The Spirit Lives  |  Continued

WHEN FORMER ACTING Governor Jane Swift shook up the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority in 2002, one of her new appointees was Nick Lopardo. His reputation as an investment wizard had not diminished since his parting from State Street Global Advisors the year before, and his involvement in a series of sexual discrimination suits apparently had not made him a political liability.

Lopardo spent 18 years as an institutional pension salesman for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, then grew the money-management arm of State Street Corp. from $18 billion in assets when he took over in 1987 to more than $700 billion before he left and began his own management firm, Susquehanna Capital Management Group.

"We were on a mission," he recalls. "We were nobody in 1987. We were less than 2 percent of the whole bottom line. Nobody ever thought of State Street as a money-management firm. When I folded up and left, we were the sixth-largest money-management firm in the world. You couldn't go anywhere in the world where people didn't at least recognize [State Street Global]. That's a huge sense of accomplishment for all the guys and gals that worked with me. To put that thing together, that was an incredible statement."

Lopardo was compensated well for his success -- he received an $11.5 million severance payout upon his departure from State Street Global and held more than 100,000 shares of stock when he left. His worth has been estimated in the $40 million to $50 million range, which has enabled him to maintain a lifestyle that includes the ownership of two private planes, homes on the North Shore (in Boxford, where he used to be neighbors with Bourque), in Florida and Vermont, two lots on the island of Hawaii, and membership in seven country clubs (a former single-digit handicap, Lopardo says he has had time to play just 20 rounds in the last three years).

"I don't have as much money as the Reeboks and the Krafts -- that's a different league from me," he says. "Am I comfortable? Yeah, I'm very comfortable. Do I have a plane? Do I have some gorgeous homes and vacation homes? Yeah. I just built a brand-new home in Sanibel Island [Florida] at the Sanctuary Golf Club there. I just had Ray and Christine Bourque there. . . . When she walked through the front door, she turned to Ray and said, 'Ray, you stopped playing too early.' "

Lopardo, the son of a scrap-metal shop owner in Brooklyn, New York, lived in San Francisco, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania while working for Equitable. He brought a different sensibility to the buttoned-down world of State Street.

"State Street was this dowdy regional bank, a family business whose primary business was custodial accounts for blue-blood New England families," Ahearn says. "And here was Nick, a real piece of work, one of these larger-than-life figures who literally became a legend in the industry, a hard-charging entrepreneur in a staid industry. He really chafed against the culture there, the bean-counter types running the organization."

Lopardo was loud, he was "very emotional in an Italian don fashion," Ahearn says, he was paternalistic. And according to a half-dozen complaints filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, he turned a blind eye to practices unacceptable to his female employees.

The most notorious of these complaints became known as the "Case of the Pink Pump." According to an affidavit filed by a former portfolio manager at State Street Global, a woman's high-heel shoe was left on the desk of any man in the firm's international equity operation who went home instead of drinking after work with his colleagues. In an another incident that may have eclipsed the Pink Pump in its titillation quotient, a State Street Global vice president allegedly installed an audio recording of Meg Ryan's restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally in a computer on the trading floor, so that the computer broadcast her orgasmic moans whenever a particular key was touched.

A third case involved a manager of State Street Global's fixed-income operations area, who says she was demoted after returning from a maternity leave in 1993. In a 1998 deposition taken in connection with that complaint, Lopardo answered "I don't recall" in more than 80 instances, and he was chided in the media for his arrogance and evasiveness.

The case was settled after an MCAD finding of probable cause. Lopardo remains unapologetic about all of it today, noting that was the only case resolved in the complainant's favor.

"The Pink Pump was very simple. We had a lot of young MBAs -- this was their internal way of ridiculing a guy who didn't go out drinking with them the night before because they had to stay home," he says. "Quite frankly, there were one or two women who went along until it became an opportune time for somebody to complain about it."

Lopardo banned the practice. Male employees "couldn't understand why I was so upset about it. They couldn't understand why I was blowing this thing way out of proportion, and I said I'm blowing it out of proportion because people will blow it out of proportion. I finally said, 'It stops, or the next time anybody's involved, you're out of here.' I took a lot of hits from the male population" at State Street Global.

The deposition? He wouldn't do anything differently.

"You know what the attorney told me? 'Nick, if you don't remember the exact words, the exact facts, you don't say you know.' But it was a deposition. It was a deposition.

"The whole Harry Met Sally thing? The person who brought that recording into the trading room was a woman" -- his voice rises for emphasis -- "not a man. A young lady on the trading desk got upset -- a Middle Eastern gal who culturally didn't get the significance of the Harry Met Sally scene and was upset by it. But no one ever got the facts."

Another former State Street Global employee, David Smith, took his grievance onto the Internet with a website on which he regularly attacked Lopardo. Smith says he was fired after reporting that a co-worker broke into the company's electronic mail system, discovering that Smith and another State Street Global employee were gay and were partners. He also filed complaints with the MCAD and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charging that he was a victim of discrimination based both on his sexual orientation and his physical disability (Crohn's disease). Neither agency acted on those complaints.

opardo, who played shortstop in baseball and fullback in football while at Susquehanna University, where he was graduated in 1968, contributed $1 million in 1999 toward a new football and track stadium bearing his name at the Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, campus. But he resigned as chairman of the school's board of directors after the women's field hockey coach, Connie Harnum, demanded that her team be allowed to play there, too.

"We were flying in my aircraft with the president down to talk to another potential board member about joining the board and he said we have a problem," Lopardo says. "I said, 'What's the problem?' He said, 'The women's field hockey coach wants to play all of her home games at the stadium and wants to paint lines on the field.' I said, 'So what's the problem?' He said, 'I just told you what the problem is.' I said, 'There's no problem, I said that wasn't the deal.' He said, 'They're threatening to make it a Title IX thing and threatening to go to the press with it.' I said, 'This is not a Title IX issue.'

"Now you've got to understand, the field hockey coach is the wife of the athletic director, so the athletic director wasn't taking a firm stance on this. Then they upped and retired this year, so they're now gone, and all the young ladies who put up a stink last year, they're all gone.

"But six years from now, when we have a problem with the paint, it's down there settling on the bottom of the turf so it won't drain, you know who they're going to call? 'Nick, we have a problem with the field.'

"I resigned from the board. They went ahead and painted it, and I left the board. I said, 'I can't be involved with this when you go and do things like that, which isn't right, and you don't even come and ask Diane and I. We made the contribution. We built it.' "

The Susquehanna field hockey team finished last season, Connie Harnum's last as coach, ranked No. 7 in the country in the NCAA Division III national rankings, and school officials credited playing on the turf surface as a key reason for its success.

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