Twenty-five years ago, as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks ripped through the fabric of the nation, every American was seized by unbearable grief, whether we knew someone whose life was lost or we were feeling heartbreak for strangers from afar.
For the employees of Cantor Fitzgerald, which had offices in the World Trade Center, the sheer magnitude of the personal tragedy was nearly impossible to comprehend. The attack on New York City's Twin Towers killed a staggering 658 employees at the financial services firm, an avalanche of loss that affected everyone at the company.
The number of casualties was so great that the staff had no choice but to leap into action to support one another. That essential work — distributing money, planning funerals, providing grief counseling, building support groups, and more — eventually turned into the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which has since raised more than $300 million to aid the families whose worlds were forever changed on that infamous September day.
In observance of the tragedy's 25th anniversary, the fund is releasing a moving book in which the community that coalesced around this profound loss offers a raw and emotional look at their experiences. The Families: 9/11 Anthology of Love, Loss and Lessons of Resilience includes 176 essays from Cantor Fitzgerald survivors, witnesses, and family members who speak from the heart and share what they've learned through it all.
Below, you can read one of those essays in full. It's from Edie Lutnick, who co-edited the book and co-founded the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund back in 2001. She writes intimately about losing her brother Gary on 9/11, the whirlwind that followed, and why she's remained so committed to her relief mission for the last 25 years.
I used to know every name by heart. Twenty-five years later, that recall is harder. My labor law firm was on the 101st floor of One World Trade Center, inside Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices. I knew some employees, but not all. I knew very few families. Now, every name, every lost person, every family member — I think of them as mine.
I loved working in the World Trade Center. I had shoes to change into under my desk because I adored walking to and from work, crossing the plaza with the Koenig Sphere and the “Peace on Earth” sculpture. Often, there was live music. You never knew what type of music you would hear as you made your way into the building. Our tower had the antenna on the top. I'd go into the lobby with soaring ceilings, up the elevator to the 78th floor to change to a second elevator, which took you up even higher to your floor. Cantor’s offices, with Rodin’s The Thinker sculpture, were amazing. The views, magnificent. The sunsets, unparalleled.
My two younger brothers, Howard and Gary Lutnick, worked on the 105th and 104th floors, respectively. Howard was the chairman and chief executive officer of Cantor Fitzgerald. Gary was a managing director and trader. We were very close. Our parents died young, and all we had was each other. We were a team. Gary bought me lunch from the 101st floor cafeteria all the time. I ran upstairs to Howard’s office at the end of most days, watched them work together, and kissed them goodnight.
On September 11, 2001, my morning meeting was canceled, Howard was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten, and Gary went to work. The rest is history.
Prior to 9/11, I described my identity as being the sister of Howard and Gary. Then, on September 11, 658 of the 960 Cantor, eSpeed, and TradeSpark employees who were at work on the 101st to 105th floors of One World Trade Center (the North Tower) were murdered. Two-thirds of Cantor’s New York workforce. My brother Gary, the person I had practically raised, who took me out every Mother’s Day; my 36-year-old brother, who was the average age of the 9/11 victims, was among them. My entire life changed.
Three days after the attacks, I had a new identity. I became the co-founder and executive director — and eventually president — of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund.
Looking back, people assumed the Relief Fund existed before. It did not. Howard wanted to start a charity to take care of the families. He tasked me with running it. Howard would rebuild the company. I would, as best as possible, help rebuild the families. The company would provide financial support. The Relief Fund would figure out its form and how to get it to them. Helping these families forced me to do something other than grieve Gary.
In hindsight, the timeline was mind-boggling. Here’s a snapshot:
September 11, 2001: The unthinkable happened. People started congregating at Howard and his wife Allison’s apartment. They opened their home and their phone lines and became the hub for everything. Everyone there hugged, cried, answered phones, and worked. Around the clock. Grief and immediate purpose co-existing out of necessity.
September 12, 2001: Howard decided to start a charity. Allison thought of a crisis center to provide the families a central place to gather and immediately went about making that a reality at the Pierre Hotel.
September 13, 2001: As Howard and the other Cantor survivors were cobbling pieces of the company together, their competitors forced them to open their bond business. They had 72 hours to save the business. It seemed impossible. Galvanized by the goal of helping the families of lost colleagues, miraculously and heroically, they succeeded. They re-opened the U.S. Treasury platform on September 13.
September 14, 2001: The Internal Revenue Service awarded us emergency 501(c)(3) status and the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund was born. Howard donated $1 million to get us started. Later that day, Howard appeared on television. He made America understand this was not just a corporate loss and attack at the center of capitalism, but a human tragedy.
People began writing to us. My partner, Lewis Ameri, two volunteers, and I opened huge bins of letters, cards and checks that arrived.
Both Howard and I had a mission larger than ourselves: the families.
September 16, 2001: Douglas Gardner’s funeral was the first I attended. He was Howard’s best friend, eSpeed’s vice chairman, and right hand at work. It was crushing. With 658 dead, there were hundreds of funerals; sometimes 20 a day.
September 17, 2001: I attended a meeting with existing major charities whose names you would recognize. They advocated doing nothing because, since the 9/11 victims did not meet the $16,000 threshold for indigency, donations to families might not be tax-deductible. I was outraged. I called my brother. With Cantor’s help, we got the law changed. Simultaneously, Cantor’s equities business reopened. They too defied the odds and succeeded.
It was only our first week. The pace never let up.
Howard, now glimpsing a future for Cantor, pledged 25 percent of Cantor’s profits for five years and 10 years of healthcare to the families. Cantor committed to underwrite all the Relief Fund expenses, so 100 percent of all donations could be distributed. The same holds true today.
Cantor’s patent attorneys, then Fish & Neave, donated office space. The Relief Fund had a home. What began with friends manning Cantor’s crisis centers at The Pierre and The Plaza hotels and answering phones at Howard and Allison’s apartment grew to a volunteer corps over 100 strong. They were spectacular, working in shifts around the clock.
We worked 20 hours a day, rarely going home, sometimes just to shower. When Lewis and I did go home, I’d privately cry in the shower. One volunteer’s whole job was to source donated food to feed the volunteers. Still, we all lost weight. I dressed in Gary’s oversized sweaters. A reporter described me as “a hollow-eyed 42-year-old.” She was not wrong.
We had no business plan and no experience with this. I was completely reactive. People sent in money? Okay: Open a bank account. People wrote offering to volunteer? Great: Ask them to come in.
The only thing predictable about our days was their unpredictability.
September 20, 2001: I was invited to sing on the remake of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” to benefit 9/11 families. I was reluctant, but the money mattered, so I went. Some 200 people sang, including major stars, and the lyrics became: We are family. I have all my brothers and sisters with me. Surrounded by voices, I started sobbing, knowing Gary would never be “with me” again. When it ended, I cut in front of actress Rosie Perez in the interview line to make it to Fred Varacchi’s funeral — she later became a loyal Charity Day supporter. Still in my funeral clothes, I went back to our new office, and back to that day’s tasks.
We became master list-makers. Our tasks were endless and varied: find the missing, make a final list, find the next of kin, manage complicated family dynamics, gather contact information, share funeral information, open mail, deposit checks, record and copy absolutely everything... figure out how to get money to families... then do it... write checks… again… and again… and again… thousands of times... answer desperate phone calls, figure out how to get them emotional support, get grief counselors, set up support groups... town hall meetings... accept 30,000 teddy bears, give away 30,000 teddy bears, make a teddy bear mosh pit... breathe... research DNA samples, set up estates, talk to the medical examiner... help with taxes, accounting and fundraise. If one family out of the 658 (some with multiple deaths), had a problem, others had it, too, so onto the list it went. Would this end? It would not.
Make no mistake: Our primary task — a truly horrible one — was to figure out who was alive and who was dead. Initially, we thought we had 733 victims. Every person we found was a gift. We would ultimately end with 658, a number that became sacred to us, plus three burn victims. My brother Gary was one of the lost. Howard and I never had hope that Gary had survived, but now we too were officially a Cantor Family. When BGC Partners, the successor to eSpeed, acquired Euro Brokers in 2005, they had lost 61 people in the South Tower. Their families joined ours, alongside Cantor’s contractors and visitors lost that day, as part of the Cantor community.
After we saw how much red tape the families had to go through to receive any form of help, we decided upon direct financial aid without strings. We would provide financial assistance with dignity and grace and without all the bureaucracy.
October 1, 2001: About 5,000 people attended our first memorial service in Central Park, which was open only to our community. There, something remarkable happened. This enormous group of people who had very little in common, except that they lost someone they loved at Cantor, became a community. While grief is certainly individual, the families recognized they were not alone. Cantor and the Relief Fund would be there. We provided something well beyond financial aid and emotional support. We provided continuity and community. We would always answer the phone.
October 4, 2001: We sent out our first round of checks to women who were pregnant or had a child under the age of one. I wrote every check by hand. This was after three weeks! Three weeks before, we didn’t exist. Three weeks before, we didn’t have to.
October 8, 2001: We held Gary’s memorial service. A gust of wind blew his picture board down the street, and I always felt that meant he wasn’t ready to leave us. Many families think of their loved ones with signs from nature. Gary’s memorial was my first public speech. I said my heart was in three pieces: one-third was mine to do with what I wanted, and I gave it to Lewis; one-third belonged to my brother Howard; and one-third, which was broken but never severed, belonged to my brother Gary. Lewis, an artist, made me my broken heart necklace, which I wear every day.
With the passage of time, things changed. Hundreds of volunteers became a core of about 12. Immediate care shifted to longer-term needs. I always had one goal, one responsibility: to diminish the amount of pain that my families would feel.
I began to advocate. As a quarter of the 9/11 victims, the voice of the Cantor families deserved to be heard. I engaged with other family group leaders and bureaucratic entities on major issues: How would our loved ones be remembered? What would be built on the World Trade Center site? Would the human remains of our loved ones be moved out of the horribly-named Fresh Kills garbage dump in Staten Island? Would there be a museum? What would happen to all the World Trade Center steel? Cantor also made sure our families had the support they needed both legally and personally with the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.
It is very easy, when you see what is, to forget what was or recall what might have been. I look back and see how our fierce determination still resounds today. Howard joined the then-named World Trade Center Memorial Foundation board to ensure that the families got a museum we could all be proud of. I spearheaded the fight on behalf of all 9/11 families to ensure our names at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum would be listed together with meaningful adjacencies. I laid out every name of our loved ones by hand to capture and honor the relationships that existed between friends, family members, and colleagues. Our names take up nearly two walls on the north parapets with the center being by the entrance to the Memorial Museum. What appears random to the public is not random to us. While not alphabetical, we start with Andrew Abate and his brother Vincent and end with Charles Zion. Sets of siblings are on our corner panels. We created a book so our families would see these relationships and know where their loved ones were located.
I went to Hangar 17 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, where the World Trade Center steel was being housed, and distributed to museums and memorials around the globe to ensure that Cantor was included. Cantor Fitzgerald then created, and we distributed, a specially crafted box containing a piece of steel for each of our families and survivors.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, Howard closed the firm so we could once again be together for our memorial service in Central Park. Employees read the names of our loved ones. Howard announced that all the firm’s profits on the following day, September 12, 2002, would be donated to the Relief Fund to benefit the families. This was our first Charity Day.
After Howard’s pledge of 25 percent of the profits for five years and 10 years of healthcare resulted in $180 million to our families, we turned our attention to using the lessons we learned from 9/11 to help others. That first Charity Day morphed into a dynamic annual event now known as Cantor and BGC Group’s September 11th Charity Day. On each anniversary, after observing a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., celebrity ambassadors representing charities make trades with clients at Cantor and BGC Group’s offices globally. The money raised supports the Relief Fund’s disaster relief and aid to military families, as well as the missions of hundreds of other charities. It makes a very difficult day uplifting. Afterwards, we gather with our families for our annual memorial service. We remember and honor those we lost by listening to their names being read, seeing their faces, and telling their stories.
The money raised through Charity Day and donations from the public have allowed us to assist other families devastated by acts of terrorism, natural disasters, and emergencies. In 2012, in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, my sister-in-law, Allison, took on the position of Director of Disaster Relief. Our Sandy family assistance program focused our efforts on giving financial aid directly to families with elementary-aged children in need who had been hard hit by this disaster. Once again, we grew to nearly 100 volunteers, this time friends and Cantor employees. Aid was given with empathy. We had walked in similar shoes. We understood.
We continued that model for disaster relief in Moore, Oklahoma; Houston, Texas; and Puerto Rico, and we have assisted tens of thousands of families. The program continues to this day, supporting the communities important to Cantor, BGC Group and Newmark employees and others in need. Our 2026 distribution assisted those impacted by the wildfires in Los Angeles, California.
Since inception, the Relief Fund has raised over $320 million to help others. We are still small, scrappy, and volunteer-driven. Twenty-five years later, we are still here.
Time has moved forward. Out of necessity, everyone has found a new normal. Many of our young widows and widowers found love again. Some can’t ever conceive of that. Many of our older family members have passed on. Marriages have taken place. Children have been born. Our 9/11 kids are now 24 or older.
Long ago, Howard made another pledge. Cantor would hire the children of our 9/11 victims who wanted to work at the firm. Many of them do. At the Relief Fund, I have a 9/11 widow and a 9/11 child who work with me. And it does my heart good to see my nephews Brandon and Kyle carrying forward the incredible vision of their father and the legacy of their Uncle Gary. At the end of the day, if we are all there, I run downstairs to Brandon and Kyle’s offices, watch them hard at work together, and kiss them goodnight. And I remember.
Caroline Koster, a senior Cantor lawyer and the Relief Fund’s general counsel, came to me with an idea for a project to memorialize our loved ones through essays written by their families. I don’t think either of us realized just how powerful, poignant, and important these family voices would be. As we look to the future, I hope this anthology gives you a glimpse of who our 9/11 loved ones were, and the resilience of their families. Their lessons are born out of September 11, but they have universal appeal.
Everything we have done since 9/11 has come from a pure-of-heart place. Thank you to all who donated, volunteered, or spared us a kind word in dark times.
My lesson to the future generation is this: If you find a mission larger than yourself in times of trauma, it will not only help you heal, but you can do spectacular things in the world. And, sometimes, when there are no words, a hug is enough.
When the unthinkable happens, we come together. Then, now, and forever, we will always remember.
Edie Lutnick is the co-founder, president, and executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established on September 14, 2001, to support victims of terrorism, natural disasters, and emergencies. Under her leadership, the Relief Fund has raised over $300 million and distributed direct financial aid to 9/11 families, disaster victims and families of wounded service members, as well as supporting hundreds of charities worldwide. Her work has been instrumental in helping families heal and rebuild.
Before dedicating herself full-time to the Relief Fund, Ms. Lutnick practiced labor law. After 9/11, she transitioned out of legal practice to focus entirely on supporting the 9/11 community.
She is the author of An Unbroken Bond: The Untold Story of How The 658 Cantor Fitzgerald Families Faced the Tragedy of 9/11 and Beyond and co-editor of The Families: 9/11 Anthology of Love, Loss and Lessons of Resilience.
