You may remember the "Fabulous" Fabrice Tourre, the mid-level Goldman Sachs trader who the SEC cherry-picked last year to make an example of. Goldman scrounged around in their manatee-leather couches and found $500 million to settle charges of fraud and gee they were really sorry. An article in today's Times seems to confirm what most people knew all along: Tourre was a scapegoat and his superiors should have been targeted for investigation, but weren't.
Unfortunately distracting the media from the real story is how the Times obtained Tourre's email correspondence and his attorney's legal strategies: through a laptop that a friend of an "artist and filmmaker" just happened to find "discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building." Maybe Nixon was on to something!
Felix Salmon at Reuters speculates that the Times' actions—trolling through emails that were continuing to come into the laptop—were equivalent to hacking into Tourre's private email account, "and breaking into a password-protected email account is clearly wrong." But dubious journalistic practices aside, the laptop revealed that Tourre's own lawyers argued that Tourre was merely "one member of a large team," and this reasoning was borne out in email exchanges between his superiors, including senior trader Jonathan Egol, who told Tourre via email that "the edo biz is dead we don't have a lot of time left," referring to the toxic bundles of mortgage debt that Goldman was selling to their customers while simultaneously hedging against them to protect themselves when the housing bubble burst.
Another Goldman colleague tells the Times that "I just can't even begin to tell you how junior and insignificant [Tourre's] role was," and a recent report from the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which specifically names executives at Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual, and other banks that may have committed crimes bears this out. As Wall Street continues to resist efforts to prosecute the white collar criminals behind the financial crisis, Americans may need all of the dumpster-laptops they can get their hands on.
