In this week’s issue, Patrick Radden Keefe writes about Jordan Thomas, a lawyer who has made millions of dollars representing whistle-blowers who expose crimes on Wall Street. Before going into private practice, Thomas helped create a program at the Securities and Exchange Commission that pays whistle-blowers—either from inside or outside a company—bounties of as much as thirty per cent of the fines generated by a successful action. Keefe looks closely at one such outsider case, a “citizen petition” filed by Thomas on behalf of two scientists alleging “a series of anomalies” in research published by Cassava Sciences, a company pursuing a new Alzheimer’s drug. In this case, however, there was an added wrinkle: both of Thomas’s clients had shorted Cassava’s stock, betting against the company. This morning, I spoke with Keefe about his dive into the world of whistle-blowing. What was your sense of the risks and motivations associated with whistle-blowing coming into this story? For my reporting on the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, I spent all this time interviewing people who worked there, and what was striking was that you had criminal misconduct happening, but there weren’t whistle-blowers. In some cases, retaliation was a fear. But, at Purdue, there was a sense that we’re all family, and you don’t want to betray the tribe by reporting to anyone on the outside. I think that’s something you see at other companies as well—that blowing the whistle is a form of betrayal of one’s colleagues. Right. For all the people who view whistle-blowers as brave and heroic, others might see them as skulking figures in the shadows. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years looking into the world of intelligence. The more I got to know Jordan Thomas and understand his practice, the more it seemed akin to what a C.I.A. officer does. You’re sort of in the business of betrayal. You’re trying to persuade people to clandestinely betray the people they work with. To some people, there is something unsettling about knowing that someone like Thomas is making millions of dollars doing this work. Or something suspicious about the idea that you could do right and do well. I ended up feeling that you do need to incentivize this kind of whistle-blowing, and also to create a mechanism where people know whom to call and how to report this stuff. And it seems like motivations get even more complicated when whistle-blowers are coming from outside a company? It’s not that they face no risk, but the risks are, to my mind, usually going to be smaller. It turns out that forty per cent of the awards that the S.E.C. has made go to people on the outside. I talked to a lot of people about this, and I think the argument that the architects of the program would make is, they don’t want to start drawing lines about what categories of people they reward. They want the tips. In the end, either the allegations that someone is making are true or they aren’t. As you write, Cassava has both ardent defenders and critics. What’s been the response since the piece was published? What has been fascinating is the passion that people feel on both sides. You have a lot of scientists who look at the company’s research and say, “This doesn’t add up.” They raise questions and in some cases are offended by what they regard as methodical shortcomings in the published scientific work associated with the drug. And then, on the other hand, you have a lot of equally passionate people who hold the stock or have hope that this is the most promising potential solution when it comes to Alzheimer’s. It’s been interesting to watch the fights that the piece has set off on social media. But I prefer to watch rather than enter the fray myself. Read “Jordan Thomas’s Army of Whistle-Blowers” here. | 
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