[joe_the_user]

Because the activities of Wall Street and financial industry operate in a "gray area". They game the system "by the rules" (or at least by the "exceptions").

When Goldman Sachs creates a fund of stocks at the direction of a private investors who intends to short these stocks, determining the illegality is a more difficult problem (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...).

The crime of this guy seems to be taking a larger cut of the money going through his hands than he claimed. If he was enough of a "rain maker", he might conceivably have openly demanded the money that he was skimming and then there would be no crime. But he either wasn't a big enough "fish" or simply a sociopath who couldn't help lying and stealing even when he was making bank.

I think a number of folks argue that the most successful businesspeople "surf the edge" between normalcy and sociopathy. I would add that when the business environment is closer to "bubble-dom", the true sociopaths can rise but when the "tide goes out", these characters go to jail - we saw that in the last two crashes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

And, yes, "because Wall Streets runs the country" is fine simplification of the situation too...