Bond value. (Letters).

YOUR AUGUST 2002 ISSUE MARKS THE FIRST time I read BE from cover to cover. [It had] many inspirational stories for black entrepreneurs. What jumped out at me was the good and the bad about the Newspoints article "The Fall of Alan Bond."

The bad news is that he deceived those people of millions of dollars. The good news is that he and other blacks convicted of investment fraud were in a position to have hundreds of millions of dollars under their control. As one of the people quoted in the recently published Black Enterprise In The Black: A History of African Americans on Wall Street (John Wiley & Sons, $24.95), I remember the days in the 1960s when a black stock broker could only fantasize about having one customer with $1 million in investments. As In The Black author Gregory Bell points out, today we have several black-owned firms with billions of investment dollars under their control, and there are blacks in senior positions at major firms like Tom Jones of Citigroup, who is responsible for over $700 billion in investment dollars. This is the same Tom Jones who led an armed takeover of Cornell University in 1969, while the Harlem office of Shearson Hammill & Co. was just starting to teach Harlemites about Wall Street.

Have we come a long way? I say, yes, and I hope we go further. Stan O'Neal becoming CEO of Merrill Lynch is just a beginning.

Jim Greene
New York, New York
[e-mail]

I'M A FORMER EMPLOYEE OF ONE OF THE top brokerage houses on Wall Street. I was saddened to hear the news about Alan Bond. It makes me wonder if he was treated fairly.

Sakina P. Spruell's article reports that C. Thomas Mason [of the Norman, Oklahoma-based Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association] used to enjoy watching Bond on Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser, and that he is sorry Bond turned out to be a crook. I wonder how many blacks are on the board of directors of the PIABA?

I remember the Joseph Jett incident in which Jett took the fall for decisions that were made by others so long as the money was rolling in. It makes me wonder how long it will take a federal jury to find the Enron and WorldCom good ol' boys guilty of basically the same [crimes].

Frederick F. Smith
Marietta, Georgia
[e-mail]

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