The New York Times - Jennifer Senior
If Black Edge weren't about real life, it would be an uncomplicated pleasure to read. The book is many things: a Wall Street primer; a procedural drama; a modern version of Moby-Dick, with wiretaps rather than harpoons. Kolhatkar…expertly synthesizes an enormous amount of material, including court documents and hundreds of her own interviews. Cohen was not among them, alas…But his silence may also have been liberating to Kolhatkar, who was not psychologically constrained by gratitude to her subject for letting her in. She does not spare us her judgments of Cohen or of SAC Capital or of the hedge fund industry. They are not favorable.
From the Publisher
A modern version of Moby-Dick, with wiretaps rather than harpoons.”—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
“Excellent.”—The Economist
“If you liked James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves, Sheelah Kolhatkar’s thrilling Black Edge should be next on your reading list.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A lot of people do not trust Wall Street. They regard it as a moneymaking machine for those who work there, which has little interest in practice in its stated aim of channeling capital into businesses and helping them to grow for the broader benefit of society. For such skeptics, Steven Cohen is Exhibit A.”—John Gapper, Financial Times
“A richly reported, entertaining tale about the cat-and-mouse game between the government and Cohen.”—Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times Book Review
“Masterfully deconstructing a massive web of Wall Street operating, New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar retraces the seven-year government investigation that took down the firm—though not the man—in a true-life thriller with Shakespearian stakes. . . . Her chilling account of a blighted industry is as mesmerizing as a human story as it is as a financial one.”—Fortune
“There are few financial-industry struggles as titanic as the one portrayed in these pages.”—Reuters BreakingViews
“One of the best books about the 2008 financial meltdown.”—The Globe and Mail
“Well-written, with pointed characterizations of the ambitious players and their motives, this book is highly recommended for readers interested in finance, crime, and politics.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“Black Edge is not just a work of major importance, it is also addictively readable—and horrifyingly compelling. Sheelah Kolhatkar pulls back the curtain on the cheating, corruption, and skulduggery that underlie large swaths of the hedge fund industry and some of Wall Street’s most fabled fortunes. This book is as hard to put down as it is to stomach.”—Jane Mayer, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Money
“Black Edge is a real-life thriller about the government’s attempt to get the legendary trader Steve Cohen on insider trading charges—and the lengths to which he goes to elude them. Using deep reporting and top-notch storytelling, Sheelah Kolhatkar is able to shed new light on one of the least known and most fascinating characters on Wall Street.”—Bethany McLean, co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room
Library Journal
★ 01/01/2017
Kolhatkar's (staff writer, The New Yorker) book provides the most details about the Securities and Exchange Commision and FBI investigations into insider trading in New York in the past ten years, coming after Charles Gasparino's Circle of Friends, Anita Raghavan's The Billionaire's Apprentice, and the PBS Frontline documentary To Catch a Trader. The "black edge" of the title refers to insider information used by hedge fund traders to cheat. The subject of this book is Steven A. Cohen's former firm, SAC Capital, which pled guilty in 2013 to criminal insider trading and paid a $1.2 billion settlement. Cohen avoided personal liability. Organized chronologically, this volume starts with the FBI investigation into convicted billionaire Raj Rajaratnam. It ends in 2015 with Cohen emerging unscathed and ready to return to trading other people's money. Unlike Circle of Friends, which covers the same ground, this book benefits from Kolhatkar's access to the post-2013 criminal trials and government investigators. She notes wryly that the attorneys who pursued Cohen have moved into representing the industry, which is now more complex and successful than before. VERDICT Well-written, with pointed characterizations of the ambitious players and their motives, this book is highly recommended for readers interested in finance, crime, and politics. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/16.]—Harry Charles, St. Louis
Kirkus Reviews
2016-12-08
A formulaic but still intriguing financial cops-and-robbers story. Billionaire Steven Cohen (b. 1956) was a perfect fit at Wharton, its culture "driven by the worship of money." Brilliant and driven, he was a perfect fit on Wall Street, where, in the 1970s, he became a pioneer of a certain kind of hedge fund, making millions every year right out of the gate. The time was perfect, too, in a deregulated Reagan-era financial market that thought nothing of risk and even less of the law. Cohen's methods hinged, writes New Yorker staffer and financial-industry veteran Kolhatkar, on the accumulation of huge amounts of information—much of it along the "gray" edge, much more of it deep into black territory, "information that was obviously illegal," the stuff on which insider-trading convictions hang. By the author's account, Cohen is emphatically not a nice guy; she writes of how he skillfully hid assets during a divorce and of his tyrannizing employees: "For traders, getting a job at SAC was like pulling the pin out of a grenade: It wasn't a question of if you would blow up, it was a matter of when." It was also not a question of if the authorities would eventually catch up, and here Kolhatkar's tale assumes a certain inevitability, with good but indifferently socialized investigators, forensic accountants, and informants chasing after enough hard evidence to put an end to Cohen's manipulations. The upshot of the book is an inevitability of another kind, perhaps: although the punishment leveled at Cohen was astonishing on paper—close to $2 billion—it brought a nonapology by way of apology ("we greatly regret this conduct occurred"), and Cohen is preparing to resume his activities on the trading floor. It's a story that requires lots of insider information of its own kind to write, and Kolhatkar handles the job well though without the narrative flair of Michael Lewis' kindred book Flash Boys.
