Black and White on Wall Street by Joseph Jett, with Sabra Chartrand. William Morrow, 387 pages, $25.
Remember Joseph Jett? He occupies a curious place in this decade's pantheon of scandalous black American men. His 15 minutes of infamy occurred in April 1994, about two and a half years after Clarence Thomas' confirmation hearings and two months before O.J. Simpson's Bronco chase.
A 36-year-old bond trader at Kidder Peabody & Company, Mr. Jett was accused of defrauding his firm of $350 million. When I first read of Mr. Jett and saw a photo of him–with his bemused smirk and huge, James Baldwin eyes–I felt a perverse pride that a young buppie might be as bold a crook as Ivan Boesky or Michael Milken; and a sense of relief that here, for once, was a scandal about a black man that had nothing to do with sex. How wrong I was.
After five years and three grueling investigations, Mr. Jett has never been convicted of fraud. Moreover, his downfall offers a chilling case study of how machismo and sexual paranoia work in the financial community. At the center of his autobiography–co-written with Sabra Chartrand–is the story of what happens when some Wall Street traders renowned as Big Swinging Dicks find, in their midst, a Big Swinging Black Dick.
It's the same with any my-side-of-the-story exposé–open Mr. Jett's book and up pops the question: Is it credible? Quite.
Unlike a lot of memoirists, Orlando Joseph Jett (evidently, no one ever nicknamed him O.J.) does not present himself as a role model. His self-portrait reveals a man who is arrogant, avaricious, vindictive and status-obsessed, contemptuous of the poor and bereft of any sense of altruism or a social conscience. He is, in short, the quintessential Wall Street trader.
He was reared in Ohio, the son of a grimly driven entrepreneur who believed that the "only hope" for African-Americans "was in economic