When the Feds Went After the Hedge-Fund Legend Steven A. Cohen

One day in early 2013, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, met with his deputy, Richard Zabel, about one of the biggest cases of his career—a crackdown on insider trading in the hedge-fund industry. Although the financial crisis had receded, popular rage against Wall Street bankers and traders was still strong; most Americans had seen their incomes stagnate while the fortunes of the wealthiest continued to swell. For the previous few years, Bharara and the prosecutors who worked under him at the Southern District, along with investigators at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been studying phone logs, wiretapping traders’ calls, and flipping witnesses, one after the other, as they worked their way deep into some of Wall Street’s most profitable hedge funds. Bharara was now considering a criminal indictment of Steven A. Cohen, the founder of a fourteen-billion-dollar hedge fund called S.A.C. Capital Advisors.