Books, Movies, U.S. Attorneys Offices, White-Collar Crime

The Bonfire Of The Vanities: A Conversation With Preet Bharara And Tom Wolfe

An enjoyable evening with a prominent prosecutor and one of the nation's greatest writers.

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Last night, while some sort of sporting event was going on, I had the pleasure of attending a screening of The Bonfire of the Vanities, followed by a very interesting discussion featuring Tom Wolfe, author of the bestselling book (affiliate link) that served as the basis for the movie, and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. The event was part of the tenth annual FOLCS Film Festival, produced by the Forum on Law, Culture & Society at NYU Law School.

The evening’s host, law professor and Forum director Thane Rosenbaum, humorously alluded to the Mets being in the World Series in his welcoming remarks. He noted that the time period depicted in Bonfire, the 1980s, was the last time the Mets were relevant to the sport of baseball (apologies to Elie Mystal and all the other Mets fans out there — and condolences on last night’s loss).

I had low expectations for the movie, generally regarded as a “critical and commercial flop,” so I was pleasantly surprised by its entertainment quotient — I wouldn’t call it “good,” but I would call it “fun” — and by the amount of law it contains. Morgan Freeman chews the scenery as the benchslap-happy Judge Leonard White, Kevin Dunn does a fine job portraying defense lawyer Tom Killian (inspired by the real-life celebrity lawyer Ed Hayes), the plot turns on an evidentiary issue and the legality of recording conversations in New York, and the film concludes with a stirring courtroom oration by Judge White about the nature of justice.

(It’s also a pleasure to see the younger versions of several high-profile actors — Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, Kim Cattrall — especially Hanks, who was quite nice-looking back when he had more hair and fewer pounds. His acting has improved over the years even if his physique has not. Watching him in Bonfire, I thought about how much better he is in the new legal thriller, Bridge of Spies. (You can read more about that movie in Staci Zaretsky’s review — note that it contains spoilers.))

In the post-screening discussion, Tom Wolfe seemed to distance himself from the film. When asked for his reaction to the film based on his book, Wolfe said, “The movie was… very different.” The audience chuckled at Wolfe’s implied dig at the adaptation. Wolfe then pointed out several differences between the book and the movie. Perhaps most prominently, the film features a black instead of white judge presiding over the trial of Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks), a rich white Wall Streeter accused of killing a black teenager by hitting him with his Mercedes.

The politicized nature of that trial raised a question that Thane Rosenbaum as moderator posed to Preet Bharara as prosecutor: do political considerations play a role in prosecutorial decisions? Bharara’s response, to no one’s surprise, was not at all. Bharara said that he and his prosecutors strive for the value articulated by Judge White at the end of Bonfire: justice, not just victory. He said that accusing a prosecutor of playing politics is an easy and all-too-common critique — and that if you’re being accused by some of being too harsh and by others of being too lenient, as he and his colleagues often are, then you are probably doing something right.

Rosenbaum then asked Bharara: why are we so interested in the prosecutions of Wall Street tycoons? Citing Shakespearean drama and Greek tragedy, Bharara said that the public is fascinated by people who experience a skyward rise followed by a dramatic fall, often due to some tragic flaw. And the public is also curious: why would someone who already has so much commit a crime just to get a little more of what they already have?

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Tom Wolfe’s response: status (a theme that runs through pretty much all of Wolfe’s work). Millionaires want to become billionaires; billionaires want to become bigger billionaires. And even people with great wealth and power suffer “status fear,” anxiety over not measuring up to their peers.

This fear of losing status — and wealth, and freedom — can be harnessed to combat white-collar crime, Bharara argued. Some criminals, such as certain terrorists, are difficult to deter; they are willing to die to commit their crimes. But white-collar criminals are different; working in finance, they see the world through the lens of cost-benefit analysis. So the hope articulated by Bharara is that these Wall Street types will conclude, after seeing a colleague getting sent to prison, “I have my $100 million — I’m good.”

After reviewing questions submitted by audience members, Rosenbaum asked Bharara if he had any thoughts on the recent setbacks experienced by his office in the area of insider trading — specifically, the Second Circuit’s December 2014 opinion in the Newman and Chiasson cases, which tightened up standards for criminal insider-trading liability. After the ruling, the U.S. Attorney’s Office moved to dismiss the convictions of several insider-trading defendants (including two law school graduates, Thomas Conradt and David Weishaus, whom we wrote about back in 2012).

Preet Bharara stood his ground and expressed no regrets over those prosecutions (to say nothing of the apologies to defendants advocated by the Wall Street Journal editorial page). He argued that the Second Circuit ruling affected just a small percentage of the insider-trading convictions won by his office, that journalists made too big a deal over the Second Circuit opinion (because of the media’s love for “who’s up and who’s down” stories), and that his office is simply following the law (which, he argued, the Second Circuit changed in Newman).

“If Congress tomorrow adopts the Wall Street Journal editorial board’s view that insider trading is awesome, then we won’t prosecute those cases any more,” Bharara said. But until such a time, he promised that “we’ll keep doing what we’re doing, applying the law to the facts.”

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(Flip to the next page for additional photos from last night’s event.)

The Bonfire of the Vanities [Forum on Law, Culture & Society at NYU Law School]

Earlier: An Afternoon With Ed Hayes, Celebrated Litigator and Memoirist
Bridge Of Spies: A Must-See Legal Thriller
Lawyer of the Day: An Allegedly Loose-Lipped Cravath Associate

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