A few days after his New York Times op-ed explaining why he refused to cooperate with the FBI’s hedge fund-raiding, expert networker-arresting investigative extravaganza, former nobody John Kinnucan is getting an additional 15 minutes today, courtesy Bloomberg.
The piece opens with the same old story about how agents visited him at home and threatened to arrest him, and then apparently without irony catalogs Kinnucan’s recent spotlight grabs:
Kinnucan, meantime, has made two appearances on cable television and has written an opinion piece for the New York Times assailing the federal government for abusing its powers by cracking down on analysts who make a living providing legitimate research to investors.
And then we get a couple experts. One of them says Kinnucan might not be acting in his own best interest by talking to the press so much (a point we um, humbly disagree with), and another says maybe the FBI made a mistake by threatening him. And then there’s a whole bunch of biographical information, most of which is boring, but for one revealing detail. It seems Mr. Kinnucan co-managed money at mutual fund Crabbe Hudson (emphasis added).
The fund rose 12 percent in 1994, according to Institutional Investor magazine, which profiled Kinnucan in July 1995, and assets swelled to $800 million. Colleagues called him “Nuke,” Kinnucan said.
Kinnucan said Crabbe didn’t like the attention he was getting, and prohibited him from talking to the press. Kinnucan erred, he said, when Netscape Communications Corp. sold shares to the public in August 1995.
It’s possible that over the years, the pressure of not being able to talk to reporters had built up and become unbearable. And what we’re seeing now is the bursting of the dam, so to speak. Hopefully the reservoir has just about dried up.
