Traders Online
By Ingrid Eisenstadter

Here is the story of two trading professionals tragically struck down in the prime of their lives. It is the story of two beloved men gone, but fondly remembered by friends and co-workers, who want to find a way to extinguish the killer of these courageous traders. This is the work of the Wings Over Wall Street group. Since its beginnings in 2001, Wings Over Wall Street has contributed significantly to research funds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. This labor of love is in memory of two revered traders. They are two of the many who struggled and courageously succumbed to this debilitating disorder, which slowly destroys a person physically even though the victim retains all of his or her mental faculties.

Murray Sandler was president of the Security Traders Association of Los Angeles, and a partner at Crowell, Weeden & Co. There he spent 25 years as an OTC/Nasdaq marker-maker. Michael Beier was a Nasdaq trader for some 17 years. Nine of them he served as director of equity trading for Credit Suisse First Boston.

‘Missed Dearly’

Beier was a New Yorker who made many friends over the course of a successful trading career, “We all miss him dearly,” said Andrea Crikelair, who worked next to Beier from 1998 until his death in 2003. Crikelair daily witnessed the ever-increasing struggles Beier faced as a result of his disease.

But, as ALS took its toll, Beier continued to come to work, eventually in a motorized wheelchair.

"I have vowed to do anything and everything possible to help stop this disease so that my children will never be threatened."
Michael Beier

“Michael had a twinkle in his eye, fire in his spirit, and relentless determination in his mind,” Crikelair added. He kept trading until the last months of his life, despite physical limitations, she noted.

“It was a grim reality that I had to face, but I wasn’t going to sit home and sulk. That’s not my style,” Beier told Traders Magazine just before his death. Two years ago, he passed away at just 39 years of age, leaving behind his wife, Theresa, and two young children, Carly and Dustin.

As Beier’s friends and family know, in so many important ways his battle with his fatal disease was a victory.

“I have vowed to do anything and everything possible to help stop this disease so that my children will never be threatened,” he said just before his death.

‘How’s Murray?’

Murray Sandler was also a remarkable soul.

“He was a dear friend to many of us and he will be dearly missed,” George Casey of Crowell, Weedon said on the day he informed Sandler’s colleagues that he had passed away. A lifelong Californian, Sandler had retired from Crowell, Weedon five years before. But he stayed in constant touch with friends in the company.

When Sandler died last summer at age 68, 600 people attended his memorial services. Casey, a Crowell, Weedon partner, knew Sandler for 40 years. For eight of them, they worked side by side.

“Trading OTC stocks was a wild and wooly game,” Casey wrote at the time of his friend’s passing. “In an often-times tense and stress-charged environment, we remember Murray as the model of calm, politeness and service.” Today Casey recalls that in his years of travel for Crowell, “Everywhere I went, the first thing people said was ‘How’s Murray’?”

Retirement

Sandler and his wife Sandy expected they would enjoy a long retirement when he left the company in 1998. “And he did enjoy his retirement,” Casey said. “He was very healthy, still running in his 60s, and then he became a mountain biker.”

And then came his ALS diagnosis, in January of 2003. In the remaining years of his Sandler’s life, he and his wife became active in the search for a cure for ALS. It is a work that Sandler’s wife carries on.

The friends of these two men keep their memory alive by continuing their battle against ALS. Each year Wings Over Wall Street holds the single largest ALS fund raising event in the country. Wings began some four years ago.

In 2001, while Michael Beier was being treated at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, he found his way to Toni Diamond, an airline stewardess who had been diagnosed with ALS not long before. Beier became involved in her friends’ and family’s considerable efforts to raise research funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA), an organization that is one of the great champions of the some one million Americans who suffer from neuromuscular diseases.

"For this year’s event, some $200,000 in donations has already been committed"

Launching Wings

Beier and Diamond, with their friends and families, named their fundraising undertakings “Wings of Hope.” However, they soon decided to take their efforts to where the money is and Wings of Hope became “Wings Over Wall Street.”

The group’s first event, in November of 2001, was held in midtown Manhattan in the shadow of the disaster downtown. With Beier at the helm, it attracted 800 people. The event raised a stunning $1 million for ALS research.

Since then, despite some difficult economic years, the guest list has risen as high as 1,700. In just four years, Wings has raised $4 million to fund ALS medical research. Today Wings contributes significantly to the $5.9 million raised annually by MDA for ALS research.

With this year’s Wings event just two months away on September 22th, some $200,000 in donations has already been committed by the friends of the men, along with other people in the country. The Los Angeles chapter of the Security Traders Association will be an “Angel Sponsor” for $25,000 in honor of Sandler.

CSFB will be a $50,000 “Presenting Sponsor” again this year. Street firms from all over the U.S. have also already contributed, among them Knight, Schwab, UBS, Bloomberg and Jefferies, among others.

The 100 Percent Commission

East Shore Partners is one of many trading firms that make annual donations of commissions. Fritz Garrecht, a principal, said, “We open the doors every year for a week when anybody who wants to come in and do a trade can designate the charity that we give 100 percent of our commissions to.” He added that traders feel “passionate” about Wings.

“Most of us are fortunate in this business,” Garrecht explained, “so we can give back,” a sentiment echoed by traders all over America.

Lisa Utasi and Mary McDermott-Holland are among the many traders who give back. Utasi, a past president of STANY and Citigroup Asset Management director, and Mary McDermott-Holland, past president of the Boston Security Traders Association and senior vice president at Franklin Portfolio Associates, are serving on the fund-raising committee for Wings again this year, working as co-chairs of the event. They report that traders throughout the country have already donated some items for the auction: These include tickets to the 2006 Vera Wang fashion show, a week of golf at Hilton Head Island, and a Galveston guitar autographed by former president Bill Clinton.

The guitar was donated by Andrew Kowalczyk, president and CEO of AK Capital. It’s not the first time Kowalczyk has donated to Wings a celebrity-signed guitar from his personal collection of 120 guitars and other rock and roll memorabilia. Also up for auction this year is lunch with Walter Cronkite.

Helping Wings

Traders can go to www.wingsoverwallstreet.org to sign up, as Andrew Kowalczyk does, to donate something of their own for the auction. Utasi, the Cititgroup Asset Management official, signs up to donate, too.

In fact, Utasi is typical of the women and men of Wall Street who support their communities. Besides her senior position at Citigroup and service as an executive in numerous Street trade-organizations, she is also a member of the Eden Institute, which helps autistic children and adults. Additionally, she’s a fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Ask her where she gets the time for her good works and she replies laughing, “I don’t get much sleep.”

As Beier said, shortly before he died, “Wall Street people are the best. They are very generous.”