Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Lewis Michael

Author:Lewis, Michael [Lewis, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-03-31T05:00:00+00:00

FOR MUCH OF the flight from Chicago he’d slept. Leaving the plane, he noticed three men in dark suits waiting in the alcove of the Jetway reserved for baby strollers and wheelchairs. They confirmed his identity, explained that they were from the FBI, handcuffed him, searched his pockets, removed his backpack, told him to remain calm, and then walled him off from the other passengers. This last act was no great feat. Serge was six feet tall but weighed roughly 140 pounds: To hide him you needed only to turn him sideways. He resisted none of these actions, but he was genuinely bewildered. The men in black refused to tell him his crime. He tried to guess it. His first guess was that they’d gotten him mixed up with some other Sergey Aleynikov. Next it occurred to him that his new employer, Misha Malyshev, then being sued by Citadel, might have done something shady. Wrong on both counts. It wasn’t until the plane had emptied and they’d escorted him into Newark Airport that they told him his crime: stealing computer code owned by Goldman Sachs.

The agent in charge of the case, Michael McSwain, was new to law enforcement. Oddly enough, he’d spent twelve years, until 2007, working as a currency trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He and others like him had been put out of business by Serge and people like him—or, more exactly, by the computers that had replaced the traders on the floors of every U.S. exchange. It wasn’t an accident that McSwain’s career on Wall Street ended the same year that Serge’s began.

McSwain marched Serge into a black town car and drove him to the FBI building in lower Manhattan. After making a show of stashing his gun, McSwain led him into a tiny interrogation room, handcuffed him to a rod on the wall, and, finally, read him his Miranda rights. Then he explained what he knew, or thought he knew: In April 2009 Serge had accepted a job at a new high-frequency trading shop, Teza Technologies, but had remained at Goldman for the next six weeks. Between early April and June 5, when Serge left Goldman for good, he sent himself, through the so-called subversion repository, 32 megabytes of source code from Goldman’s high-frequency stock trading system. McSwain clearly found it damning that the website Serge used was called a subversion repository, and that it was in Germany. He also seemed to think it significant that Serge had used a site not blocked by Goldman Sachs, even after Serge tried to explain to him that Goldman did not block any sites used by its programmers but merely blocked its employees from porn sites and social media sites and suchlike. Finally, the FBI agent wanted him to admit that he had erased his bash history. Serge tried to explain why he always erased his bash history, but McSwain had no interest in his story. “The way he did it seemed nefarious,” the FBI agent would later testify.

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