Howard Lutnick recounts to ‘Pod Force One’ how 9/11 attacks killed his brother, most of his colleagues

WASHINGTON — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick emotionally recalled on the latest episode of “Pod Force One” how he lost his brother, his best friend and hundreds of employees at his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Lutnick, now 64, told The Post’s Miranda Devine that he had taken his eldest son to school for his first day of kindergarten on that fateful Tuesday morning.

“I’ve got a picture in front of his school at 8:48 [a.m.],” two minutes after hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, of which Cantor Fitzgerald occupied the 101st through 105th floors.

“I’m just in the school, and then my phone keeps ringing, but I have a flip phone, but there’s no one on the other end,” Lutnick said. “I kept saying, like I was annoyed, like, ‘They can’t just leave me alone for an hour to take my kid to school? Something has to call me from work?’ And then an administrator came in, told me a plane hit the building.”

Later, Lutnick would learn that the caller trying to reach him was his younger brother Gary.

“He couldn’t get through to me, but he got through to my sister, and she said, ‘Oh, thank God you’re not there.’ He said, ‘I am here, and I’m just calling to say goodbye. I’m gonna die,’” he told Devine.

After dropping off his son, Lutnick made his way to Lower Manhattan and tried frantically to find out what had happened to his employees.

“I started grabbing people as they were coming out [of the North Tower], asking what floor they were on,” he remembered. “Because I knew there were lots of doors, there were probably 20 ways out of the building, and if one of my guys came out of this, then they were steaming out of all of them.”

“The highest floor I got to was 92, meaning someone told me they were on the 92nd floor,” he went on. “And then we heard this sound, the loudest sound I’ve ever heard in my life, I had no idea what it was.”

It was the collapse of the South Tower.

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“It sounds like [the] Titanic when it breaks apart in the movie. It was just the loudest smashing, banging I’d ever heard in my life,” he added. “I just started running. And I’m running my tail off [with] all my might.”

“I make a right on Vesey Street, and there’s a cemetery there — I’ve never seen the cemetery … It’s behind St. Nicholas [Greek Orthodox Church], I never paid attention to it, but I see the tornadoes [of debris] coming across the cemetery, and I dive under a car … and then it just goes ‘woosh’, and then it’s black and silent.

“And I’m thinking, I’m laying there, thinking, ‘I’m dead. Son of a gun. I’m dead,’ beause it’s silent and black. So I said, ‘All right, I’m dead.’ So I go like this, I stab myself in the eyes, and I’m like, ‘Ah, OK, I’m alive, I’m blind’ — because remember, it’s black and silent, so I’m blind and deaf — ‘but I’m alive.’”

After crawling out from under the car, Lutnick said he came across a police officer holding a flashlight.

“I put my hand on the back of his collar, which is like one of those hard collars, and I go, ‘Let’s get the eff out of here,’” the commerce secretary said. “And he sits down, because he’s in shock.”

After taking the cop’s flashlight, Lutnick made his way back uptown and called his wife to let her know he was still alive.

In all, 658 of Cantor Fitzgerald’s 950 New York-based employees died in the attacks, the highest fatality rate of any World Trade Center tenant.

“I cried every day until October 21, 2004,” Lutnick said of the aftermath. “You can’t process 658 people getting murdered. You just can’t, and so it just stays a part of you for a long time.”

In the 35 days after the attack, Lutnick attended, by his estimate, “20 funerals a day.”

“I became an expert,” he said. “I’d go sit in the second row of the church, say hello to the widow and their family. Then, as it started, when there was a break, I would head out, go back, and then go to the next church and go to the next church.”

Lutnick rebuilt Cantor Fitzgerald with the help of the remaining employees and new hires, who agreed to commit 25% of the company’s payroll for the next five years to support families of the victims.

“We gave $180 million to those families,” he said. “… My brother Gary was killed. My best friend Doug [Gardner, Cantor Fitzgerald’s executive managing director]. So, I rebuilt the company to take care of their families.”