Gordon Gekko is cooperating with the F.B.I.
No, there’s not another big-budget Oliver Stone follow-up to “Wall Street” in the works. Instead, Michael Douglas, who played the financier in the 1987 movie and the sequel, is now starring in a straight-to-television video for the Federal Bureau of Investigation meant to root out insider trading — the same crime that brought down the high-flying Mr. Gekko.
A one-minute spot that points out that illicit trading is, in fact, illegal might not seem a priority. But the new video — now showing on CNBC and Bloomberg Television — is part of the government’s broader initiative aimed at drawing cooperating witnesses and tipsters from Wall Street.
For years, insider trading was not a top focus at the bureau, so would-be informants might not have known where to turn, the thinking went. Now that the crime is front-and-center for securities investigators, the video is part reminder, part plea for those who have seen something illegal to say something.
“The movie was fiction, but the problem is real,” Mr. Douglas, sans the slicked-back hair that his character sported, says in the announcement, which was unveiled on Monday. “If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.”
Federal Bureau of InvestigationMichael Douglas in a scene from “Wall Street” embedded in a new public service announcement.The video, shot last November in the Trump Hotel in Manhattan, is also an effort to raise the F.B.I.’s public profile. Or, as David A. Chaves, a supervisor and special agent, said on Monday, “It’s important for us to have the F.B.I. brand out on Wall Street.”
For years, the bureau toiled in relative obscurity as federal prosecutors received praise for winning convictions in white-collar cases. Time magazine recently had Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, on its cover with the headline, “This Man Is Busting Wall Street.”
Yet there are a number of government agencies ferreting out wrongdoing on Wall Street, from the F.B.I. to the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators. To build their cases, investigators are using aggressive tactics once reserved for organized crime and terrorism cases, such as wiretaps and well-placed cooperators.
Add to that arsenal their newest weapon: publicity, compliments of Mr. Douglas.
And, as the F.B.I. noted on Monday, what better spokesman against insider trading than Mr. Gekko, who came to personify Wall Street crime in both the 1980s and in the recent financial crisis with the 2010 sequel, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”
“The more people out there aware of the problem, the more opportunities we have to get tips,” said Richard T. Jacobs, a supervisory special agent at the F.B.I. who helped bring the Galleon Group insider trading case, which resulted in the conviction of the billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
The latest federal operation, an outgrowth of the Galleon investigation, is called Perfect Hedge. It has already yielded 64 arrests and ensnared other big names in the hedge fund world. That effort, F.B.I. agents said Monday, is likely to continue for years to come as the network of sources they have developed multiplies and more tips flow in.
But the intense focus on insider trading has drawn criticism from outsiders, who call it a distraction from more important crackdowns. On the heels of the financial crisis, which crippled the global economy, the government has filed few cases tied to wrongdoing at the major banks and lenders that prompted the upheaval.
The idea to create a public service announcement about insider trading began last year, as the bureau worked to broaden the network of potential tipsters on Wall Street. Without a budget to throw cash at the project, the F.B.I. lined up a free production team and several networks that were willing to show their appeal.
And who might star in such a video? “I thought there was only one person to do it,” said Mr. Chaves, who came up with the idea. Mr. Douglas, he said, is “such a revered man in Hollywood and I think just a wonderful person.”
Mr. Douglas, 67, who two decades ago said Gordon Gekko was the best role he ever had, obliged. The actor, who recently underwent treatment for throat cancer, felt he needed to set the record straight about insider trading, Mr. Chaves said.
In the wake of the popularity of the first “Wall Street,” Mr. Douglas would receive high-fives and handshakes from real-life traders and bankers when he walked the streets of Manhattan. The Wall Streeters loved Mr. Gekko, who declares in the film that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
But the outpouring of love for such a character befuddled Mr. Douglas, who won a best-actor Academy Award for his role in the first Wall Street film.
Mr. Douglas wondered why he was being thanked, according to Mr. Chaves, who quoted him as saying: “I’m a criminal in the movie. Don’t they realize that?”