“With his federal trial for alleged obstruction of justice to begin Monday, Frank Quattrone will be the most powerful Wall Street financier to face a judge and jury on criminal charges in more than a generation,” writes Randall Smith in today’s Wall Street Journal.

“Few executives represent the stock-market bubble more than Mr. Quattrone, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential investment bankers during the technology-stock boom of the 1990s. So while the trial hinges narrowly on whether the former Credit Suisse First Boston banker instructed his staff to destroy documents amid a regulatory probe of allocations of hot new stock offerings, its backdrop includes the excesses of the tech-stock bubble itself.”

“During that era, bankers launched hundreds of young and untested companies into the public markets, some of them earning tens of millions personally while many of the companies later failed. At the height of the bubble, Mr. Quattrone helped CSFB lead more tech-stock IPOs than any other firm on Wall Street. In addition to arguing his innocence at the trial, Mr. Quattrone’s team is also expected to emphasize that companies his team took public have generated $420 billion in sales and 140,000 jobs.”

“The biggest names of the 1980s insider-trading scandals, such as Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky and Martin Siegel, avoided trials via criminal plea bargains. Such agreements allow someone facing a criminal accusation to negotiate a guilty plea to specific charges, avoiding the risk of conviction for more serious crimes, often in exchange for testimony against others. Even Michael Milken, who agreed to plead guilty to six felonies in 1990, appeared in court only for a lengthy sentencing hearing.”

“Mr. Quattrone, age 47, who ran the technology banking business at CSFB, a unit of Credit Suisse Group, ‘was a very senior officer at a very large, prominent firm. For a serious Wall Street player to face a criminal trial, you really have to go back quite a long time,’ said Roy Smith, a professor of finance at the New York University business school.”

” ‘Most of the relatively senior prominent people charged have either cut plea agreements or otherwise settled their cases,’ said William McLucas, a partner at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering and former head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Indeed, defense lawyers at the time complained that prosecutors used the threat of stiff forfeitures under a racketeering law to pressure defendants into such settlements.”

“Unlike many of the 1980s defendants, Mr. Quattrone isn’t being accused of a ‘financial crime’ in which he profited improperly from his business.”

“The Justice Department’s U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, James Comey, in April accused Mr. Quattrone of obstruction of justice and witness tampering after a December 2000 e-mail came to light in which Mr. Quattrone resent to his entire department a subordinate’s advice to ‘clean up those files.’ At the time of the e-mail, regulators had issued subpoenas for information about the firm’s allocation of hot initial public offerings.”

“A central issue at the trial will be whether Mr. Quattrone realized that documents being sought in the IPO probe might be destroyed as a result of his e-mail. Though he had received a briefing on the case just two days before forwarding the e-mail, his lawyers are expected to argue that his e-mail referred to investment-banking documents and not those kept by traders and capital-markets executives who oversaw IPOs.”

“CSFB, without admitting or denying wrongdoing, paid $100 million to settle charges arising from that probe by the SEC and the National Association of Securities Dealers that it obtained excessive commissions from about 100 hedge funds in exchange for IPOs, thus improperly sharing in the IPO profits. The NASD also later suspended four brokers who worked with Mr. Quattrone for failure to cooperate in the probe.”