Yesterday, the trial of Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge fund founder accused of a huge insider trading ring (how huge? well, he's out on $100 million bail), began yesterday, The federal prosecutor declared, "Greed and corruption — that’s what this case is all about," while Rajaratnam's defense said, "The government has it wrong." But who are the people who have to listen to dense financial jargon for weeks, if not months? Well, you can bet at least some are Oprah Winfrey fans.
Bloomberg News offered an amusing sketch of all the jurors, plus the six alternates: For instance, one is a MTA station agent, while another is a retired bookkeeper who briefly was with the Israeli Army and who watches Two and a Half Men. Another, a nursing home activities therapist, said she watches True Blood and Grey’s Anatomy, while another likes Man v. Food and ESPN programs. A special needs teacher says she watches reality television and two other jurors watch Oprah. Another MTA employee says he reads five newspapers and watches birds. And then there's this:
Alternate juror 6 told Holwell he is unemployed and lives in Harlem with his girlfriend and two roommates. He has a bachelor’s degree in English and has held temporary jobs at the American Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. He said he enjoys reading and video games and belongs to a band that’s looking for a drummer.
In college in the early 1990s, he was charged with a misdemeanor for receiving stolen property and pleaded guilty, he said.
“It was a street sign that was in my room and they threw as much of the book as they could at me, but I got away from it,” he told [U.S. District Judge Richard] Holwell.
Overall, it's a mostly blue collar jury who don't even know who Lloyd Blankfein is! Prosecutor Jonathan Streeter explained why insider trading is so bad, "Secret information that other people don’t have is a very valuable thing in the stock market... He exploited a corrupt network of people to get access to secret, sensitive information. This is all information that ordinary investors didn't have and couldn't get."
