You don’t have a gun; that’s good.” That was how Richard Fuld greeted a Reuters reporter who had tracked him down to

his country house in Ketchum, Idaho last Friday.

Standing on his gravelly driveway, Fuld indicated he was torn about speaking out in his own defence, partly because of ongoing litigation but also because he felt the world was not ready to listen. “You know what? The anniversary’s coming up,” he said. “I’ve been pummelled, I’ve been dumped on, and it’s all going to happen again. I can handle it. You know what, let them line up.”

“They’re looking for someone to dump on right now, and that’s me,” Fuld lamented and later added: “You know what they say? ‘This too shall pass’.”

Fuld, 63, took Lehman’s reins in 1994 when it was troubled and rebuilt it into the fourth-largest US investment bank, a Wall Street powerhouse whose massively profitable mortgage banking machine inspired rivals’ envy. Even Goldman Sachs was nervous.

But it was forced to file the biggest bankruptcy in the US history after it choked under the weight of souring assets and lost investor confidence. The US government and Federal Reserve failed to find a buyer and decided not to ride to its rescue.

Fuld was then humiliated before a Congressional panel last October as stock markets spiralled downwards. He was told by a politician that he was the designated ‘villain’ of the day and screamed at by protesters who called for him to be jailed. Since then, he has mostly ducked the spotlight, allowing an image of greed, arrogance and failure to cling unchallenged to his name. Fuld said he wanted to speak but didn’t see the point. “Nobody wants to hear it. The facts are out there. Nobody wants to hear it, especially not from me.”

Fuld declined to speak about his current work. But friends and acquaintances say he has started his own consulting firm named Matrix Advisors, based out of an office on Third Avenue in New York. He commutes from his Greenwich, Connecticut estate into Manhattan and has been seen at breakfasts and lunches with former colleagues. “He’s keeping a low profile but doing a lot of power-lunches,” a top executive at an investment bank said. “He’s keeping in touch with friends on Wall Street.”

But behind those power lunches is a man clearly worried about being slammed all over again. “He got such negative press, they made him out to be this devil,” said one past associate. “So I think he’s embarrassed to be seen in public, afraid someone is going to throw a pie in his face.”

The former CEO has been named in nearly 40 different legal actions since Lehman went bankrupt, most of which were filed by cities and pension funds that claim he and other Lehman executives led them into making bad investments. More than a dozen suits were filed by former employees of the firm who claim that Lehman’s executives allowed imprudent investments in the firm’s stock for employee savings plans.