By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 2, 2015
1 West Street, Manhattan, Where Thomas Hughes Allegedly Took His Life
Last Thursday, 29-year old Thomas J. Hughes, later described by his
brother as “one of the happiest people I know,” allegedly took his life
by jumping from a luxury apartment building at 1 West Street in
Manhattan. Before any serious investigation had taken place, the New
York tabloids had dismissed the matter as a suicide. Hughes was an
investment banker on Wall Street.
In any serious investigation, law enforcement is required to look at
any potential motive for foul play. But when it comes to serial deaths
among Wall Street bankers and technology personnel, occurring repeatedly
over the last 18 months in highly unusual circumstances,
the deaths are almost instantaneously labeled non-suspicious by the
police. But there are two glaring motives for foul-play in almost all of
these deaths involving Wall Street or global banks.
First, major Wall Street banks hold hundreds of billions of dollars
of life insurance on their workers, and even prior workers, effectively
betting that an early death will pay off big for the corporation. The
bank collects the death benefit as tax free income, an added perk. In
most cases, neither the employee, public nor shareholders know how much
life insurance is held on any one individual. The death of a technology
vice president could generate a $3 million tax free payment to the Wall
Street bank and there is no public acknowledgement and no way to obtain
the data.
As of December 31, 2013, the four largest Wall Street banks, JPMorgan
Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup, held a total of
$68.1 billion in Bank-Owned Life Insurance (BOLI) assets according to
their financial filings. Since the ratio of life insurance in force to
assets can run as high as ten to one, just these four banks alone may
hold $681 billion or more in life insurance on their current or past
workers.
On March 21 of last year, Wall Street On Parade wrote to the
regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the
Currency (OCC), seeking the following information under the Freedom of
Information Act (See OCC Response to Wall Street On Parade’s Request for Banker Death Information).
The number of deaths from 2008 through
March 21, 2014 on which JPMorgan Chase collected death benefits; the
total face amount of BOLI life insurance in force at JPMorgan; the total
number of former and current employees of JPMorgan Chase who are
insured under these policies; any peer studies showing the same data
comparing JPMorgan Chase with Bank of America, Wells Fargo and
Citigroup.
The OCC responded by letter on April 18, advising that it did have
documents relevant to our request but they were being withheld on the
basis that they are “privileged or contains trade secrets, or commercial
or financial information, furnished in confidence, that relates to the
business, personal, or financial affairs of any person,” or relate to
“a record contained in or related to an examination.”
Seven months after we had received the “trade secrets” letter from
the OCC, 54-year old Melissa Millan, a woman who had the very type of
peer review records we were seeking from the OCC, was brutally stabbed
to death while jogging in Simsbury, Connecticut, a quaint, quiet town.
Millan was a Senior Vice President with Massachusetts Mutual Life
Insurance Company (MassMutual), headquartered in Springfield,
Massachusetts, who worked in the Bank-Owned Life Insurance area. That
meant Millan was among a limited group outside of Federal regulators who
was in a position to have broad data on the death benefit claims being
submitted by multiple banks and able to run studies to detect if
anomalies were emerging.
Millan’s death is still under intense investigation and, according to Fox news, which credits Wall Street On Parade for the original investigative report,
Simsbury Police Chief Peter Ingvertsen is looking into the Bank-Owned
Life Insurance connection. Fox quotes Chief Ingvertsen as stating: “I
would say that is something we looked at. We were familiar with it. We
looked into it. And we continue to look into it.” Anyone with
information is urged to contact the Simsbury police at (860) 658-3100.
The other Wall Street motive is the jarring fact that for the first
time in two centuries, iconic Wall Street banks are being serially
charged with committing felonies. These banks have known for the same 18
months that bankers have been dying under suspicious circumstances that
felony charges were coming. After a series of deferred prosecution
agreements, two weeks ago on May 20, five global banks pleaded guilty to
criminal charges of conspiring to rig markets. Two of those were U.S.
banks, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, where recent unusual deaths have
occurred.
The death of Thomas Hughes last Thursday has many unusual aspects. He
was part of a close, loving, affluent Westchester family. If he had
money problems, as one New York tabloid suggested, he could have asked
one of numerous affluent family members for a loan. Another curiosity is
that Hughes had insights into the culture and potential crimes of an
inordinate number of mega banks on Wall Street. The number of major
banks he had worked for by age 29 is almost unprecedented.
According to his resume filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory
Authority (FINRA), Hughes had interned at both JPMorgan and Goldman
Sachs, then held full time jobs with Citigroup and UBS after graduating
from Northwestern University. He was currently employed at investment
bank, Moelis & Company LLC. According to reports at the Wall Street
Journal and Bloomberg News, the U.S. Justice Department continues to
investigate market rigging on Wall Street, including the potential
rigging of precious metals markets by the largest banks.
Another worry for Wall Street is how many of their employees are now
wearing wires to work. Former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder raised
paranoia to a whole new level last September 17 when he delivered a
speech at the NYU School of Law in Manhattan. Holder told the crowd of
legal luminaries on Wall Street:
“…in our full-court press to investigate
and prosecute the ongoing LIBOR matter – which is being led by the
Criminal and Antitrust Divisions, and involved a wide-ranging scheme to
rig one of the world’s benchmark interest rates – witnesses from inside
some of the world’s leading financial firms have played important
roles. They have strengthened our ability to follow leads; to obtain
guilty pleas from subsidiaries of major banks like UBS and RBS; and to
pursue individual charges against nine former traders and managers at
these institutions. Our ongoing investigation into the manipulation
of foreign exchange rates has relied on similar investigative techniques
involving undercover cooperators, as well.” [Italics added.]
On a family member’s recently updated Facebook page, Thomas Hughes
was described as “popular and outgoing,” with a “great sense of humor.”
Friends posted comments such as: “Tom was such a wonderful, kind and
gentle soul.” Another female friend called him a “wonderful gentleman.”
An individual identifying himself as Mark Witte said “Even Wednesday Tom
was strategizing with Northwestern students to help them build the
careers they dreamed about.” Wednesday was the day before Hughes
allegedly took his life.
There is a legitimate concern that the NYPD is simply too cowed by
Wall Street to bring any comprehensive investigations into these deaths.
As we have previously reported, the NYPD co-staffs a high-tech surveillance center with Wall Street personnel and, at least in the past, has rented out cops in full uniform to Wall Street
banks. And there is also the pervasive attitude in New York City that:
as goes Wall Street, so goes New York City. The wealth that spills out
from Wall Street into propping up New York City real estate prices,
keeping retailers and restaurants busy, and sluicing ad revenue to
Manhattan media outlets are all impediments to getting at the bottom of
why these Wall Street deaths continue unabated — along with serial,
criminal market rigging. ~
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 1, 2015
(Left)
JPMorgan’s European Headquarters at 25 Bank Street, London Where
Technology Executive Gabriel Magee Died on January 27 or January 28,
2014
Since December 2013 there have been a rash of unusual deaths among
workers at JPMorgan Chase, including alleged leaps from buildings and
two separate alleged murder-suicides in New Jersey. A noteworthy number
of the deaths have been among technology workers. With the exception of
Julian Knott, who was a high level technology expert for JPMorgan in
both London and later at the firm’s high tech Global Network Operations
Center in Whippany, New Jersey, all of the individuals were under 40.
(See names and incidents below.)
Last Thursday, 29-year old Thomas Hughes allegedly took his life by
jumping from a luxury apartment building at 1 West Street in Manhattan.
According to Hughes’ resume at the Financial Industry Regulatory
Authority (FINRA), he had previously interned at JPMorgan Chase, as well
as held jobs at Citigroup and UBS after graduation from Northwestern
University. Hughes was employed at investment bank, Moelis & Company
LLC, at the time of his death. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and UBS
pleaded guilty to criminal felony charges for conspiring to rig markets
the week prior to Hughes’ alleged leap from the building.
The fact that JPMorgan Chase holds an estimated $179 billion in life insurance on its workers,
and in some cases, prior workers, whose death benefit pays to the bank
not the family of the employee, has raised concerns of more than just
trading conspiracies at JPMorgan Chase.
Now, according to Sarah Butcher at EFinancialCareers, at least two executives at JPMorgan have forbidden their technology workers
from explaining exactly what they do at the bank on their LinkedIn
profiles. One tech worker imagines that it’s a plot to restrict their
ability to market their skills to prospective competitors as JPMorgan
moves tech workers from the glitter of London to cheaper corporate digs
in Bournemouth, England or Glasgow, Scotland. Says one worker, according
to Butcher, “We’ve been joking that the plan is to make us
technologists invisible in the market and then forcing us to move to
Bournemouth or Glasgow.”
JPMorgan Chase could have other reasons for restricting information
as to just what its tech workers are up to. There are ongoing lawsuits
and investigations across Wall Street into the use of computerized
trading to rig markets.
In his annual shareholders’ letter in 2014, Jamie Dimon, CEO of
JPMorgan Chase, said the firm had “nearly 30,000 programmers,
application developers and information technology employees who keep our
7,200 applications, 32 data centers, 58,000 servers, 300,000 desk-tops
and global network operating smoothly for all our clients.”
According to Anish Bhimani, Chief Information Risk Officer at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview published at the Information Networking Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon,
JPMorgan has “more software developers than Google, and more
technologists than Microsoft…we get to build things at scale that have
never been done before.”
One thing that JPMorgan has never before done in its 200-year history
is to plead guilty to a criminal felony. That occurred on May 20 while
the bank was still under a two-year probation and a deferred prosecution
agreement for two felony counts in aiding and abetting the Bernie
Madoff Ponzi scheme. It’s certainly a bank worth keeping an eye on –
from many levels.
~~~
Following are the names of individuals who, at the time of their
death or previously, were employed by JPMorgan Chase and experienced
unusual deaths since December 2013. With the exception of the Knotts,
all of the individuals were under 40 at their time of death – a striking
statistic.
Joseph M. Ambrosio, age 34, of Sayreville, New Jersey, passed away on December 7, 2013 at
Raritan Bay Medical Center, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He was employed as
a Financial Analyst for J.P. Morgan Chase in Menlo Park. On March 18,
2014, Wall Street On Parade learned from an immediate member of the
family that Joseph M. Ambrosio died suddenly from Acute Respiratory
Syndrome.
Jason Alan Salais, 34 years old, died December 15, 2013 outside
a Walgreens in Pearland, Texas. A family member confirmed that the
cause of death was a heart attack. According to the LinkedIn profile for
Salais, he was engaged in Client Technology Service “L3 Operate
Support” and previously “FXO Operate L2 Support” at JPMorgan. Prior to
joining JPMorgan in 2008, Salais had worked as a Client Software
Technician at SunGard and a UNIX Systems Analyst at Logix
Communications.
Gabriel Magee, 39, died on the evening of January 27, 2014 or the morning of January 28, 2014. Magee was discovered at approximately 8:02 a.m. lying on a 9th level rooftop at the Canary Wharf European headquarters of JPMorgan Chase at 25 Bank Street, London. His specific
area of specialty at JPMorgan was “Technical architecture oversight for
planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income
securities and interest rate derivatives.” A coroner’s inquest in
London, which relied heavily on information provided by JPMorgan Chase,
determined the cause of death to be suicide.
Ryan Crane, age 37, died February 3, 2014, at
his home in Stamford, Connecticut. The Chief Medical Examiner’s
eventually ruled that the cause of death was ethanol toxicity/accident.
Crane was an Executive Director involved in trading at JPMorgan’s New
York office. Crane’s death on February 3 was not reported by any major
media until February 13, ten days later, when Bloomberg News ran a brief
story.
Dennis Li (Junjie), 33 years old, died February 18, 2014 as
a result of a purported fall from the 30-story Chater House office
building in Hong Kong where JPMorgan occupied the upper floors. Li is
reported to have been an accounting major who worked in the finance
department of the bank.
Kenneth Bellando, age 28, was found outside his East Side Manhattan apartment building on March 12, 2014.
The building from which Bellando allegedly jumped was only six stories
– by no means ensuring that death would result. The young Bellando had
previously worked for JPMorgan Chase as an analyst and was the brother
of JPMorgan employee John Bellando, who was referenced in the Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report on how JPMorgan had hid
losses and lied to regulators in the London Whale derivatives trading
debacle that resulted in losses of at least $6.2 billion.
Andrew Jarzyk, age 27, went missing in the early hours of March 30, 2014 after leaving friends at a supper club in Hoboken, New Jersey. His body was recovered from the Hudson River in Hoboken on April 28, 2014.
According to police, there were no signs of trauma to the body. Jarzyk
was employed at PNC Financial at the time of his disappearance. He had
worked previously as a technology intern at JPMorgan.
The bodies of Julian Knott and his wife, Alita, ages 45 and 47, respectively, were discovered by police on July 6, 2014
at approximately 1:12 a.m. in their home in the Lake Hopatcong section
of Jefferson Township. After a two-day investigation, police announced
that they believed Julian Knott shot his wife repeatedly and then took
his own life with the same gun. Knott had worked on JPMorgan computer
networks in London since 2001, initially as a subcontractor for Computer
Science Corporation and, later, IBM. Knott formally joined JPMorgan
Chase at its London operations in January 2006 and remained there until
2010 when he transferred to JPMorgan’s large complex in Columbus, Ohio
and rose to the rank of Technical Director of Global Tier 3 Network
Operations. Knott was transferred again in 2012 and began work in
JPMorgan’s high tech Global Network Operations Center in Whippany, New
Jersey. Six months before his death he was promoted to Executive
Director.
Michael A. Tabacchi, 27 years old, and his wife, Iran Pars Tabacchi (who also went by the name Denise) were discovered dead on Friday evening, February 7, 2015
in their home in Closter, New Jersey. Their infant son was in the home
and unharmed. A text message from the home had been sent to the father
of Michael Tabacchi asking him to come to the home, according to media
reports. The father found the couple. On the very evening the bodies
were discovered, before any autopsy had been performed, Bergen County,
New Jersey Prosecutor John Molinelli characterized the deaths in a tweet
as a “probable murder suicide.” Michael Tabacchi’s LinkedIn profile
lists him previously as an Operations Analyst at JPMorgan with the
current JPMorgan title of Associate.
Thomas J. Hughes, age 29, was found dead on May 28, 2015
outside his residence at 1 West St., Manhattan. A spokeswoman for the
NYPD said his injuries were “consistent with a fall from an elevated
location.” Hughes’ death came the week after JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and
UBS each pleaded guilty to criminal felony charges of engaging in a
conspiracy to rig markets. Hughes had worked for all three firms
previously. He was currently employed at the investment bank, Moelis
& Company LLC. ~
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 19, 2014
(Left) JPMorgan’s European Headquarters at 25 Bank Street, London Where Gabriel Magee Died on January 27 or January 28, 2014
In the past six months, five current workers and two former workers
of JPMorgan Chase have died under unusual circumstances. Adding to the
tragedy, all seven were in their late 20s or 30s and three of the deaths
involved alleged falls from buildings – a rare form of death even
during the height of the financial crisis in 2008.
According to the New York City Department of Health, there were just
93 deaths resulting from leaps from buildings in Manhattan and boroughs
during 2008 – a time when century old iconic Wall Street firms collapsed
and terminated tens of thousands of workers. Those 93 deaths
represented just .000011625 of the City’s population of 8 million.
JPMorgan’s global workforce population is just 260,000.
No other major Wall Street bank comes close in terms of young worker
deaths over the past six months. Of equal concern, since December, the
early deaths related to JPMorgan have been coming at a rate of one or
two a month – almost like clockwork.
The most recent was 27-year old Andrew Jarzyk,
who went missing in the early hours of March 30, after leaving friends
at a supper club in Hoboken, New Jersey to jog in preparation for an
upcoming half-marathon. A month later, his body was recovered from the
Hudson River in Hoboken. According to police, there were no signs of
trauma to the body. Jarzyk was employed at PNC Financial at the time of
his disappearance but had worked previously as a technology intern at
JPMorgan.
L. Jay Lemons, the President of Jarzyk’s alma mater, Susquehanna University, wrote in a tribute to Jarzyk
that “During his undergraduate years at Susquehanna, Andrew was
inducted into three national honor societies: Alpha Lambda Delta for
first-year student achievement; the Order of Omega for Greek leadership;
and Omicron Delta Kappa, a national leadership honor society
recognizing students who demonstrate superior scholarship, leadership
and exemplary character. As someone blessed to have known Andrew
personally, I can attest that he indeed demonstrated all of these
qualities.”
Tomorrow, a Coroner’s inquest will be held in London to investigate
the circumstances of the tragic death of Gabriel Magee, age 39, a U.S.
citizen from New Mexico working at JPMorgan’s European headquarters at
25 Bank Street in Canary Wharf, London. Magee was a Technology Vice
President involved in the “planning, development, and operation of
systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.”
Magee’s body was discovered at approximately 8:02 a.m. on the morning of
January 28 on a 9th level rooftop at the 25 Bank Street
building. Magee had been working late the prior evening but had emailed
his girlfriend to say he’d be leaving shortly. When he did not arrive
home, she reported his disappearance to police.
The series of strange deaths has brought unwelcome attention to the
fact that mega banks like JPMorgan Chase are allowed to secretly collect
life insurance proceeds on the lives of their employees, and former
employees, without disclosing the amounts to the families, or the
public, or their shareholders. (Other corporations are likewise engaged
in this practice.) The payments are a closely guarded secret between the
companies and the insurers who collect the lucrative premiums.
While New York City based banks, insurance companies and other
corporations received an estimated $3.5 to $4 billion in death benefits
on the lives of workers killed during 9/11, according to a June 2003
presentation made by Ron Colligan to the Society of Actuaries, specific
details on amounts received on a company-by-company basis have not been
made public.
The death benefits among all U.S. corporations may now exceed $1
trillion and are growing annually. The practice is called Bank-Owned
Life Insurance (BOLI) where banks are involved and Corporate-Owned Life
Insurance (COLI) for other corporations. As we reported last month, just
four of Wall Street’s largest banks (JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells
Fargo and Citigroup) hold a total of $68.1 billion in Bank-Owned Life
Insurance assets. According to Michael Myers, an expert on BOLI
and COLI and a partner in the Houston, Texas law firm McClanahan Myers
Espey, L.L.P., those assets could potentially mean that just these four
banks are holding $681 billion in face amount of life insurance on their workers, or possibly even more.
The cash buildup in the policies (mostly universal or whole life) is
recorded as tax free income to the company and the death benefit is also
received tax free. While the banks are not required to publicly report
the number of workers they insure, or the life insurance amount per
individual, or breakout the income they derive annually from deaths
(it’s typically lumped in with numerous other items as “other income”)
they do report in public filings to regulators the cash value amount and
the year over year growth in cash value. As of December 31, 2013,
JPMorgan held $17.9 billion in BOLI assets and had reported a gain of
$686 million in the cash buildup. (The $17.9 billion in BOLI assets
could represent as much as $179 billion or more in life insurance in
force on employees, past and present.)
Key man insurance is an easily justifiable life insurance product for
a business. That’s where the company insures the lives of its key
principals whose loss would have a very real financial and operational
impact. But BOLI and COLI have become known as dead peasant insurance
because many companies are taking out policies on employees in bulk,
often including rank and file workers. And there is evidence that
companies grouse when workers have the temerity not to die as projected.
In her groundbreaking book released in 2011, Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers,
Ellen E. Schultz, an award-winning reporter for the Wall Street
Journal, revealed the following in her chapter on “How Dead Peasants
Help Finance Executive Pay”:
“In a confidential memo in 1991, an
insurance agent wrote to Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co. that American
Electric Power (20,441 employees covered), American Greetings (4,000),
R.R. Donnelley (15,624), and Procter & Gamble (14,987) were ‘acutely
aware’ that mortality was running at only 50 percent of projected
rates.
“The Procter & Gamble plan covered
only white-collar employees, which might explain its poor death rate (34
percent of projected mortality), the memo noted. But the disappointing
death rate at card maker American Greetings was a puzzle, since the plan
covered only blue-collar employees, who are expected to have higher
mortality rates. (The white-collar employees were covered by a separate
policy with Provident.)
“Diebold, the agent wrote, had been
expecting $675,300 in death benefits since adopting the plan; so far, it
was expecting only one ‘mortality dividend’ of $98,000. ‘Do you think
that a mortality dividend of that size relative to their current
shortfall will give them comfort?’ the memo said.
“A company the agent called NCC had a
better death rate, he noted. People were dying at 78 percent expected
mortality. ‘However, this includes three suicides within the first year
which is highly unusual’— NCC had not had one suicide in twenty-five
years until 1990. ‘Without these suicides, NCC would be running at 33%
expected mortality. This fact highly concerns me.’ ”
It’s hard to say from the memo, which emerged during discovery in a
lawsuit, if the insurance agent is worried about the potential that the
suicides were foul play or if he’s worried that the expected mortality
rate in the future will fall short without a continuance of the unusual
suicides. (Typically, insurance companies will pay the full death
benefit in the case of a suicide if the worker has been employed at
least two years by the company.)
It’s customary in cases of unusual deaths for the police to
immediately explore “who benefits,” who has motive. Multi-million dollar
insurance policies held on workers by serially malfeasant banks
apparently raise no alarm bells among the men in blue today. Without
exception, each of these unusual JPMorgan related deaths were instantly
called “non suspicious” by the police, including that of Gabriel Magee,
whose inquest into the matter is just now being held some four months
later.
America wasn’t always this cowed by too-big-to-jail banks. The U.S.
Supreme Court defined the idea of “insurable interest” in Warnock v.
Davis in 1881, writing that “in all cases there must be a reasonable
ground, founded upon the relations of the parties to each other, either
pecuniary or of blood or affinity, to expect some benefit or advantage
from the continuance of the life of the assured. Otherwise the contract
is a mere wager, by which the party taking the policy is directly
interested in the early death of the assured. Such policies have a
tendency to create a desire for the event. They are, therefore,
independently of any statute on the subject, condemned, as being against
public policy.”
Today, BOLI and COLI are closely held corporate secrets – even
Congress can’t get answers. At a hearing on October 23, 2003 before the
Senate Finance Committee, Senator Charles (Chuck) Grassley explained how
the General Accounting Office attempted to conduct a survey into the
matter but was thwarted by the failure of the parties to turn over
information.
Schultz reports in her book that the American Council of Life
Insurers, the National Association of Life Underwriters, the Life
Insurance Marketing and Research Association, and A.B. Best Co. which
rates insurance companies, all say they don’t know how much of this
insurance exists in the marketplace. (Senator Grassley said back in 2003
that it represents one-fourth of the life insurance market; others put
it currently at one-third.)
Wall Street On Parade decided to seek the details on the life
insurance held by JPMorgan by filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
request with its Federal bank regulator, the Office of the Comptroller
of the Currency (OCC) and a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request
with the New York State Department of Insurance, now bundled into the
New York State Department of Financial Services.
The OCC told us that it had documents responsive to our request but
it would not provide them to us because they are “privileged or contains
trade secrets, or commercial or financial information, furnished in
confidence, that relates to the business, personal, or financial affairs
of any person,” or relate to “a record contained in or related to an
examination.” (See OCC Response to Wall Street On Parade’s Request for Banker Death Information)
More shocking, the New York State regulator said it “does not have
any of the records” – nothing, zip. This is the same state that watched
the U.S. taxpayer bail out AIG, an insurance company headquartered in
New York City, to the tune of $182 billion because of reckless insurance
practices involving credit default swaps. (See NYS
Department of Financial Services/NYS Insurance Dept Response to Freedom
of Information Law Request by Wall Street On Parade Seeking Information
on Life Insurance Held by JPMorgan on Employees Lives.)
And there is a growing amount of anecdotal evidence that dodgy things
are happening with the billions invested in mortality bets on bank
workers. Reports are surfacing that the banks have opened “separate
accounts” and are personally managing the assets instead of paying out
the premiums to an insurance company to manage. Ina Drew, the head of
JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office, reported on March 15, 2013 to the
Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that her office was
managing $9 billion of the company’s corporate owned life insurance
portfolio. The Chief Investment Office is the division that lost $6.2
billion trading exotic derivatives in London with depositor funds from
the FDIC insured bank in the U.S.
————-
Following are the names and circumstances of the five young men in
their 30s employed by JPMorgan who experienced unusual deaths since
December 2013 along with the two former employees in their late 20s.
Joseph M. Ambrosio, age 34, of Sayreville, New Jersey, passed away on December 7, 2013 at
Raritan Bay Medical Center, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He was employed as
a Financial Analyst for J.P. Morgan Chase in Menlo Park. On March 18,
2014, Wall Street On Parade learned from an immediate member of the
family that Joseph M. Ambrosio died suddenly from Acute Respiratory
Syndrome.
Jason Alan Salais, 34 years old, died December 15, 2013 outside
a Walgreens in Pearland, Texas. A family member confirmed that the
cause of death was a heart attack. According to the LinkedIn profile for
Salais, he was engaged in Client Technology Service “L3 Operate
Support” and previously “FXO Operate L2 Support” at JPMorgan. Prior to
joining JPMorgan in 2008, Salais had worked as a Client Software
Technician at SunGard and a UNIX Systems Analyst at Logix
Communications.
Gabriel Magee, 39, died on the evening of January 27, 2014 or the morning of January 28, 2014. Magee was discovered at approximately 8:02 a.m. lying on a 9th level rooftop at the Canary Wharf European headquarters of JPMorgan Chase at 25 Bank Street, London. His specific
area of specialty at JPMorgan was “Technical architecture oversight for
planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income
securities and interest rate derivatives.” A coroner’s inquest to
determine the cause of death is scheduled for May 20, 2014 in London.
Ryan Crane, age 37, died February 3, 2014, at
his home in Stamford, Connecticut. The Chief Medical Examiner’s office
just recently ruled that the cause of death was ethanol
toxicity/accident. Crane was an Executive Director involved in trading
at JPMorgan’s New York office. Crane’s death on February 3 was not
reported by any major media until February 13, ten days later, when
Bloomberg News ran a brief story.
Dennis Li (Junjie), 33 years old, died February 18, 2014 as
a result of a purported fall from the 30-story Chater House office
building in Hong Kong where JPMorgan occupied the upper floors. Li is
reported to have been an accounting major who worked in the finance
department of the bank.
Kenneth Bellando, age 28, was found outside his East Side Manhattan apartment building on March 12, 2014.
The building from which Bellando allegedly jumped was only six stories
– by no means ensuring that death would result. The young Bellando had
previously worked for JPMorgan Chase as an analyst and was the brother
of JPMorgan employee John Bellando, who was referenced in the Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report on how JPMorgan had hid
losses and lied to regulators in the London Whale derivatives trading
debacle that resulted in losses of at least $6.2 billion.
Andrew Jarzyk, age 27, went missing in the early hours of March 30, 2014 after leaving friends at a supper club in Hoboken, New Jersey. His body was recovered from the Hudson River in Hoboken on April 28, 2014.
According to police, there were no signs of trauma to the body. Jarzyk
was employed at PNC Financial at the time of his disappearance. He had
worked previously as a technology intern at JPMorgan.
Related Articles:
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By Melissa Dykes
