US attorney who rattled Wall Street

Every few days during the trial of Galleon co-founder Raj Rajaratnam, Preet Bharara, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, would quietly enter the courtroom and take a seat in the last row.
From that unassuming vantage point, Bharara watched his colleagues try to persuade a jury to convict the former hedge fund titan of securities fraud and conspiracy.

The presence of Bharara at the largest insider trading case in a generation—and the office's resounding victory on Wednesday—signaled that the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan was back as the sheriff of Wall Street.

Over the last decade, the New York attorney general, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn , the Manhattan district attorney and even the Justice Department in Washington angled for their share of financial fraud cases, an area traditionally dominated by the Southern District.

But Bharara has not-soquietly reaffirmed his office's leading role in pursuing corporate crime with this landmark insider trading case, which relied on aggressive prosecutorial methods and unprecedented tactics. For the first time, federal authorities used wiretaps to listen in on stock traders swapping illegal tips.
"What this case has done," said Neil Barofsky, a former Southern District prosecutor who recently served as the special inspector general for the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, "goes well beyond simply putting a billionaire hedge fund manager behind bars."

"The case will impact an entire industry," Barofsky said. He said that Bharara "did more than just oversee and support the prosecutionhe made sure that the target audience, traders on Wall Street, fully understood the extraordinary lengths that his office will go to discover these crimes, and that justice will be served."
Bharara was an infant in 1970 when he came to the US from India with his parents. He grew up in Eatontown, NJ, and earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia Law School. After several years in private practice, including a stint at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in New York, Bharara became a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, handling organized crime, narcotics and securities fraud cases. In 2005, he became chief counsel to Senator Charles Schumer of New York, leading a Congressional inquiry into the firings of US attorneys.

Some lawyers have wondered aloud whether Bharara may have political aspirations like his predecessors, including former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who filled the post in the 1980s. As with Giuliani, Bharara is a charismatic figure who is comfortable in front of cameras , can talk tough and has a knack for the witty sound bite. At a news conference announcing Rajaratnam's arrest , Bharara riffed off a famous line from the movie "Wall Street."

"Greed, sometimes, is not good," he said.

Unlike Giuliani, whose political ambitions seemed barely hidden while he led the prosecutor's office, Bharara has told friends he has no interest in elected office. "Everything about Preet's record suggests that he's a federal prosecutor for all the right reasons ," said Randy Mastro, a lawyer at Gibson Dunn and a former top deputy under Mayor Giuliani. "The best prosecutors are often those who don't have political ambitions." Mastro, who overlapped for a time with Bharara at Gibson Dunn, added, "But that doesn't mean he shouldn't be drafted into running."

Ellen Davis, Bharara's spokeswoman , said in a statement on Thursday: "Preet loves his job and has no desire to run for public office now or ever."

Bharara has not commented publicly on the Rajaratnam verdict, other than a short statement in a news release . But in a series of speeches, he has explained his aggressive approach to corporate crime.

"When sophisticated business people begin to adopt the methods of common criminals , we have no choice but to treat them as such," Bharara said weeks after revealing the use of wiretaps in building a case against Rajaratnam. "To use tough tactics in these circumstances is not being heavy-handed ; it is being even-handed ."
He has taken that approach in other areas of financial crime.