No Backing Down by Tameron Keyes

My Story of Suing One of the Largest
Investment Firms in the World and Winning

erhaps after what I had experienced in my first two and a half years at Smith Barney Shearson I should have known that moving wasn't going to be a solution with this company, but I didn't. Entrenched beliefs and habits are difficult to change. I persisted in my habit of ignoring obstacles together with my belief that people, in the end, do the right thing allowing justice to prevail. A large part of my mind believed they would let me move, leave me alone, and sincerely allow me to start over, even if I didn't get my starting pay. The initial interview with Lyndsey was my first clue that moving peaceably wasn't going to happen, but I knew this was my one shot at trying again, no matter how disadvantaged I was. I took what I could get. I wasn't in a position to make any more demands, and the thought that they would try to get me to leave by other means once I had moved didn't even occur to me. As I have said, I am an optimist by nature, so again once I put my eye on the ball I tried to ignore everything else.
   I moved myself. I packed my boxes of client files and all my desk stuff, put them in my Honda Civic hatchback, and drove to Beverly Hills. I told Annie that I had gotten the approval to move, but told her nothing about the complaint I made or the negotiations I had with management. I saw no benefit in telling her, but did see possible negative consequences, so I kept my mouth shut. She seemed surprised that I was able to get the transfer, but was happy for me. I don't think I actually went down to her office to say good-bye the day I left, and I'm sure I didn't say good-bye to anyone else. I called all my clients, told them that I was moving branches and that their account numbers would change but nothing else. There

 

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were no papers to sign; it would just happen. They had no idea about what had been happening in the downtown branch, the negotiations, or why I was moving. I told them I was moving branches to be closer to my apartment.
    Unlike the downtown branch, Beverly Hills had only two of those
cherry wood cubicles at the time. They were located against an inside wall on the northeast side of the floor across the hall from the branch compliance manager's office. The rest of the branch was composed of private offices. Most Beverly Hills brokers were much more mature, both chronologically and behaviorally, and seemingly more ethical than the downtown brokers. The branch was quiet. It had the same sound and feel as a bank, exactly the opposite of downtown. I was assigned to one of the two cubicles. There was a guy about ten years older than me sitting in the other cubicle. He introduced himself as Raymond Gregory and told me he had been a successful executive recruiter earning a six-figure income for ten or so years. He had gotten tired of it and wanted a change, so he became a stockbroker.
    Looking back, I think it was a blessing that I got to sit next to Raymond. He was always up, positive, and supportive— a nice guy who probably could have been successful as a motivational coach. We often talked to each other over the cubicle wall and could hear each other's telephone conversations. To this day, I can repeat Raymond's self-introductory cold call. Many years later, Raymond told me that when I first transferred to the Beverly Hills branch, I was bouncing off the walls with nervous energy. He said I was very high-strung, talked fast, and was generally nervous. What he didn't know at the time was that I had good reason to be nervous. Anybody who had gone through what I had gone through would have been nervous too. I was really looking forward to beginning my career again in peace and be given a fair shot to start over. Even if they had just left me alone and had not tried to undermine me or defeat me, it would have been enough.

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   Lyndsey, my new manager at the Beverly Hills branch, was what I
would call a player. It appeared that he took his identity from his pride and power. He was very smart, a graduate of Dartmouth, tall, white, fit, single man with thick white hair who seemed to be in his late fifties or early sixties. He was a wealthy resident of Bel Air who has been in with the "good old boys" for a very long time. I wouldn't call him handsome, more like leaning toward handsome, as if he hadn't aged well and had been better looking when he was younger. It seemed to me that he had ruined his face a bit by his earlier heavy drinking. He had stopped drinking and smoking by the time I met him, but he had been known to have been a party animal. Colleagues told me that he used to drink with them after work and I heard him brag that he used to "run with models." He had asquare-ish face with blue eyes and his bottom eyes lids drooped slightly as
if they were in the very early stage of alcoholic droop. I'm not trying to be unkind but his face reminded me of a boxer. Not a boxer like Joe Lewis, but like Oscar, a white boxer dog one of my friends used to own.
    I think most people who knew Lyndsey would agree that his most
memorable characteristic was his quick-as-lightning incendiary verbal skills. He could cut Genghis Khan to shreds with words. He behaved as if his life had been permeated with that old-fashioned male prerogative: "I am the man; I say this is the way it is going to be, and it is so." A woman who did not play her proper subordinate role was an insult to his God-given masculinity and dominance. It seemed as if he was very uncomfortable with independent women. They didn't fit his worldview; therefore, they deserved to be taught a lesson, crushed, and put in their place. He was a very crafty guy and smart with regard to those endeavors as well.
    They were allegedly going to allow me to start over, and there was no way I had it in me to complain about Lyndsey under the circumstances. It would have been ridiculous and would have made me look like a psycho.

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    What could I have said, "Eeweh, I don't want to work for him; he's too sharp tongued for me?" They were ostensibly giving me a chance, and I was going to hang in there; however, it wasn't an auspicious start.
    I settled into my cubicle just fine for the first few days or so, until one day when Lyndsey was standing in the hallway close to my cubicle. I was about to drop a ticket and needed what was called a time stamp. A time stamp is a machine that stamps the time on stock or bond order tickets. Nowadays, most trades are done by computer, so the time is recorded automatically, but back in the early '90s all the way up to the 2000s this was not the case at Smith Barney, and it certainly wasn't the case in late 1993. All tickets in the downtown branch had to be time-stamped by the broker in addition to being time-stamped by the wire operator. I believe now that this was the case because of all the compliance problems and all of the lawsuits in the downtown branch. It was not the case in the Beverly Hills branch, but I didn't know that. I simply asked Lyndsey where the time stamp was.
    "You want a time stamp, why don't you go back downtown for a time stamp," he growled at me with an unbelievably nasty sneer on his face.
    "Whoa, where did that come from?" I thought. His response shocked me; even the manager downtown didn't talk to me like that. I didn't expect overt hostility from him. This was straight out of the branch manager's mouth unprovoked. Why did he take me into his branch if he felt such hostility toward me? I was speechless for a few seconds.
    "Well, ah," I stuttered, "I'm dropping a ticket, and I need to stamp it." I realized that something was wrong with this picture, but I didn't know what. I instinctively understood it was not the time to get to the bottom of my confusion but to just back down and leave the scene. Later I asked somebody else and subsequently found out that we didn't need to time stamp every ticket in that office.
    Lyndsey had lots of reasons to come to my corner of the world. My cubicle was across the hall from the compliance manager with

 

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whom Lyndsey often interacted. More importantly, on one side of the compliance manager's office was the biggest broker in our branch, and two offices over on the other side was a corner office, meaning another big broker and another big producer. That area of the branch meant lots of money to Lyndsey. Not long after the time stamp incident, I needed to approach Lyndsey again and did so in about the same place in the hallway. I don't remember what I needed from him, whether I asked him a question or needed a signature. Whatever it was I said, his response was totally off the wall and, again, unexpected. Picture a 6'1'' branch manager— i.e., branch king— getting that menacing sneer on his face, and in a totally hostile and loud voice, saying, "I'm sick of you." "How could you be sick of me?" I remember thinking, "I just got here." These early events quickly let me know where I stood with Lyndsey and set the tone for all of our future interactions. His nasty behavior toward me came out of nowhere, was uncalled for, unprofessional, out of line, unsupportive, and blatantly obstructionist for most of the next four years.

    We got paid once a month on the tenth, but when I opened my paycheck for that first pay period in Beverly Hills, the additional $800 was not there. I was alarmed. "Oh, god," I thought, "I went through all this and now they're going to screw me. They got me over here, and now they aren't going to pay me."
    Even though I had it in writing that they were extending my salary and all three managers— Aaron, James, and Lyndsey— had signed the document, a wave of fear rushed over me that they would renege. Aaron was the two branch managers' boss, and he ultimately made the decision to move me. I really saw the agreement as between him and me. And when I noticed that the additional $800 had not been included in my paycheck, I called Aaron right away. He wasn't in, so I left a message on his voice mail saying that the extra $800 wasn't in my paycheck.

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    Apparently, Aaron didn't like that because he called Lyndsey and, it seems, had a very unpleasant conversation. Lyndsey, instead of calling me directly, called Pete, the Beverly Hills compliance manager whose office was across the hall from my cubicle. Pete called me into his office and was definitely agitated.
    "Lyndsey just called me from his car phone," Pete said to me in a very annoyed voice. "He told me to tell you that he got a call from Aaron and that he, Lyndsey, will handle it."
    "OK," I said and was about to walk back to my cubicle across the hall, but Pete wasn't finished with me. He tried to get me to tell him what was going on, but I wasn't talking. It seemed that he wasn't in the loop, and I wanted to keep it that way; the fewer people who knew, the better. I played innocent as if I didn't notice that Pete himself was now angry and trying to get information out of me. Once he understood he wasn't going to intimidate me into talking, I left. I did get my money a few days later and every month after that for the full six months. It wouldn't really matter that Pete hadn't been in the formal loop. He, along with many others, would figure out that I was on Lyndsey's shitlist soon enough.
    I was hoping that nobody in the branch would know about the problem downtown because I just wanted to get on with my career and forget about the unfortunate beginning. I behaved as if most people didn't know. I still don't know who knew or when they found out, with a few exceptions. About two weeks after I moved into the Beverly Hills branch, the branch Christmas party was held at Tatou's, a discothèque located a couple blocks over on Beverly Drive. My new assistant, Lisa, whom, of course, I had just met a few weeks prior, couldn't help herself. She asked me as nonchalantly as someone could, yelling over the music and trying not to come across as nosey, "I heard you had a problem downtown."
    "Huh?" I said as innocently as I could and denied it. She had been
friends with Lyndsey's assistant, Penny, and I think that is how she knew.
I prayed that she and Penny kept their mouths shut.

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    Smith Barney and Lyndsey knew I had a strong case, and, I believe, knew I had talked to lawyers. Lyndsey, as many people who have worked with him have articulated to me, was a lazy manager and also a bully. I surmised that his strategy was not to fire me straight out, because he couldn't do that; it would have been more of a hassle for him. He was doing his own boss a favor— "nudge, nudge"— by taking me into his branch to begin with. His strategy was not to overtly provoke me into suing but to wear me out, grind me down, belittle me, humiliate me, obstruct my efforts, and demoralize me to the point where I would eventually quit. He blocked me at every turn, and all interactions were a battle with him. Years later, I would find out, definitively, that Aaron had given an order to get me out. Unfortunately for Lyndsey, Aaron, and Smith Barney, I refused to fail. As Raymond, the guy in the cubicle next to mine used to tell me, "Tameron, you burned the ships," and he was right.

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