Andrew Ross Sorkin

He had, by the way, engaged in what was demonstrably a sham tax transaction with his wife.

And you get into I mean, you really get to see what was going on in the moment when he's literally in the room with his wife, you know, planning this whole tax strategy out.

And the jury comes back and finds him not guilty.

And this goes to exactly maybe what people thought about after the financial crisis of 2008.

Nobody really went to jail.

And when people discuss this with the jurors, when you read all of the sort of articles and opinion pieces about this at the time, the view was that –

He did basically what everybody else just would have done.

And they did not consider that to be criminal.

Interestingly, he had done it with the blessing of his lawyer, which was also sort of from a legal perspective, a very interesting defense, which was that he went to the lawyer, got the lawyer to bless it.

Completely corrupted process.

So that was, by the way, one of the great surprises for me as I was going through the letters and archives of this period, which was I think we all have this impression that this great Bill Glass-Steagall, which broke up the banks, was sort of driven by...

Carter Glass and this idea that the bank should be broken up and this was to make the system safer.

Correct.

You were dividing the casino from the actual bank.

But the truth was that this entire process had been corrupted.

And the only reason I would argue this bill even came about was because the Rockefeller family, which effectively owned a big chunk of Chase, which was a major competitor to Citigroup, wanted to break up Citigroup, but also more importantly, wanted to break up J.P.

Morgan.

and that the Rockefeller family had it out for J.P.

Morgan.

And as a result, they went to Roosevelt, who, by the way, wasn't so excited originally about passing this bill.