Proof that South Asians have made it in the US? Wall Street indictments!

Raj Raratnam, a Sri Lankan-born hedge fund tycoon, is found guilty of securities fraud, and faces up to almost twenty years in prison.  The only real question that the jury had was whether Raj was smart or stupid.

Stupid?

"He was very stupid. That was the sad part. He traded for less money than he already had. If you’re going to steal, steal big."

Or smart?

He was a “chameleon” who “could adapt to whatever personality to get whatever he wanted..."

"He knew how to pick his victims. He knew who was weak and who was crooked. It’s better to have weak and crooked people feeding you information."

But the jurors went meticulously though every detail to make sure they didn't send an innocent man to prison.

Tied to this Sri Lankan are a bunch of other characters as well, many with roots in the Subcontinent.  Including Rajat Gupta, who headed McKinsey to newer heights, before being termed out:

According to the SEC, it was on the evening of June 10, 2008, that Gupta, in "a flurry" of phone conversations with Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, allegedly divulged Goldman Sachs's still secret second-quarter earnings.
In early March, the SEC stunned global business circles when it filed a civil administrative proceeding against Gupta, accusing him of leaking information from confidential boardroom discussions held by Goldman and Procter & Gamble to Rajaratnam—accusations Gary P. Naftalis, Gupta's attorney, calls "baseless." Gupta has not been criminally charged, but for seven weeks this spring, during Rajaratnam's sensational insider-trading trial, hardly a day passed when Gupta's name was not mentioned. Although federal prosecutors called him an unindicted "co-conspirator," he never appeared at the trial. But jurors heard his voice, caught on an FBI wiretap, resonating through the courtroom, saw his face in a photograph beamed onto a large video screen, and listened as his professional and personal lives were dissected by federal witnesses. While Rajaratnam is alleged by the SEC to have made more than $17 million from Gupta's information, what Gupta himself might have earned is less clear.
Gupta has been removed from the prominent corporate and philanthropic boards on which he once served and is shunned by business leaders who were once his friends. His spectacular fall from grace has left the world's leading companies shocked and mystified. Rajaratnam's conviction on 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy on May 11 closes a central chapter in the story

There is more to this "illustrious" list mentioned in the same story, likeVictor Menezes: former Citigroup vice-chairman, and Anil Kumar: of McKinsey and Mindspirit, and Parag Saxena.

Why would Rajat Gupta go down this path?

his quest to amass great wealth led him to lapses in judgment, says Bala Balachandran, dean of the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai, India, and a friend for almost three decades.
“He wanted a billionaire’s life and the question for him was how could he become a billionaire in a short time,” Balachandran says.  ...
Gupta’s former Harvard dorm mate Carberry says he’s dumbfounded as to what went wrong with his friend.
“If the SEC charges are true, something happened to Rajat,” he says. “The Rajat I knew at business school was of the highest integrity. The Rajat I’ve heard on wiretapped conversations isn’t the person I knew.”

We have made it, baby!!!  Next stop: the White House, because we now know how to say "I am not a crook."