Karen, it's not like I think Lebed is heroic or anything. I just think he fits in perfectly well with the sell side of the securities industry in general. If the SEC guys didn't want to come across as jokers, they shouldn't have acted like jokers.
From the article, nytimes.com :
Right from the start, the S.E.C. treated the publicity surrounding the
case of Jonathan Lebed at least as seriously as the case itself.
Maybe even more seriously. The Philadelphia office had brought the
case, and so when the producer from "60 Minutes" called to say he
wanted to do a big segment about the world's first teenage stock market
manipulator, he called the Philadelphia office. "Normally we call the top
and get bumped down to some flack," says Trevor Nelson, the "60
Minutes" producer in question. "This time I left a message at the S.E.C's
Philadelphia office, and Arthur Levitt's office called me right back."
Levitt, being the S.E.C. chairman, flew right up from Washington to be
on the show.
To the S.E.C., it wasn't enough that Jonathan Lebed hand over his
winnings: he had to be vilified; people had to be made to understand that
what he had done was a crime, with real victims. "The S.E.C. kept saying
that they were going to give us the name of one of the kid's victims so we
could interview him," Nelson says. "But they never did." . . .
"Put it this way," [Levitt] said. "He'd buy, lie and sell high." The chairman's
voice had deepened unnaturally. He hadn't spoken the line; he had acted
it. It was exactly the same line he had spoken on "60 Minutes" when his
interviewer, Steve Kroft, asked him to explain Jonathan Lebed's crime.
He must have caught me gaping in wonder because, once again, he
looked at me long and hard. I glanced away.
Levitt, being an old Wall Street hand, should have known who Michael Lewis was, and that Lewis wasn't going to be snowed by blather and sound bites. He might have been able to snow Steve Kroft on 60 minutes with the piercing glare, I'm sure it made for good TV. Lewis? He speaks for himsefl.
"What do you think?" [Levitt] asked.
Well, I had my opinions. In the first place, I had been surprised to learn
that it was legal for, say, an author to write phony glowing reviews of his
book on Amazon but illegal for him to plug a stock on Yahoo just
because he happened to own it. I thought it was -- to put it kindly --
misleading to tell reporters that Jonathan Lebed had used "20 fictitious
names" when he had used four AOL e-mail addresses and posted
exactly the same message under each of them so that no one who read
them could possibly mistake him for more than one person. I further
thought that without quite realizing what had happened to them, the
people at the S.E.C. were now lighting out after the very people -- the
average American with a bit of money to play with -- whom they were
meant to protect.
Finally, I thought that by talking to me or any other journalist about
Jonathan Lebed when he didn't really understand himself what Jonathan
Lebed had done, the chairman of the S.E.C. displayed a disturbing faith
in the media to buy whatever he was selling.
But when he asked me what I thought, all I said was, "I think it's more
complicated than you think."
On a more upbeat note, the Register actually picked up today's SEC story. These actions all seem a little more substantial than what Lebed did, involving real fraudulent activity. Who knows, they might even make it to 60 minutes, though somehow, I doubt it. theregister.co.uk
SEC press release: sec.gov |
