This week, an executive with Morgan Stanley was charged with assault, theft of services and second-degree intimidation based on race or bigotry after allegedly stabbing a cab driver in a dispute over a fare. Yesterday, cab driver Mohammed Ammar described the incident to the Post, claiming that William Bryan Jennings screamed, threatened and stabbed him after he refused to pay the full fare. Today, Jennings lawyer talked to the Post to once again insist that his client had been abducted by Ammar. But it was also revealed that Jennings flew to Florida the day after the incident for a well-timed vacation.
“He was held against his will in that vehicle. The cabdriver has admitted that,” banker Jennings’ attorney, Eugene Riccio, told the Post. “We asked the police department [to file charges], no charges have been brought so far.” A reportedly intoxicated Jennings had hailed a cab in Manhattan on Dec. 22 and instructed Ammar to take him on a 43-mile trip to his $3.6 million home in Darien, Connecticut. Ammar says the two agreed on a flat fee of $204 before they left; he said Jennings slept on the way, but was agitated and angry when he woke up at the home.
Ammar claims Jennings refused to pay the fare (“Are you crazy? That’s too much. I’m already home. I don’t feel like paying!”) then offered to give him $50. When Ammar said he wanted to find a police officer, Jennings then allegedly started cursing and shouting racial slurs at Ammar—then he pulled out the penknife. Jennings told police that he took the penknife out because the cabbie threatened to bring him back to NYC: “At this point, I began to become afraid that he intended to take me back to New York—and the fear of potentially being dropped in any number of dangerous places began to concern me as well,” Jennings said.
Ammar said, "He went for my neck first but ended up slashing my hand many times as I was fighting him off...My hand was bleeding pretty bad.” Jennings insists Ammar was slashed when he lunged for the knife: “At no point did I attempt to make contact with the driver” with the knife or otherwise, Jennings said.
Jennings, who makes over $2 million a year as Morgan Stanley's co-head of North American fixed-income capital markets, has called the $204 fare "exorbitant," and said he offered a "reasonable" $160 instead. Jennings told police he was so afraid of the cab driver knowing where he lived, he went on a vacation to Florida the next day. “Jennings said he didn’t know what to do -- he just wanted the whole thing to go away,” Darien Police Detective Chester Perkowski said in a court document. In that same document, Perkowski wrote his investigation “discredits Jennings’ statement that Ammar reached into the back of the cab while he was driving.”
