The real mystery, to the insiders, wasn’t why Serge had done what he had done. It was why Goldman Sachs had done what it had done. Why on earth call the F.B.I.? Why coach your employees to say what they need to say on a witness stand to maximize the possibility of sending him to prison? Why exploit the ignorance of both the general public and the legal system about complex financial matters to punish this one little guy? Why must the spider always eat the fly?

They had no end of theories about this, but one was more intriguing than the others. It had to do with the nature of Goldman Sachs these days, and the way people who work for the firm get ahead. As one put it, “Every manager of a Wall Street tech group likes to have people believe that his guys are geniuses. Their whole persona among their peers is that what they and their team do can’t be replicated. When people find out that 95 percent of their code is open-source, it kills that perception. . . . So when the security people come to them and tell them about the downloads, they can’t say, ‘No big deal.’ And they can’t say, ‘I don’t know what he took.’ ”

To put it another way: the process that ended with Serge Aleynikov sitting inside a federal prison may have started with some Goldman Sachs employees concerned about their bonuses. As they walked down Wall Street and into the night, one of the jurors said, “I’m actually nauseous. It makes me sick.”

Cyrus Vance’s Secret Sauce

The mystery the jury of his peers had more trouble solving was Serge himself. He seems, and perhaps even is, completely at peace with the world. Had you lined up the people at those two Wall Street dinners and asked the American public to vote for the man who had just lost his marriage, his home, his job, his life’s savings, and his reputation, Serge would have come in dead last. At one point one of the people at the table stopped the conversation about computer code and asked, “Why aren’t you angry?” Serge just smiled back at him. “No, really,” said the other. “How do you stay so calm? I’d be fucking going crazy.” Serge smiled again. “But what does craziness give you?” he said. “What does negative demeanor give you as a person? It doesn’t give you anything. You know that something happened. Your life happened to go in that particular route. If you know that you’re innocent, know it. But at the same time, you know you are in trouble and this is how it’s going to be.” To which he added, “To some extent I’m glad this happened to me. I think it strengthened my understanding of what living is all about.”

In the comfort of the Wall Street cornucopia, that notion—that the hellish experience he’d been through had actually been good for him—was too weird to pursue, and they returned to discussing computer code and high-frequency trading. But Serge actually believed all of this. Before his arrest—before he lost all he thought important—he went through his days and nights in a certain state of mind: a bit self-absorbed, prone to anxiety and worry about his status in the world. “When I was arrested I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “When I saw articles in the newspaper I would tremble at the fear of losing my reputation. Now I just smile. I no longer panic. Or panic at the idea that something could go wrong.” By the time he was first sent to prison, his wife had left him, and he had no money, and no one to turn to. He needed other people. “He didn’t have very close friends,” says Masha Leder. “He never did. He’s not a people person. He didn’t even have anyone to be power of attorney.” Out of a sense of Russian solidarity, and pity, she took the job—which meant, among other things, frequent trips to see Serge in prison. “Every time I would come to visit him in jail, I would leave energized by him,” she says. “He radiated so much energy and positive emotions that it was like therapy for me, to visit him. His eyes opened to how the world really is. And he started talking to people. For the first time! He would say: People in jail have the best stories. He could have considered himself a tragedy. And he didn’t.”