Great piece from the June 2013 issue of Vanity Fair 

The Hunt for Steve Cohen

With arrest after arrest in a massive, seven-year insider-trading investigation, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is getting closer to the biggest fish of them all: Steve Cohen, founder of SAC Capital, the $14 billion hedge fund, who some regard as the most successful stock picker of his time. C.E.O.’s have fallen, lives and companies have been upturned, but Cohen has thus far escaped. Bryan Burrough and Bethany McLean go deep inside Bharara’s probe—and SAC’s org chart—to reveal just how much blood is in Wall Street’s waters.

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Cohen seems determined to ride it all out with sheer bravado. A week after the settlement, news broke that he had paid the casino owner Steve Wynn an astounding $155 million—a record sum for a U.S. collector—to buy Picasso’s Le Rêve (which Wynn had accidentally put his elbow through in 2006). Days after that revelation Cohen paid $60 million for a 10,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom mansion with ocean views, on Further Lane in East Hampton. Taken together, it all had a “Let them eat cake” quality, as if Cohen were waving his billions in the government’s face, daring it take him on.

Their looming showdown draws on themes of money, privilege, and class that define the era. Steve Cohen isn’t just another hedge-fund billionaire; he is the hedge-fund billionaire. He doesn’t live in just another Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion; he lives in the largest of them all, complete with its own two-hole golf course and Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog sculpture adorning the driveway. Inside, the walls are festooned with paintings from his fabled collection of Impressionist and contemporary art, which includes Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope, hanging just outside his bedroom. Doughy and clerk-like, Cohen is nevertheless the Gatsby of our age, a middle-class kid from Long Island who caught the gambling bug fleecing his high-school pals in all-night poker games. Today he tosses around his winnings in transparent attempts to join the social elite that’s never quite accepted him and his 48-year-old Puerto Rican second wife, Alex, whom he met through a dating service.