WTC Sues Tenant For Back Rent

Former Landlord Says Cantor Fitzgerald Owes For August, Sept. 1-10

(CBS)  Cantor Fitzgerald Securities, the bond trading firm that lost two-thirds of its workers in the World Trade Center attack, is being sued by its former landlord for more than $1 million in back rent.

Cantor Fitzgerald owes rent from Aug. 1, 2001, through Sept. 10, 2001 — the day before the attack — for the floors it occupied near the top of Tower One, according to a lawsuit filed in Manhattan's State Supreme Court.

Since the attacks, the documents stated, 1 World Trade Center, which held the lease, has tried to settle with its former tenants, and most have either paid or "engaged in good faith discussion to do so."

Cantor Fitzgerald had no comment, said spokeswoman Amy Nauiokas.

The firm lost 658 of its 1,050 employees on Sept. 11; it now has offices in midtown Manhattan — on lower floors. Its chief executive's office is on the third floor.

CEO Howard Lutnick survived the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center because he was taking his son to kindergarten, but lost his brother, his best friend and hundreds of employees.

In the weeks that followed, the chief executive became the public face of grief and then a target for Cantor family members outraged at his decision to stop paying the salaries of their lost loved ones.

Lutnick insists it was the right decision.

"I couldn't possibly have made another decision," he said. "Three hundred twenty-five people could not, days after the attack, pay the salaries of 658 people who died, when it was unlikely ... that the 325 people would have had a business that covered their own pay."

The book "On Top of the World," written by college friend Tom Barbash, describes how Lutnick won back the trust of the Cantor families by convening town meetings, phoning hundreds of family members and writing 1,300 condolence letters.