Last Man Standing (57 page)

The Dimon family at President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009.

Jamie Dimon worked with Sandy Weill for more than fifteen years. In 1986, the two men parachuted into Baltimore’s Commercial Credit and turned it into the platform on which they would eventually build Citigroup.

Bill Winters, co-CEO of JPMorgan Chase’s investment bank.

Steve Black, Winters’s counterpart, in Anguilla just before the dinner during which Dimon called to alert him to the impending sale of Bear Stearns.

JPMorgan Chase obtained Bear Stearns’s headquarters at 383 Madison Avenue as part of the purchase of the investment bank in March 2008. Some JPMorgan Chase executives urged Dimon to buy the company if only to acquire the building—thus preventing a much longer commute to a proposed new site for the JPMorgan headquarters at the southern tip of Manhattan.

By the late 1980s, Dimon had already earned a reputation as one of Wall Street’s sharpest minds, even though he was barely in his thirties.