“Last December, Gary Lynch, the top in-house lawyer at Credit Suisse First Boston, expressed outrage when regulators told him that the big securities firm would have to pay tens of millions of dollars in fines for allegedly misleading investors with faulty stock research. Why should CSFB pay such a steep penalty? Mr. Lynch demanded during a meeting at the New York Stock Exchange, according to people who were there,” writes Charles Gasparino in today’s Wall Street Journal.

” ‘How about this?’ an investigator from the National Association of Securities Dealers answered, handing Mr. Lynch an e-mail written by Frank Quattrone, CSFB’s star investment banker and a leading financier of the late-1990s tech boom. In the Dec. 5, 2000, message, titled, ‘Time to clean up those files,’ Mr. Quattrone reminded his subordinates to follow company policy by discarding certain notes, memos and files.”

“Mr. Lynch waved off the e-mail. ‘This is done every day on Wall Street,’ the attorney said.

“But now the Quattrone e-mail has taken on a new significance. It could add to mounting woes for a troubled CSFB and for the investment banker who has come to personify many of the excesses of the technology bubble.”

“The reason: At the prodding of federal prosecutors, CSFB has turned over to the government a previously undisclosed series of e-mail exchanges between Mr. Quattrone and the firm’s then-general counsel. These messages show that at the time he urged his colleagues to discard documents, Mr. Quattrone already had been told about three investigations of CSFB, including a federal grand-jury probe that had generated a subpoena to the firm, according to people familiar with the situation.”

“The offices of the New York attorney general and Manhattan U.S. attorney are looking into whether Mr. Quattrone and possibly others violated criminal obstruction-of-justice laws that forbid destroying documents during a government investigation, people familiar with the matter say. Investigators have already uncovered evidence that some employees in CSFB’s technology-banking unit discarded documents around the time of the Quattrone e-mail, according to these people. Mr. Quattrone has denied any wrongdoing.”

“CSFB, a unit of Switzerland’s Credit Suisse Group, said in a statement Thursday that it put Mr. Quattrone on administrative leave in early February, when it discovered the Dec. 3, 2000, e-mail exchange between him and the then-general counsel, David Brodsky. The firm added that ‘the discovery of this e-mail exchange raised serious questions both about whether Mr. Quattrone acted appropriately in sending a Dec. 5, 2000, e-mail to employees regarding document retention and about Mr. Quattrone’s response to subsequent questions by the firm about that e-mail.’ “

“Mr. Quattrone, 47 years old, and his 300-person team in Palo Alto, Calif., arranged some of the biggest and richest initial public offerings of the giddy 1990s, including those of Amazon.com Inc., Netscape Communications and VA Linux Systems. In an extraordinary arrangement, he demanded and received from CSFB control of both investment banking and stock research for the high-tech industry. His deal-making muscle allowed him to demand one of the largest paychecks on Wall Street, approaching $100 million a year during the late 1990s.”