Bill Cohan, Columnist

Steven Cohen Appears Oblivious to Insider Trading Law

January 6, 2014 at 1:02 AM UTC

William D. Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities," as well as "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times best-sellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. "The Last Tycoons" won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

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You’ve got to figure that if the Justice Department had the goods on Steven A. Cohen, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, we would know about it by now. For years, the U.S. has been investigating allegations that Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors LP is little more than a sandbox for insider traders. Cohen, the ultimate prize, has so far evaded Justice’s clutches.

Still, the investigation by Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, has yielded a jackpot of wrongdoing: Six former SAC employees have pleaded guilty to securities fraud; a seventh, Michael Steinberg, was found guilty in December of five counts of securities fraud and conspiracy; and the trial of an eighth, Mathew Martoma, is set to begin Jan. 7.