They should make a movie

The son of Indian immigrants, Mathew Martoma has led a pretty interesting life.

Part Two: An arrest can dog you for life but if you can avoid an arrest record, you can get away with a lot.

In 1999, Mr. Martoma was expelled from Harvard for creating a false transcript when he applied for a clerkship with a federal judge, court papers unsealed on Thursday showed. Mr. Martoma used a computer program to change several grades from B’s to A’s, including one in criminal law, and then sent the forged transcript to 23 judges as part of the application process.

Then, during a Harvard disciplinary hearing to determine whether he should be expelled, Mr. Martoma tried to cover his tracks by creating a fake paper trail that included fabricated emails and a counterfeit report from a computer forensics firm that Mr. Martoma had created to help conceal his activities.

After Harvard expelled him, Mr. Martoma, who at the time was known as Ajay Mathew Thomas, legally changed his name to Mathew Martoma.

Nearly a decade after he was kicked out of Harvard, federal prosecutors contend, Mr. Martoma carried out one of the largest insider trading schemes while working at Steven A. Cohen’s hedge fund.

From the NYTimes. But if you think that is the end of the story you would be wrong because the Times doesn’t even mention that Mortoma had an earlier career as, wait for it….a medical ethicist at the NIH! He even wrote a paper on medical ethics (bonus points if you can find it).

Part One, from USA Today, Academics praise insider trading suspect’s past:

Bruce Payne, a former Duke professor, stressed Martoma’s strong ethical code when he wrote a recommendation letter for his ex-pupil’s application to Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Martoma was in Payne’s ethics and policymaking class in 1994, before later becoming his chief teaching assistant for the class.

Payne…wrote that Martoma was “extraordinarily intelligent,” ”remarkably analytic” and “wonderfully fair-minded.”

and here is the piece de resistance:

“No one has contributed more to our class discussions of Sissela Bok’s Lying, nor was anyone in our class as acute on the issues of moral capacity raised by Camus’ The Plague,” Payne told Stanford.

Addendum: A reader points me to the paper. It’s on genetic testing and insurance. Unfortunately, they missed the key reference in this field.