Spotlight

last updated 8 January 2015

“Main Street has been baying for some high-paid Wall Street heads to roll” since the financial crisis, and Preet Bharara “is supplying them,” said Massimo Calabresi and Bill Saporito in Time. The 43-year-old U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has embraced “Mob-busting techniques” like wiretapping and flipping defendants into informants to target what he calls Wall Street’s culture of greed. Since arriving on the job in August 2009, he’s won 56 convictions for insider trading and other fraud charges, including that of former hedge fund boss Raj Rajaratnam. While those he has targeted so far “may not have caused the meltdown,” he’s making plenty of people high on Wall Street’s food chain nervous. Friends believe the India-born Bharara, who has a “first-generation immigrant’s passion for the American way of government,” could be the first Indian-American to hold a “top spot at the Justice Department or in the courts.”

Bharara asks patience of those who want to see more Wall Street honchos held responsible for their financial misdeeds, said Peter Lattman in The New York Times. “The number of prosecutions is not a function of resources, effort, commitment, or courage,” Bharara said last year. “It is a function of the laws, the facts, and the painstaking nature of these investigations.”