DON’T CRY FOR GRUBMAN

Jack Grubman, the hotshot Wall Street analyst who resigned under fire last week from Salomon Smith Barney, blamed “the current crisis of criticism” and “the relentless series of negative statements about my work” for his troubles.

Those negative statements pointed out that he sat in on WorldCom board meetings and kept hyping its stock long after insiders were jumping ship and the huge telecommunications firm was heading for collapse. As an insider’s insider, Mr. Grubman rode the telecom bubble, working closely with senior executives at companies including Global Crossing and U.S. West and with WorldCom’s former CEO Bernard Ebbers to promote irrational mergers and acquisitions as the red-hot industry rode a rising stock market.

Come the collapse, investors watched their holdings vanish and employees lost their jobs and saw their retirement savings disappear. But Mr. Grubman, who was making $20 million a year, gets to keep a $15 million bonus he received when he signed a four-year contract in 1998 with CitiCorp, WorldCom’s owner, plus $4 million in termination pay, along with $1.2 million to reimburse him for legal fees and $12 million in restricted stock options. As the old music hall song goes, “The rich gits all the gravy and the poor gits all the blame.”

In a letter of resignation, he expressed brief regret for having “failed to predict” the telecom market’s collapse, adding, “I understand the disappointment and anger felt by investors.” But the rest of his letter was filled with whining about his own misfortune. He wrote, “This constant barrage of unsubstantiated, negative reports has caused my family great pain.” And, although he had appeared on magazine covers as the nation’s leading stock analyst, he resented being singled out for criticism.

Sure enough, others worked the same game behind the scenes at Salomon

and should share responsibility for the $2 trillion in losses by investors and lenders in the telecom industry in recent years, wrote Gretchen Morgenson, who monitors such matters for The New York Times. She named bankers, some still at Salomon and some who have gone elsewhere, who advised telecom companies to load up on debt so that many were bound to fail – Tony Whittemore,

David Diwik, Tom Jones, Christopher Lawrence, John Otto, Steve Winningham, Eduardo Mestre and Thomas King. We can watch for their names as investigators and prosecutors go after the people who orchestrated the present mess.