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Black and White on Wall Street: The Untold Story of the Man Wrongly Accused of Bringing Down Kidder Peabody | 
 enlarge | Authors: Joseph Jett, Sabra Chartrand
Publisher: William Morrow & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  63 reviews
Sales Rank: 624085
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Pages: 387
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 12.8 x 6.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0688161367
Dewey Decimal Number: 332.6092
EAN: 9780688161361
ASIN: 0688161367
Publication Date: April 1999
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: EX-LIBRARY; used item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned for refund. Buy with confidence - your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics!
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Product Description
In Black and White on Wall Street, Joseph Jett describes the combative environment of a Wall Street trading floor, where the driving forces are greed and competition, whatever the cost. For Jett, the price was his career, his reputation and the distinction of being a Wall Street pariah. Like James Stewart's Den of Thieves, Black and White on Wall Street reveals not only the excitement of the game but the Street's own brand of corruption as well. Its power-hungry, wildly rich players have their own set of rules and though Jett got caught in the crossfire, he isn't going down quietly. In 1994, Joseph Jett found himself at the center of one of the biggest Wall Street stories of the decade. Just months after naming him "Man of the Year" for heading a phenomenally successful bond-trading team, Kidder, Peabody & Co. accused him of recording $350 million in phony profits and taking more than $8 million in bogus bonuses. Jett was forced out of his job and charged with masterminding one of Wall Street's largest securities scams in a scandal that played out in newspaper headlines and television broadcasts for months. Jett's career was crushed in an onslaught of accusations from one of the most powerful corporations in America, Kidder's parent company, General Electric. His family, his childhood and his personal life became fodder for countless lurid media stories.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 58 more reviews...
 Belongs in the fiction section September 2, 2008
clutchhitter (Boca Raton, FL USA)
I worked on the trading floor (a few desks from Jett) at Kidder-Peabody during the scandal and nothing in the book remotely resembles the environment he describes.
Compensation on Wall Street is BASE SALARY + BONUS. Your base salary has a maximum value (for Managing Directors at the time it was probably 150K to 250K)
His much-hyped 8 million dollar bonus...was COMPLETELY discretionary! They could have paid him ANYTHING and he had absolutely no recourse except to quit.
So....why would Kidder pay him ALL that money ONLY to take it back? Because they were all racists?????? Why go through all that trouble!
Joe Jett had access to the head of Fixed Income 24/7....he was always in his office, no one treated him disrespectfully (he had the audacity to claim the Admin staff dissed him?????)
Folks...if the writing weren't so long-winded, pretentious and over-baked the book would make a great fiction thriller.
 Racism is present on Wall Street and Jett proves it. July 8, 2006
K. Orr (Florida)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
When I first read the book, I was sympathetic to Mr. Jett because many times blacks must walk into corporate America with "double consciousness"----knowledge that you have to be twice as good to land and maintain your image in corporate America. Yet, Mr. Jett should have seen the cycle of set-ups. When one of the fund managers asked him "How many blonde women have you f-c-k-ed?" It should have been obvious that they were in a competition and that there was a type of non-Oedipal "penis-envy" occurring. However, Mr. Jett proceeded to acknowledge this question, answer it, and state that he had "done" more than his colleague. Knowing the history of lynching, Mr. Jett should have known that this was a booby trap. Yet, he didn't deserve the set-up. I read this book because during the time of its publication, I worked in corporate America and I needed coaxing. I was the highest producer on my unit. Yet, no one seemed to appreciate it and I felt unwanted, and often, downright ignored. I since quit and started my own business and selling real estate. The book provided catharsism because it helped me see that racism was not personal; it was racial. I am glad that Mr. Jett had a chance to exonerate himself.
Rightly Accused June 28, 2005
Former Trader (NY, NY USA)
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
It's been a long time since Joe Jett was in the news, despite his hefty PR Agency bills, but I just couldn't resist making a couple of comments.
I was flying home yesterday on a AerLingus flight from Dublin and by chance flipped to one of the in-flight channels that was showing the 1999 BBC "documentary" Blood on the Carpet. I had never seen this "documentary," before and was surprised to see iit aired so many years after the actual events took place. II worked with Joe at CSFB in the mid 1980's. I was amazed to how the BBC was capable of painting Joe as the good guy-- as someone who's been falsely accused, and used as a scapegoat. Joe was fired from CSFB for a reason. He was probably one of the most unethical (and ineffective) people I have ever worked with in my 22 years on Wall Street. He was deceitful on more than one occasion in an effort to improve his position within the firm. I've never seen anything like it since. But that's not why he was fired. He was fired because he produced very little that was considered to be value added, socially as well as economically.
I'll never forget the day in the early 1990's when an old CSFB colleague called me and mentioned that Joe was now considered to be a big shot on Kidder's government trading desk. I was dumbfounded, commenting on how this couldn't possibly be the same Joe that I knew. It wasn't long after this call that Joe's Kidder career came to an end.
What strikes me most about the BBC's "documentary" is the lack of research that was done prior to it's production. Not one former colleague was interviewed other than the Kidder or GE bosses that were involved in the legal proceedings. Joe demonstrated a pattern of deceit during his career, and any investigative reporter (or employer for that matter!) worth his/her salt would have looked into why he was fired from 2 firms in a relatively short period of time.
However, Kidder is not without blame. Joe's boss and the firm allowed the fraud to occur by not being more careful about how strips and Treasury bond profits/losses were accounted for. Unfortunately, Kidder (apparently) wasn't thinking enough about how a rogue trader might use the system for personal gain.
Finally, it's worth mentioning the outcome of Joe's appeal to the SEC's ruling. Joe filed an appeal on 8/11/1998. On March 5th, 2004, the SEC ruled that Joe was indeed required to disgorge $8.21mm in unearned income, and also had to pay the $200,000 in civil penalties. Joe was also barred from working in any registered securities business for life. (Hedge Funds are unregulated)
Why do I feel compelled to write about Joe and the series "Blood on the Carpet?" For several reasons I suppose. Joe, in my humble opinion, is a fraud. And yet, the BBC (and by Joe's own accounts in his many books) has him portrayed as the good guy being attacked by big corporate America and subject to overt racism. What a great story for the media, it's got all the right stuff. Color, money, sex, bla, bla, bla. What a bunch of B.S.
What have I learned from this experience? Several things, but number one is to be very careful about who you hire. Kidder blew it by hiring this guy. All they needed to do was to dig a little into Joe's past, and they could have saved themselves alot of grief. This is particularially true in the financial services industry. It only takes one rouge trader or crook to take the whole place down. There have been multiple examples; Barings, Kidder, immediately come to my mind.
 SWAMPLAND IN FLORIDA June 4, 2002
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
It's been a few years since I read and first reviewed this book. In that time I have come to appreciate the details quite a bit more.
Kidder Peabody was a trading operation, just like Enron. If we had taken Mr.Jett seriously, perhaps a few people would still have their 401k's at the Houston company. For those who say Jett is a liar, compare his situation to what brought down Enron. Read June's issue of L.A. magazine, there's a story of a young Enron trader who couldn't quite figure out how his company made either.
If by now you still don't believe Mr. Jett, I've got some swampland......
 Ends up as story where you just don't care... August 18, 2001
5 out of 9 found this review helpful
This could have been an interesting book -- a black man who fights his way to Wall Street, makes millions, and ends up in tangled web of lies and corruption. I picked it up because the story of Joseph Jett seemed intriguing, but sadly, the book ends up being dragged down by the fact that Jett is a very unlikeable person, the way he tells the story makes it obvious that he is lying about what actually happened, and in the end the book doesn't say much more about Wall Street than we already know. Jett was fingered as the guilty party in a bond trading scandal at the firm of Kidder Peabody and black-listed from Wall Street. This book is Jett's attempt at his side of the story in an effort to prove his innocence. The main problem for me in reading this book is that Jett comes across as a real jerk, and as a result, I really didn't empathize with his position and I really didn't care about what happened to him -- my feeling was "This greedy arrogant jerkwad got what he deserved." Secondly, the parts of the book detailing what supposedly happened at Kidder Peabody just don't seem realistic. I've worked in the securities industry, so I have something to guage Jett's story by, and it just doesn't come across as 100% accurate. I think the real truth is somewhere in the middle of what Kidder Peabody said, and what Jett said. The early chapters of the book, where Jett describes his upbringing and life before Wall Street, were the best ones, because you get to understand the forces that drive him and the barriers he had to overcome. The book rapidly degenerates after the early chapters and I found it quite boring. If you haven't read any books about Wall Street or the real world of finance, then you might find this interesting. If you have, you won't miss anything by skipping Jett's tale.
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