Jimmy Kennedy earned $13 million during his nine-year career as a player in the National Football League. He was the kind of person most banks would be happy to have as a client.
It is no secret that racism has been baked into the American banking system. There are few black executives in the upper echelons of most financial institutions. Leading banks have recently paid restitution to black employees for isolating them from white peers, placing them in the poorest branches and cutting them off from career opportunities. Black customers are sometimes profiled, viewed with suspicion just for entering a bank and questioned over the most basic transactions.
Kennedy was told he was essentially too black. His financial adviser, Ricardo Peters, complained that he, too, was a victim of racial discrimination. What makes their cases extraordinary is not that the two men say they faced discrimination. It is that they recorded their interactions with bank employees, preserving a record of what white executives otherwise might have dismissed as figments of the aggrieved parties’ imaginations.
Peters was left with the impression that his managers, who were white, were predisposed to view him suspiciously. Could he prove it? No.Peters complained to Venniro that another financial adviser was trying to steal a prospective client: a woman who had just received a $372,000 wrongful death settlement after her son died. She was black.
One day, Peters met Kennedy, then 38. Kennedy had played for five NFL teams as a defensive tackle. In 2011, he had joined the New York Giants — a homecoming that, The Times wrote at the time, was notable because of his impoverished childhood in Yonkers, New York. That season, Kennedy and the Giants won the Super Bowl.
On Oct. 5, Venniro took Peters to a meeting room and said he was being fired. Venniro said he didn’t know why.Peters filed a discrimination claim with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the civil rights division of the Arizona attorney general’s office, accusing JPMorgan of racial discrimination. JPMorgan denied that and said Peters was fired for improperly assigning credit for a new client to an employee who managers did not think deserved it.
Kennedy had been under the impression that he had been granted the coveted “private client” status that Peters had promised. When Kennedy learned that was not the case, he complained to Belton — and then to Venniro.