It's Wall Street, Without the Cash

This is true, though Cayne's sale will be remembered on Wall Street not for how much it netted him, but how little. His shares were worth $61 million when he sold them in late March. They were worth about $1 billion last year.

After a quick stop at the cafeteria, Noujaim heads back to the 43rd floor, to one of the firm's "entertainment suites." Dinner for him and a few clients will be served here in a few hours. A waiter in formal black and white flutters in and out of the room, laying out bowls of nuts, readying plates of cheese. There's a fully stocked bar against a wall. It feels like the banquet room on the Titanic after the iceberg pierced the hull.

"Where else can you eat dinner with a view of New York like this?" Noujaim asks, looking out the window.

Noujaim is the son of immigrants from Lebanon and was raised in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. He's a typical Bear Stearns employee, he says: No Ivy League degree or family connections. In the firm's parlance, he's a PSD, short for "poor, smart and desperate to be rich."

Bear set itself apart from competitors, Noujaim says, by encouraging employees to stay for their whole careers. To him, Bear expired because it was so much smaller than rivals and lacked the resources to weather what he thinks was essentially a storm of damaging whispers.

That, at any rate, is the view from the top. At lower pay grades, the blame is laid on Bear's somewhat insular corporate culture, which purportedly allowed mediocre managers to dominate fiefdoms long after those managers stopped innovating. For a long time Bear's unofficial motto, says a member of the prime brokerage division, was if it ain't broke don't fix it. When two of Bear's hedge funds collapsed, in July of last year, then-CEO Cayne was reportedly at a bridge tournament, incommunicado.

"To tell you the truth, I'm psyched to work for JP Morgan," this employee says. "I'm happy to get away from these knuckleheads."

The occupying force that JP Morgan sent has been reasonably humane, considering its task. No end-zone dances, no high-fives. A kind of there-but-for-the-grace civility has prevailed, for the most part.

Within Bear, the anger is directed at Bear's leadership. The atmosphere is so fraught that when Cayne, who is 74 and now the company's chairman, walks around the office he's accompanied by beefy security guards. Word around the company is that the guards are to protect him from his own employees.