Serge Aleynikov remains the only Goldman Sachs employee since the 2008 financial meltdown to have actually served time in prison. How the Russian-born computer programmer came to spend a year behind bars at the behest of his former employer, Goldman Sachs, is the subject of contributing editor Michael Lewis’s article in the September issue of Vanity Fair, “Goldman’s Geek Tragedy.” Though Aleynikov was released on appeal in 2011, he was subsequently re-arrested on state charges the following year—even though those could conceivably carry a lesser sentence than the time he has already served. VF Daily caught up with Lewis to discuss Alenynikov’s disturbing tangle with the American justice system, why Goldman would flourish in Soviet-era Russia, and how high-frequency traders will inherit Wall Street.

__VF Daily:__In your article we see how Serge’s perception of the American dream changes. You started working at Wall Street out of college and now you are one of its critics. How would you say your vision of the American dream has changed?

Michael Lewis: I’ve never had a vision of the American dream. When you’re born into comfortable circumstances, it’s not a dream; it’s sort of your reality. My take on the world when I was a young man coming of age on Wall Street was that the world seemed widely screwed up to me. I came from a place where nobody really seemed to do anything and everybody was happy. I went into a place, Wall Street, where everyone seemed to be busy all the time and unhappy.

Maybe that’s what we have in common. We both came to Wall Street as outsiders. Neither one of us particularly thought of that as our life’s ambition. When I was pulled into it, every young graduate of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale was going to work on Wall Street for the first time. When he was pulled into it, every Russian programmer who could make things go fast was being sucked into Wall Street. We were both subject to this gravitational pull that was peculiar to the moment in Wall Street’s history.

Would you say that Serge’s story is the logical outcome of the financial crisis, or are those two things in contradiction to each other?

The judicial response to the financial crisis, especially the criminal and legal response, has been bizarre. But it’s always bizarre. The Justice Department in Manhattan, the D.A., they’re very good at certain kinds of cases. Insider trading, theft of property from a corporation, these are easier for them to take on and wrap their minds around than what was actually the center of the financial crisis.

In a funny way, the authorities, in response to not being able to prosecute the actual bad behavior that was actually really important, became more interested than they maybe should have been in peripheral cases that just happened to have Wall Street in the headline__.__He’s such a case. He has nothing to do with the financial crisis, except that he happened to work in the institution that is at the heart of it.

The Justice Department, more or less, mistakenly thought that on the surface, what he did was cut-and-dried, and that it was easy to prosecute.

They were right. You can put this guy in jail, especially with Goldman Sachs’s help. To me, the astonishing thing is that even after the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs can call the F.B.I., and on their word alone—about the value of what was taken, about the purpose of what was taken—get someone arrested two days later.