A small thriller, written large...

"TRADING SECRETS" (U.S., U.K.)
"WALL STREET" (FR.)

This is the true story of how 30-something Foster Winans, in the heady days of the early 1980s a well-regarded columnist for The Wall Street Journal, allowed himself to be seduced by a modern-day Svengali in the form of a young, charismatic stockbroker whose blue-blood lifestyle masked a bold impostor and two-handed larceny. A similar storyline is the backbone a year later in Oliver Stone's original film "Wall Street," starring Michael Douglas as an Ivan Boesky stand-in ("greed is good") and Martin Sheen as Bud Fox, the young, ambitious sycophant who'll do just about anything to be accepted.

The broker in Winans' case, Peter Brant, was no Ivan Boesky, but he proved to be the character that makes this story vibrate with authenticity: an attractive, mysterious, driven young man who, like Jay Gatsby of Fitzgerald's seminal novel, drifted cooly out of nowhere and bought a palace on Long Island Sound.

All was not as it seemed.

The unraveling, as told in "Trading Secrets," attracted author Gore Vidal who offered to pen the screenplay. But Stone got there first with a complex, era-defining drama that has gathered a large cult following in the fifteen years since it was first released–just months after the huge stock market crash of October, 1987.

Winans and Brant were indicted in 1984. Winans admitted his role but fought his case on legal grounds all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court with the backing of First Amendment and Wall Street interest groups.

Brant, facing additional, unrelated charges that he stole millions from client accounts, pleaded guilty and served eight months, on weekends.

Winans lost his final appeal in a rare Supreme Court deadlock in November 1987. He served nine months (no days off) in federal minimum security prisons including seven months at Danbury, CT, where he wrote letters and petitions for inmates. Since 1988, Danbury has been one of only two minimum-security federal prisons for women. Danbury has hosted luminaries as diverse as New York hotel queen and tax cheat Leona Helmsley and cult leader/businessman Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

Who will be next?