A regulatory panel’s decision forcing JPMorgan Chase to pay $4.25 million for allegedly firing an employee because of a misclassified $642.50 deli plate just begs for yuks, and online wags quickly rose to the occasion.
The World’s Most Expensive Charcuterie Board
Forget Bitcoin, forget Nvidia. Salami futures are the real play
The true crime here isn’t the policy violation, it’s the price of premium deli meat
I am immediately updating my portfolio strategy to 100% allocation in cured meats
Even Brent Ryan Bodner, a veteran Beverly Hills wealth manager who was awarded the multimillion payout, referred to his plight as “the salami incident.”
While JPMorgan regards the award as a pile of baloney and plans to appeal the ruling, the story is no laughing matter and yet another indictment of the leadership of CEO Jamie Dimon.
The Salami Incident
According to published reports, Bodner in 2024 opted to also invite clients and prospective clients to an annual Super Bowl party he hosted for family members at his home. He ordered a deli platter costing $642.50 and submitted his prospective guest list for JPMorgan’s approval, which the bank granted.
The dispute centered on how the expense was entered into JPMorgan’s system. Bodner’s assistant, who The Wall Street Journal reported was his sister, entered the expense in a manner that made it appear the meal had been eaten at the deli rather than served at Bodner’s home.
“(Bodner) both misstated the purpose and location of the gathering,” a JPMorgan spokesman said.
Had Bodner spent the same $642.50 taking the prospective client to dinner at the deli itself, the expense apparently would have been permissible. JPMorgan’s objection was not the amount spent, but that the event took place at Bodner’s home and was entered into the bank’s system as though the meal had been consumed at the deli.
Reading about Bodner’s plight reminded me of an incident involving a former Detroit News colleague who spent considerable time on the road as an auto writer when he would have preferred spending evenings with his family.
One night after ordering room service dinner, he rented a hotel movie costing, in those days, about $3. Someone from accounts payable called to inform him the News had a policy against reimbursing in-room movies.
On his next trip, my colleague invited a group of auto writers to a lavish dinner and encouraged them to live it up. Detroit News accounts payable approved the expense without a murmur.
For the record, I think Bodner was wrong to expense the entire platter rather than allocating only the portion attributable to clients and prospective clients.
Regardless, JPMorgan’s objection was not the cost of the deli platter itself. Had Bodner instead taken clients or prospective clients to dinner at the deli and invited family members to join them, JPMorgan likely wouldn’t have objected.
JPMorgan treated Bodner’s deli platter expense as though he had committed a grave ethical breach rather than what he says was an administrative coding error tied to a real client event the bank itself preapproved.
That reaction is difficult to square with JPMorgan’s own history of compliance lapses involving matters far more consequential than a deli platter consumed during a Super Bowl party.
If any institution should appreciate the difference between deliberate misconduct and professed human error, it is JPMorgan.
Human Error at JPMorgan
In 2023, the bank agreed to pay a $4 million SEC penalty after “erroneously” deleting 47 million electronic records tied to at least 12 regulatory investigations. According to the SEC, the records vanished because JPMorgan employees mistakenly believed an outside vendor had properly coded the communications to prevent their deletion.
The SEC noted it was “unknown — and unknowable — how the lost records may have affected the regulatory investigations” because the communications were permanently destroyed.
JPMorgan did not admit wrongdoing. The bank told regulators it took its record keeping obligations seriously, implemented new procedures and moved on.
Bodner, by contrast, lost his job over a deli platter expense tied to an actual client and prospect event that JPMorgan itself had preapproved.
To be clear, the two matters are not remotely comparable in scale or seriousness. One involved federal record retention obligations tied to regulatory investigations. The other involved a disputed expense report over catered sandwiches consumed during a Super Bowl party.
What is striking is JPMorgan’s vastly different conception of human error depending on who commits it.
JPMorgan was prepared to spend extraordinary sums defending its decision to terminate Bodner over a $642.50 deli platter expense. The spectacle of the nation’s most powerful bank going to the mat over a catered deli plate would embarrass most corporate leaders. Dimon’s JPMorgan seems less concerned about being the butt of online jokes than about extracting a pound of flesh from those the bank believes aggrieved the institution.
Selective Accountability
The Bodner incident wasn’t a one off.
JPMorgan aggressively pursued Charlie Javice after discovering that the startup founder had wildly inflated the number of customers at the company the bank acquired for $175 million. Javice claimed the company had more than four million users. The actual number was reportedly closer to 300,000.
Javice was in her 20s when she fooled executives at a bank overseen by Jamie Dimon, who is routinely portrayed in the financial press as the elder statesman of American capitalism and the guardian of the U.S. financial system. During Javice’s criminal trial, evidence showed that some JPMorgan employees questioned Javice’s numbers but were overruled by more senior executives eager to complete the acquisition. Dimon reportedly was eager to get the deal done.
Javice was sentenced to serve more than seven years in prison. At sentencing, the judge noted that he was punishing Javice’s conduct “and not JPMorgan’s stupidity.”
Then there’s JPMorgan’s settlement with victims of Jeffrey Epstein, for which the bank and Dimon have been given a pass.
Three years ago, Epstein victims secured a landmark $290 million settlement from JPMorgan after their lawyers asked a judge to recall Dimon and one of his top aides for fresh depositions, citing what they described as a critical document produced only after Dimon had testified.
“Needless to say, the late-produced document is one of the most relevant and responsive documents produced to date, and JPMC strategically withheld it from Plaintiff until she could no longer make meaningful use of it in examining JPMC’s employees,” a lawyer for an Epstein victim wrote to the judge.
JPMorgan quickly settled the case after previously insisting it would fight the claims.
“We would never have continued to do business with (Epstein) if we believed he was using our bank in any way to help commit heinous crimes,” a Chase spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal.
Let that register. JPMorgan says it was unaware of Jeffrey Epstein’s reported criminal conduct while maintaining him as a client for years. Yet the bank’s controls were sophisticated enough to identify that a deli platter approved for a restaurant dinner was instead consumed at a broker’s home during a Super Bowl party.
Dimon’s Moral Radar
While Wall Street and the media continue to hail Dimon as the indispensable steward of American capitalism, I’m not joining the choir, particularly as he repeatedly demonstrates the situational nature of JPMorgan’s moral clarity.
Earlier this month, Dimon and Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon reportedly met with New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani after Mamdani used a Wall Street billionaire’s Manhattan penthouse as the backdrop for a campaign video about “taxing the rich.” According to New York Post columnist Charlie Gasparino, a JPMorgan source described the meeting between Dimon and Mamdani as “friendly” and “constructive.”
This is the same Mamdani who has repeatedly refused to condemn “globalize the intifada,” a phrase many Jews view as explicitly threatening and antisemitic.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Dimon famously took a knee in a public display of solidarity. One suspects JPMorgan’s moral and reputational radar functions very differently depending on the political moment, the power dynamics involved and whose sensibilities are at risk of being offended.