MASOOD, who uses no other name, is the proprietor of the Express Cafe coffee cart that sits outside 745 Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan. He thus had a front-row seat for the global financial crisis. In 1998 he was selling his wares to the workers at the building site where a new 32-floor building for Morgan Stanley was going up. In 2001 he greeted the employees of Lehman Brothers, whose downtown headquarters had been damaged and polluted by the attacks of September 11th; having been working shifts in a nearby hotel, they were delighted to move into the building Morgan Stanley had ceded to them. He was there on September 15th 2008 when Lehman's employees filed out with soon-to-be-iconic cardboard boxes. And he was there in the days that followed, when many of them came back, some with the same boxes, to work on cleaning up the mess under the auspices of Barclays.
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