lost her mother, so Henry gave Harry a bit of a talking to, reminding him that Migdalia would need him more than ever, and maybe he’d have to spend more time at home, rather than go out with the boys so often. And then there was the contractor who he went to see that morning at a coffee shop before going to work. Harry was building a new house and the contractor was working too slowly. After Harry’s meeting with the contractor, he told Henry that he was annoyed, but he was also stuck, since the old house was sold already, and, while he could stay there for a while, he needed to get the new house ready quickly if he was going to have a place to live for the family. So as the brothers arrived at the station, Harry too carried some of the ordinary burdens of life in the Big City. But as always Harry told Henry he loved him, and he gave him a high five and got out of the car.

“And the last thing I saw him do was point out some guy who was funny-looking, piling into the station to get on the train,” Henry said. “He always did that, point some goofy-looking person out so I could laugh to myself as I drove away.”

Was there anything in the life of Harry Ramos to that point showing that he would risk his own life to help somebody else, especially somebody he didn’t know, had never met before, and was about as different from him as it is possible to be? Probably none of us shows advance signs of something like that, or maybe if somebody does, it turns out that the signs were false and that he was the kind of person who runs away. Heroism just comes, or it doesn’t, with the occasion, and, for Harry Ramos, the occasion was only a train ride and an hour or so away.