Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Broker Says Morgan Stanley Fired Him For Having Hasidic Clients

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.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.