Friday, May 3, 2013

The Seven Year Long Hunt for Steve Cohen




Vanity Fair writes:  Twenty-five years ago Wall Street, and much of America, was transfixed by a sweeping set of insider-trading investigations centered on the greatest financier of the age, junk-bond king Michael Milken, of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Day after day, week after week, month after month, stories of U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani’s relentless investigation dribbled out to the press. One by one, Giuliani picked off Milken’s minions, confronting them at their homes, handcuffing them at their offices, pulling them before secret grand juries….

Twenty-five years later it’s all happening again. Once more a relentless U.S. attorney, this time 44-year-old Preet Bharara, has seemingly targeted the billionaire investor Steve Cohen, founder of SAC Capital Advisors, the $14 billion hedge fund based in Stamford, Connecticut. One by one, Bharara has picked off onetime SAC traders and analysts, confronting them at their homes, pulling them before grand juries, bringing criminal cases, and pressing them for evidence that Cohen has broken insider-trading laws. So far Cohen has not been charged with anything, but there is the same sense that Bharara, like Giuliani before him, has too much invested in all this to lose. “If Steve Cohen gets off,” one hedge-fund manager observes, “he will be the O. J. Simpson of insider trading.”


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