Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

Months passed. Nothing happened. If anyone at the SEC shared her alarm about Stanford, they did an extremely good job of hiding it from her. Leyla did hear from one person—her lawyer, who told her that Stanford had contacted him to say it was open to a settlement. For a compromise sum—$50,000, he suggested—she could retain her license and move on. Pride battered, savings depleted, Leyla took out a loan and reluctantly wired over a check. Four years later, in January 2009, she finally did hear from the SEC, when an investigator called her cell phone. “He said, ‘I want to talk to you about a prior employer,’” Leyla recalled. “I said, ‘Let me guess who—Stanford?’ He just laughed.” Leyla wasn’t laughing. “I wanted to scream,” she told me, “at everyone.”