A former Goldman employee's long, strange legal odyssey

New York

BACK in early July 2009, the Dow Jones industrial average stood at 8,280, Donald Trump had recently crowned the comedian Joan Rivers as that season's winner of his popular realty television show, Celebrity Apprentice, and a phenomenon known as high-frequency trading was just hitting Wall Street's mainstream. A smaller headline was the arrest of Sergey Aleynikov on July 3 for stealing confidential source code from Goldman Sachs, where he had worked as a programmer.

The FBI, which made the arrest, said he was going to use the code to help set up a high-frequency trading platform at a new employer.

Since then, things have certainly changed, for the markets and Mr Trump. But Aleynikov remains trapped in the legal system as he continues to face charges in a s…