Since a plagiarism conversation is working its way through my feed, here’s another one of my crazy tales. This one’s about a different kind of stealing.

The dirty secret about Black-owned firms on Wall Street is that while the ownership may be Black, in almost every case, the folks in the key positions are not.

For example, of the forty-odd employees at the place where I ran a desk, almost all were white men. At the time, I was the only Black head equity trader at a minority or woman-owned investment firm.

About a year after I moved to NC, I got a call from a guy who’d tried to get the Black-owned investment firm he worked for to hire me to run their trading desk, without success.

The guy calls me because the firm has just hired two white guys from the desk I’d run. To get hired, each of the two guys had copied various parts of my bio almost verbatim. When I saw their bios on the company’s website, it was like I was reading my own resume.

Assuming that he was unaware that he’d been had, I fired off an email to the CEO. He never responded.

So while my expertise wasn’t good enough to get me hired to run the desk at this Black-owned investment firm, two white guys—who had both worked for me—were able to plagiarize my record and get hired at the same place.