Frank Quattrone Responds

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As you all know, I promised to use this forum as a platform for anyone who took issues with the book to provide me feedback and corrections, if I got anything wrong. I was recently contacted by a communications consultant for Frank Quattrone, one of the most formidable investment bankers of the dot com era. I made a passing reference to Frank in my book, and he clearly disagreed with my observations. Bob Chlopak, Communications Consultant to Frank Quattrone, drafted a statement, which I post in full below. I'm happy to do the same for any source or character in the work who feels similarly. ”The Search” mischaracterizes Frank Quattrone’s case. The book makes reference to the right to privacy for personal email and says: "While the more sophisticated e-mail user among us has grown to understand the folly of this assumption in a corporate environment, the idea that e-mail is an ephemeral medium is still widely held. In 2003, Frank Quattrone, one of the technology sector's most powerful bankers and hardly a computing rube, was brought down by such a presumption when incriminating e-mails were used as evidence against him in a widely publicized trial." Mr. Quattrone did not regard email as private or ephemeral. There is substantial evidence of just the opposite – that he knew email created a lasting record available to many parties. For instance, there was an email shown at trial--in fact, a pre-cursor of the one to which he wrote his now-infamous reply-- where Quattrone admonished a colleague for making inappropriate comments on email. When asked about the admonishment, he testified that "email is a medium that lasts forever." There was testimony during his trials that Quattrone was well aware that CSFB backed up its system including emails, and that he rarely if...

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