2015-02-27nytimes.com

Since January 2008, as Roomy had ostensibly been going about her usual business -- analyzing companies, gathering snippets of privileged corporate intelligence and deciding which stocks to buy and sell -- she was secretly assisting the F.B.I. in a long-running investigation into insider trading at Wall Street hedge funds. Khan was the right woman for the job: Since about 2006, she herself had been trading on inside information. When the F.B.I. caught up with her, she began helping them -- at first reluctantly and then with theatrical flair. She taped telephone calls with her bosses, business associates and even a neighbor. Most important of all, she taped calls with her ex-boss, Raj Rajaratnam, whom the government had been eyeing for a decade.

...

I met Khan in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in September, five months after she was released from prison and three months after she was transferred from a halfway house to her own home. I wanted to understand how a highly intelligent woman like Khan -- she has a degree in engineering, two in physics and an M.B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley -- wound up committing a crime like this. What sorts of calculations had she made to convince herself that the benefits of cheating outweighed the possible costs?

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In February, she received a rejection [from Wharton business school], but she's waiting to hear from several other schools. If she doesn't get in anywhere, she would like to write a book, perhaps go on the lecture circuit, sharing with aspiring traders and business people the cautionary tale of her easy slide into committing crimes



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