Napoleon Brandford was born in a tough neighborhood in the early-1950s, and raised by a single mom. What happened next was against the odds – and that’s a major understatement.
Brandford led his high school basketball team to an Indiana state championship. He went to college and was destined to go pro but blew out his knee. He pivoted and went to graduate school. He started at the bottom rungs on Wall Street. He founded his own investment bank. It financed some of the biggest deals in the municipal bond market.
If this sounds like a rags-to-riches story worthy of a movie – it is. On The Money has learned that Brandford’s life story is slated to be made into a feature film called “Undefeated.”
Brandford tells me the film is in the pre-production phase, and will begin shooting in January. He has teamed up with Keith L. Craig, a former Disney executive and retired US Army sergeant major who now runs Porter-Craig Film & Media of Beverly Hills, Calif.
To play Brandford, the firm has tapped veteran actor Keith David, a Julliard-trained actor who has appeared in over 400 roles including hits such as “Platoon” and most recently “American Fiction”.
David, 69, tells On The Money “It’s not everyday that one has the pleasure of meeting a hero, but to have the opportunity to play him is evidence of God’s grace.
Making David ideal for the role is that he does bear a remarkable likeness to Brandford, 73. Both are tall men with the physiques of former athletes.
“I’ve been spending lots of time talking to Keith about the intricacies of the municipal bond market,” Brandford tells On The Money.
As for Brandford’s bio, the specifics are that he grew up in East Chicago Indiana, and his high school team won the Hoosier State championship in 1970. He went to the University of Nevada on a basketball scholarship. After that devastating knee injury, he came back home and enrolled at Purdue University, then graduate school at the University of Southern California.
He went to work on Wall Street at a time when African-American investment bankers were an anomaly. He worked for major Wall Street firms and then started his own shop. In the 1990s and through the 2000s he was a fixture on largest muni bond deals, including those issued by what would become his home state of California.
Full disclosure: I’ve known Brandford for 30 years; I consider him a friend and I spoke at conferences sponsored by his firm, Siebert, Brandford, Shank, which he retired from back in 2016.
That didn’t stop me from writing about the travails of his career, like his messy breakup with a former partner just when he and his firm became one of the market’s top underwriters of municipal debt.
I also wrote about his resurgence when he teamed up with the legendary Muriel Siebert and his other longtime business partner Suzanne Shank, and once again became a dominant force in underwriting debt for cities and states.
What set Brandford apart was his ability to cope and adapt to changes in the business and in his career – and keep building.
You don’t do any of that if you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth. I can’t wait to see this one play out on the silver screen.
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