“I’ve lost confidence in you,” Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack told Cruz last November, according to the latest New York magazine. “I want you to resign.” The company’s board of directors had already authorized his decision. A friend of Mack’s characterized his thinking: “It’s you or me. And guess what? I choose you.” You’ve heard the spin-cycle version of this story. Now hear what people are really saying about the stunning fall from grace of one of Wall Street’s highest-paid women.

One morning last November, Zoe Cruz walked the length of hallway from her executive suite at Morgan Stanley to the office of her boss, chairman and CEO John Mack, who’d called her in for an impromptu meeting. The distance, roughly 50 feet, represented the final leg of her journey to the highest echelons of Wall Street: Three weeks earlier, the 63-year-old Mack had signaled that Cruz was his first choice to replace him as the head of Morgan Stanley when he retired.

She had come far from the trading floor where she’d started 25 years ago. She had survived mergers, regime changes, and uncertain markets, not to mention the deeply ingrained sexism of Wall Street. With Mack’s help, she had risen through the ranks of upper management to become, at age 52, one of the most powerful and highest-paid women—people—in finance. She thought that she was ready for what was coming next.

Not that things were ever predictable in a career like the one she had chosen. The subprime-mortgage crisis was roiling Wall Street, and Morgan Stanley was getting hit just like everyone else. In recent months, the company had suffered losses of more than $3.7 billion, and $6 billion in additional losses were projected. But Cruz thought Morgan would be better able to weather the storm than most other firms. It was a tough time, to be sure, but she had seen tough times before. And she didn’t think she had anything to worry about personally. Just the week before, she and her husband had gone out to dinner with Mack and his wife, raising glasses of red wine in the dark, wood-paneled Italian restaurant San Pietro.

And so that morning in November, Cruz walked into Mack’s office and took in the view of Central Park that would one day be hers. Her destiny must have seemed inevitable, even imminent.

Then she was fired.

“I’ve lost confidence in you,” Mack told her solemnly. “I want you to resign.” The company’s board of directors had authorized his decision the day before. As a friend of Mack’s characterized his thinking: “It’s you or me. And guess what? I choose you.”

Cruz was stunned. “I have to call my husband,” she said. Morgan Stanley had been her life. She’d worked there her entire career, made the company billions. Her son had married the daughter of another Morgan Stanley executive. And John Mack had been her mentor, her friend. After the ten-minute meeting, she got up and left the building and never went back.

Continue reading at NYMag.com

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