What Does It Take to Get Fired?

If you're a stockbroker, apparently, more than can be believed.

As The New York Times' Susan Antilla wrote in today's paper (here),

In most professions, it would take only one or two acts of egregious conduct before troubled employees were shown the door. In the case of one stockbroker who has repeatedly had complaints from investors, it took 69 customer disputes filed over the last 13 years before he was barred from the business. [Emphasis added.]

Customers starting complaining about Jerry Cicolani Jr. in 2002. Despite that, he continued working for Merrill Lynch until 2010 (he started there in 1991), collecting a total of more than 60 complaints before his departure, during which time Merrill "paid $12 million in settlements to his customers". So we're not talking about showing up late for work on a regular basis, or parking in the boss's space.

In 2004, Mr. Cicolani was subject of an inquiry by the New York Stock Exchange over his handling of "numerous customer accounts" at Merrill, according to regulatory records, but wasn't sanctioned.

Moreover,

The Securities and Exchange Commission had already sued him, in May 2014, over his role in a Ponzi scheme. His most recent employer, PrimeSolutions Securities, based in Cleveland, fired him a day after that lawsuit was filed.

Despite all that, it wasn't until September 2014 that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), which is responsible for monitoring stockbrokers, decided to bar Cicolani from the business.

Back in November, there was a flurry of headlines in the business press suggesting that Finra was becoming more aggressive in pursuing broker-miscreants (example, here), but it's not clear that this is actually happening. (Antilla does quote a Finra spokesperson who claims that the agency "has refocused its resources over the last two years to aggressively pursue repeat offenders.")

Meanwhile, Antilla reports, there were clients who had been with Cicolani for years, who learned, from the FBI, that their money was gone. One 83-year-old retired doctor was quoted as saying, "It floored me because I always have trusted my brokers and their guidance. It was almost impossible to believe he would have done that to me."

Cicolani denies all claims, taking the Fifth.