Monday, April 14, 2014

The Guilty Men

Steve Cohen ran SAC Capital, a $15bn hedge fund with a trading floor in Stamford, Connecticut, where he controlled every aspect – including temperature and sound. In order to maintain tombstone silence, phones were set to blink instead of ring. Temperatures of 70 degrees forced traders to stay alert all day, spurring the firm's fashion armor: black fleece jackets with the SAC Capital logo – like a very rich, very exclusive street gang. Video cameras observed every employee. Cohen made $2.3bn last year. It's hard to picture that kind of wealth, but it comes to just over $262,000 an hour – if you count all the hours in 2013, including the ones during which he was sleeping and staring at computer screens and talking with his lawyers.

A judge last week fined SAC Capital, the largest-ever fine for insider trading –  $1.8bn – to federal regulators. SAC, which is the first firm to ever become a convicted felon. Cohen has set up a new firm called Point72 Asset Management that exists solely to manage his multibillion-dollar fortune.

Former ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, once named one of the "10 most crooked CEOs" by Time, left jail long ago and is wheeling and dealing once again with a new venture called Kadmon.

 Jack Grubman, the Citigroup telecommunications analyst who was banned from the securities industry in 2002, started a consulting firm called Magee Group in 2003.

Michael Milken, the junk-bond trader who was also banned for life in 1991, started the Milken Institute think tank and presides over a yearly conference that is a kind of Davos for the West Coast.

 Mary Meeker, the analyst who was often called "Queen of the Net", was named in hundreds of post-tech-crash lawsuits but went on to a successful career as a venture capitalist.

John Thain, forced out of Merrill Lynch, created a new life as the chief executive of lender CIT.

 Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers, has a place to show up for work every day: an advisory firm he founded, Matrix Advisors.

From here

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