Investigators focused on a golden rule for years: Follow the money. It’s a line popularized in the 1976 film All the President’s Men , which tells the story of the Watergate scandal. The catchphrase simply meant that if you were trying to break a case, your best lead was to track the cash – that’s how you’d catch the criminal.
There’s a new rule today on Wall Street... One thread ties together nearly all of Wall Street’s past decade of scandals, schemes, and misdeeds. From insider-trading convictions, high-profile divorce proceedings, Ponzi schemes, sexual harassment cases, pay-to-play ethics violations, misleading stock recommendations based on banking relationships, mortgage fraud, and rate-rigging scams... follow the electronic communication . In each of these exposed improprieties, e-mails, instant messages, and text messages played an integral part in the investigations. They helped open cases, filled gaps, or were themselves the damning evidence that ultimately resulted in proving guilt. Wall Street has learned this lesson the hard way. And as the world watched the 2016 campaigns, the election, and ongoing political investigations, it’s left many in the financial industry shaking their heads. How could they be so stupid to write it in an e-mail ? The idea that the rest of the world hadn’t gotten the metaphorical memo – Write It Like Ya Mama’s Gonna Read It – was shocking to most. The rule is: Never put anything in print. Some on the Street take this to an extreme, never using any form of electronic communication. But for most it’s simply a mental precaution taken every time their
fingers hit the keyboard. While typing an e-mail, assume it can end up on the front page of the New York Times . And yet, that caution didn’t happen overnight. After most of corporate America put e-mail onto its employees’ desks in the mid-’90s, it took a few years to realize it could be weaponized against you. But once those dots started to connect, the concept of avoiding self-incrimination began to catch on. Perhaps Wall Street is the older brother paving the way for everyone else in corporate America and Washington, D.C. – whatever you do, don’t incriminate yourself unnecessarily. It’s a lesson I learned early on in my career. In the early 2000s, I got a phone call from a friend who worked at Credit Suisse First Boston. He told me he needed to talk to me outside of work. That typically meant one thing – he didn’t want to share what he needed to say on a recorded line. That night, we met at happy hour. I pulled up the barstool next to his at Mexican Radio, a divey dark restaurant and we ordered a couple of tequilas on the rocks. Never put anything in print.
By Turney Duff
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American Consequences 27
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