Jordan A. Thomas, perhaps the foremost attorney representing S.E.C. whistle-blowers, has only recently started speaking openly about his own former life and his own secrets—including the fact that Jordan Thomas is not his real name.
“None of my friends know,” the JPMorgan Chase whistle-blower, who received a thirteen-million-dollar award from the S.E.C., told me. “We’re just in a plausible-deniability situation where, if I don’t drive around Manhattan in a Ferrari, I can keep a low profile.” He added, “Everyone says it’s super hard to keep a secret. It’s not. When someone pays you thirteen million dollars, it’s really not.”
One reason for this urgency is the sheer abundance of corporate malfeasance. After Thomas established his whistle-blowing practice, at the law firm Labaton Sucharow, he commissioned an anonymous survey of finance professionals, conducted by the University of Notre Dame.
When Thomas talks about his job, he occasionally seems like a C.I.A. officer whose mission is the surreptitious recruitment and handling of well-placed insiders willing to betray their bosses. He relishes the intrigue of the accompanying tradecraft, describing cases in which his clients assumed generic pseudonyms—Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones—or disguised their voices with a scrambler when making phone calls. Thomas once conducted a sub-rosa interview with a client in an empty church.
When I met Thomas, he was in a fight with the S.E.C. In 2020, the Trump Administration had altered the rules of the whistle-blower program in a way that could limit the size of awards. Thomas was incensed: the “primary beneficiary,” he pointed out, would obviously be Wall Street, because high-level people would be discouraged from reporting significant wrongdoing. He blamed the shift on Jay Clayton, Trump’s S.E.C.
One day, Thomas arranged a phone call for me with a woman who is currently working with the government to investigate misconduct at a large public company . “Anytime you talk about a female whistle-blower it is potentially identifying, because there are so few of them,” he said. In his experience, women are less likely to expose wrongdoing than men, but they can be the best whistle-blowers, because they tend to be more scrupulous about documentation.
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