The government’s case was a fiction, Rosemary assured me. “At S.A.C., there’s an expectation that you’re using the resources to formulate a hypothesis, and that’s what he did,” she said. But Gilman had admitted to violating his own confidentiality agreement, I pointed out. He may have had “little mini brain infarcts, where he was slipping on things he shouldn’t have,” Rosemary said. But these were “irrelevant to Mathew’s trading.”

Gilman had lost everything. Why would he lie on the stand about having committed these crimes? Because, Rosemary explained, when he was initially interviewed by F.B.I. agents, he lied to them, and at that point they had him on obstruction of justice. So the prosecutors could make him say anything they wanted. “His story was coerced,” she said.

She told me about her grandfather, a lawyer in India who had worked alongside Mahatma Gandhi in the struggle for independence. British authorities threw her grandfather into prison, where he contracted cholera and other ailments, from which he never fully recovered. Rosemary noted the “parallels” between her grandfather’s martyrdom and her husband’s. Rosemary’s mother, in a letter to Judge Gardephe, elaborated: “Mathew has given Rosemary courage by reminding her of her grandfather’s suffering for a noble principle, and that he too is standing for a noble principle, that is sticking to the truth.”

While Rosemary and I spoke, Mathew retreated to an inner room in the law offices where we were meeting. Periodically, Rosemary left me alone in the conference room and went to confer with him. It was a discomfiting interview scenario, with Martoma lurking in the wings like Polonius. People who maintain their innocence after a criminal conviction are often desperate to get their stories out, and, each time Rosemary disappeared to debrief Mathew on our conversation, I half-expected him to walk back in with her, and tell me that he had been railroaded by the feds. But he never came. They had arranged for a single chicken-salad sandwich to be delivered, and it sat on a sideboard, wrapped in plastic. Eventually, alone in the conference room, I ate it.

When Rosemary returned, she spoke at length about the duplicity of Sid Gilman. “He’s a strange man, and he compromised his values to save himself,” she said. The notion that Gilman and Martoma had a special relationship was “farfetched”—a fabrication of the prosecutors that Gilman had parroted. “There is no relationship outside of a cordial consulting relationship,” she said, mocking the notion that Gilman was genuinely moved by Martoma having arranged lunch at their initial meeting, in New York. She looked at me pointedly and said, “I mean, were you touched when we served a sandwich to you?”

Throughout our conversations, Rosemary was quick, animated, and intelligent. But her account stood at odds with what I had witnessed during the monthlong trial and had encountered in my reporting. She stressed that, when Mathew visited Michigan that summer weekend before the 2008 Alzheimer’s conference, it was indeed because a relative had died.

“Did he see Gilman while he was there?” I asked.

“I don’t think he has a specific memory of it,” she replied.

Early in our conversation, I had asked if Martoma felt vindicated by his acceptance at Harvard Law School, having been denied admission at Harvard College. After one of her visits with him, Rosemary returned to the room and said that she needed to correct one point: “Mathew did get into college at Harvard.”

“As an undergrad?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “He was admitted and chose to go to Duke instead.”

This struck me as hard to believe. I asked why Martoma, the very opposite of a rebellious kid, might defy his father’s deepest wish. She responded, vaguely, that Duke “was Southern” and “felt a little bit more comfortable to him.”

“He died after a long battle with me.” Facebook

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I wondered if, on this and other points, Rosemary was simply lying to me. But as our conversation progressed it became clear that she ardently believed in her husband. She reminisced about her medical residency in Boston, when she would be on call overnight and Mathew would sleep in the hospital with her so that she wouldn’t be alone. She pointed to the many letters written to Gardephe as evidence of the degree to which Mathew remained a beloved friend and a role model for his extended family. “Every Indian parent I’ve known, they take the weight of their children on their shoulders,” she said. “When you look into the eyes of all the four parents that are left behind, every single heart is broken.” Mathew’s mother had told him recently that she wished she could serve his prison sentence for him, Rosemary said. She added, “I’ve said that to him, too.”

Within this close-knit family, it seemed crucial to maintain that Martoma was going to prison for a crime that he did not commit, and it occurred to me that there might be one final explanation for his unwillingness to accuse Cohen of criminality. In order to implicate Cohen in a conspiracy, Martoma would have had to plead guilty and admit to being part of that conspiracy himself. Could it be that Martoma was prepared to leave his wife and family and spend the better part of a decade in prison for the sake of preserving their illusion that he was an honorable man? I thought of Gilman on the stand, abandoned by his friends and colleagues, while the first few pews in the courtroom were filled by Martoma’s extended family—by people who believed in him.

Martoma is scheduled to begin his sentence, at a federal prison in Miami, next month. When I asked how Rosemary and the children would manage, she said, “I’m not sure.” The children are nine, seven, and five. “They understand Daddy’s going to jail,” she said. “I mean, as an adult, I’m having a hard time understanding it.” Neither side of the family has any savings to give them, she said, adding, “There is not, and never was, and never will be, any discussion of Steve Cohen taking care of us.”

In April, S.A.C. ceased to exist, and Cohen’s company was rechristened Point72 Asset Management. Under an agreement with the government, it will be limited to investing Cohen’s personal fortune of roughly nine billion dollars. Cohen has announced that he will institute more robust compliance measures to prevent insider trading, and he has hired the Silicon Valley security company Palantir Technologies to monitor his traders. He has also reportedly banned certain kinds of instant messaging at the firm. When I asked Preet Bharara about the ultimate failure of his multi-year effort to catch Cohen, he responded, through a spokesman, that his office brings charges against “those for whom there is sufficient proof.” The S.E.C.’s lawsuit charging Cohen with “failure to supervise” will progress, as will a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of hundreds of Elan and Wyeth shareholders who lost money when Cohen shorted the stocks. Insider trading may not be a victimless crime after all—at any rate, not when the victims sue you. In August, the litigants amended their suit to include a racketeering provision, which alleges that Cohen, like a Mob boss, sat on top of a criminal enterprise.

After Martoma’s conviction, Stanford Business School rescinded its original offer of admission, effectively stripping him of his degree. “What to make of the early interest in ethics?” his professor from Duke, Bruce Payne, asked. “A hugely ambitious guy wanting to know the exact contours of the boundaries that might limit him? Or an anchor to the windward for self-protection by someone already willing to break the rules to his own advantage? If it was the latter, I was conned, and conned quite effectively.”

When I asked Rosemary about the future, she cried. “I don’t have the answers, but you know it is my goal to find them,” she said. “And I do pray that America will give us a chance to survive. And to thrive.” ♦

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Michael Steinberg was serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence.

**An earlier version of this article misspelled Riely's and Hendelman’s names.