“I was a designated code reviewer for all of the desk’s confidential and proprietary code,” Lashgari said. He called Goldman’s accusation of improper access baseless. “Had we agreed to reconsider the resignations, none of this would have happened.”
For decades, the bankers and traders who found their way into the heart of Wall Street have tended to be one of two types. There are those born into pedigrees and connections that make careers in dealmaking seem almost inevitable, and the outsiders who arrive with ambition and smarts. Paul and Lashgari's biographies read like the latter.
Paul said he was born in 1993 an hour outside Haiti’s Port-au-Prince and grew up near Philadelphia, where his father drove a cab and his mother worked shifts as a nurse. At Columbia University, he studied computer science and economics and joined the National Society of Black Engineers, where another member told him about Goldman. What hit him was “the energy and vibrancy radiating across the trading floors” and “the sports-team-like atmosphere,” he recalled.
Lashgari was born in 1987 in Iran’s Kurdistan province near Iraq and moved at age 5 to Tehran, he said. He graduated from one of the country’s premier schools for gifted students, studied electrical engineering and then moved to the US for a Ph.D. at Cornell University on the mathematics of satellite communications.
After interning at Goldman, he joined the program-trading group in 2016, where Paul was already plying his craft.
Biblical Betrayal
One reason big banks pay handsomely is that investment firms pay even more. If a bank assembles a successful trading team, it’s under pressure to keep the talent from jumping ship and to protect intellectual property. Goldman’s protectiveness may be understandable, but sometimes it has also prompted questions over whether it’s too aggressive.
Most famously, the bank enlisted US authorities in 2009 when it believed a computer programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, was making off with source code for high-speed trading on his way to another job. That unleashed a decade-long legal saga, and a debate over the fairness of his prosecution. After years of battling federal and state charges, and winning acquittals on most of them, Aleynikov was found guilty on one count of unlawfully using secret scientific material and sentenced to time served.
In the midst of that battle, another Goldman program trader, Glen Scheinberg, jumped ship to multibillion-dollar hedge fund Millennium along with three colleagues, stirring yet more consternation within the bank. That hedge fund group became one of the most successful index-rebalancing teams on Wall Street.
Paul said that the day he submitted his resignation a manager told him Goldman doesn’t like it when employees leave in unison, warning, “this was a team move and the firm does not take these things lightly.”
Earlier this year, other parts of Goldman turned heads in the industry as the firm denied past compensation awards to key executives who decided to leave. At one point it even looked to confiscate vested stock awards from some defectors, a measure usually reserved for cases of misconduct.