I waited a long time to talk to someone like James Kidney.

For years I tried to find anyone at the Securities and Exchange Commission who would speak candidly about the agency’s enforcement efforts. But even after lawyers left the SEC, usually for big law firms, they almost never wanted to talk to me. Or else they’d give me vague platitudes about what a good job the SEC was doing. I’ve been doing this long enough to know I wasn’t getting the full story.