Wall Street: It’s payback time
An angry mob of investors and taxpayers is assembling, and they want to see some executives’ heads on pikes. The question for the courts will be, Who was just foolish with our money - and who was lying, cheating, and stealing?
It’s not just the Securities and Exchange Commission, New York State attorney general Andrew Cuomo, and hordes of civil plaintiffs lawyers who want to find out. According to understated disclosures in SEC filings or newspaper reports, federal criminal prosecutors in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Newark, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Alexandria, Va., are all poring over e-mails and other records right now trying to answer that question in regard to high-level officers at such formerly blue-chip companies as Lehman Brothers, AIG, Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac.
To be clear, we’re not talking here about sensational, not conceivably legal, out-and-out Ponzi schemes, like the $50 billion one that former Nasdaq chairman Bernard L. Madoff has been arrested for, or brazen forgery and criminal impersonation, like the $100 million spree that glitzy New York litigator Marc S . Dreier has been accused of. Crimes like those typically have only one of two defenses: (a) “It wasn’t me,” or (b) “Okay, it was me, but I was sleepwalking on Ambien at the time.” This article is, rather, about an entirely different category of accusation. The probes being discussed here concern statements that ultimately proved incorrect, but which reasonable, straight-faced people can, and vigorously do, contend were honest when made.
