Broker Says Morgan Stanley Fired Him For Having Hasidic Clients
Image by Getty
By Ari Feldman November 8, 2017
A Staten Island man is claiming that Morgan Stanley, his former employer, fired him for pursuing Hasidic clients, SILive.com reported. Michael Pellegrino, a stockbroker, says that his bosses referred to Hasidic Jews as “unicorns” and disparaged him for having an association with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
According to a wrongful termination suit filed by Pellegrino, the head of compliance at Morgan Stanley told him it would be “bad for the company” if they were seen doing business with Hasidic Jews.
“And he tells him don’t work with these unicorns, as if to say that the people in the Jewish community are these mystical beings, that they have horns,” Paul Liggieri, Pellegrino’s lawyer, said of the exchange. “I’m disgusted by it.”
Pellegrino says he submitted four applications to work with Hasidic individuals, all of which were rejected.
“I want to restore my reputation and career,” he said. “They destroyed me. My license has been tarnished. My clients were tarnished.”
Update, 11/8/17 5:50pm — In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Morgan Stanley said the company “denies any wrongdoing in connection with his termination and any suggestion that ethnicity or religion played a role in that decision is completely false.”
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we need 500 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Our Goal: 500 gifts during our Passover Pledge Drive!
