You expect me to believe this crap?

But Mr. Tourre’s world would soon be turned upside down. In fall 2009, the S.E.C. issued him a Wells notice, a formal warning that he was likely to be named in a civil fraud suit for his role in the mortgage deals. Mr. Egol also received such a notice in 2010.

This is in relationship to the "Fab Fabrice" scandal with Goldman, which it settled on a civil basis.

In their Oct. 10 response to the S.E.C., Mr. Tourre’s lawyers, including Pamela Chepiga of Allen & Overy, made an argument that they have not emphasized publicly. They contended that “singling Mr. Tourre out for criticism regarding the content of this clearly collaborative effort is unreasonable.”

These legal replies, which are not public, were provided to The New York Times by Nancy Cohen, an artist and filmmaker in New York also known as Nancy Koan, who says she found the materials in a laptop she had been given by a friend in 2006.

The friend told her he had happened upon the laptop discarded in a garbage area in a downtown apartment building. E-mail messages for Mr. Tourre continued streaming into the device, but Ms. Cohen said she had ignored them until she heard Mr. Tourre’s name in news reports about the S.E.C. case. She then provided the material to The Times. Mr. Tourre’s lawyer did not respond to an inquiry for comment.

Uh huh.  So the laptop was tossed in 2006 but continued to "stream in" emails?  And the person in question didn't do anything about that - like, for instance, removing that email account?

More to the point, the password remained unchanged?  There was no two-factor authentication (e.g. a little security token) required to sign in?  This was all entirely unprotected, entirely un-detected by corporate IT and continued on for.... years?

Well I suppose this is possible.  But if this is really what happened then there are a whole bunch of questions I have about Goldman and their competence when it comes to information security.  Not noticing that Fab's email is being retrieved (or "pushed") to more machines than he owns and in places where he is not would be quite the security breach standing alone, say much less having a machine coming into the corporate network without any security on the connection and no authentication.

Were I a Goldman client I'd like to know what the hell is going on with that, and I'd want it in writing.  Were I bank regulator, or the SEC, or FINRA, I'd want the same thing.  There's either a log of this somewhere that validates that this is really what happened and how or there is enough log information to know that this claim is absolute and total crap.

Now don't get me wrong - reporters get things from "secret places" all the time.  But if this narrative on how The Times got their hands on the data is true, then the implications in terms of Goldman's IT security is stunning, and not in a good way either.