Bill Cohan, Columnist

Feds to Wall Street: Nobody's Too Big to Jail

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara delivers some refreshing straight talk when he says the pendulum has swung too far away from criminal prosecutions of Wall Street banks and executives.

April 8, 2014 at 2:05 PM UTC

By Bill Cohan

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.

No get-out-of-jail-free cards here, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara says. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg — No get-out-of-jail-free cards here, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara says. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg

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Preet Bharara's March 31 speech was little noticed outside a small gathering of legal and compliance executives in Manhattan. He delivered it on the day Wall Street and the financial news media were obsessing over the contention in Michael Lewis's latest book that high-frequency traders have "rigged" the stock market.

In the speech, Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, gave his usual defense of the Justice Department's strategy of settling cases with the big Wall Street banks instead of seeking criminal indictments.