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Mr. Ruehle, You Are A Free Man - A Broadcom Saga: My Fight for Justice
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About Mr. Ruehle, You Are A Free Man - A Broadcom
Product description In 2006 a storm hit the corporate world as companies were alleged to have "backdated" stock options to unfairly benefit their executives. Under an obscure accounting guideline this resulted in the companies' financial statements being inaccurate and therefore "fraudulently misleading" to investors. In this very personal story I will describe how I became a target of federal prosecutors because of my role as CFO of Broadcom Corporation. Using courtroom testimony I will demonstrate how overzealous prosecutors intimidated innocent current and former Broadcom employees into providing statements and testimony that was favorable to the prosecutors' version of events. Using transcripts from my trial I will take the reader through the unprecedented twists and turns that left the most experienced attorneys in amazement. The story has a happy ending. The wise and courageous judge in the case, the Honorable Cormac J. Carney, issued a ruling before the case was to go to the jury. He said, "To submit this case to the jury would make a mockery of Mr. Ruehle's constitutional right to compulsory process and a fair trial." He then turned to me and said, "Mr. Ruehle, you are a free man." From Kirkus Reviews Once the chief financial officer of the tech firm Broadcom, Ruehle faced potential sentencing of more than 350 years in prison after federal prosecutors in Southern California charged him with multiple felonies for alleged corporate malfeasance. Here, he tells his side of the story. Corporate executives are hardly sympathetic figures these days. But for Ruehle, the negative spotlight and resultant court case against him amounted to a “politically motivated, media-driven backdating frenzy.” He gives a credible account of his multiyear ordeal, which ultimately ended in December 2009 when a judge declared Ruehle’s innocence and admonished the government for overzealousness. Along with providing realistic glimpses inside the corporate world (“Staff meetings—a new level of agony”), the book could serve as a useful primer for budding legal eagles in the practice of law versus the theory of law. Government lawyers strong-armed potential witnesses into lying for them by holding potential prosecutions and prison terms over their heads; potential defense witnesses were discouraged or “frozen” with similar tactics. “A criminal trial is very much like a war,” Ruehle writes, and he lucidly documents his own legal battles, as his high-priced defense team sifted through 6 million pages of evidence in order to “pry the truth” out of prosecution witnesses during cross-examinations “like an oral surgeon extracting a tooth.” Besides providing observations on good and bad lawyering, the book also offers a simple but useful lesson for these tech-dependent times: “Always be extra careful when writing e-mails.” Although Ruehle gives a clear, convincing account of courtroom tactics and strategies, he’s weak on the human aspects of the trial; most of the leading characters come across as colorless. Even a dab of physical description would have illuminated this chronicle a bit more. Also, the first chapter, which gives a brief history of Broadcom and an explanation of stock options, feels tacked on; it doesn’t cleanly segue into the rest of the book. Still, Ruehle offers an instructive, remarkably evenhanded account of “how overwhelming it could be to fight the federal government.” An effective indictment of governmental abuse of power written by an unlikely but excellent source. About the Author A graduate of Allegheny College and Harvard Business School, Bill Ruehle has spent most of his career in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley and in Southern California. The highlights of his career were his Chief Financial Officer (CFO) roles at SynOptics/Bay Networks and at Broadcom. He joined both companies when they were small privately-owned entities and helped guide both to public companies with multi-billion dollar revenue levels and market cap.
