In any modern society there is no human drama quite as gripping as a high-profile trial.
It is a hallmark of a functioning civic society that those accused of great crimes face the impartial justice of the state.
They are found guilty or innocent: an appealingly black-and-white choice. Thanks to endless legal films and television shows, the public is also intimately familiar with a courtroom. They follow the arguments of lawyers, debate the merits of witness statements and examine the evidence.
No wonder the Galleon insider trading trial has Wall Street and New York enthralled. It has all the classic elements that make for gripping coverage.
First, the allegations are simple. Insider trading is easy to grasp: you use confidential knowledge to make money illegally on selling and buying stocks, bonds or other financial products.
The accused, the Galleon hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, is alleged to have made millions of dollars with such information. He has denied the charge. Second, there is great evidence to pore over. In the course of their investigation, federal officers secretly recorded lurid phone calls full of foul-mouthed plotting.
Third, there is the wonderful colour that comes when top-class lawyers cross verbal swords. Bloggers and reporters file regular updates and any shred of new information is eagerly awaited.
News organisations even reported the sudden presence of 30 "attractive" Albanian legal students in the public gallery.
"A pair of them canoodled throughout the morning's testimony," gossiped the normally more staid New York Times.
It is all fitting for one of the biggest insider-trading trials to rock Wall Street for a generation. If found guilty, Mr Rajaratnam faces up to 25 years in prison. But it is not just the trial's drama that has Americans so excited.
At a time when many ordinary people are deeply angry at Wall Street and the banking industry, the trial appears to offer some hope of justice and vengeance for the awful ravages of the Great Recession.
Which is where things start to go wrong.
The Galleon trial, whatever the eventual verdict, does not really stand for revenge against the out-of-control greed of those Wall Street masters of the universe who believed they were immune from the rules the rest of us obey.
The Galleon prosecution is, in fact, very small fry. The sums involved in the case amount to some US$45 million (Dh165.2m). That pales against the billions of dollars of public money poured into Wall Street to stave off financial collapse.
Also, it is worth remembering that insider trading was not one of the main causes of the financial collapse: increasingly worthless financial products - backed by highly suspect investment ratings - were.
Yet there has been no trial or even any real sign of criminal investigation into those issues. Instead, Mr Rajaratnam, like the arch fraudster Bernie Madoff before him, appears to fit into an easy-to-understand narrative that lone "bad apples" are the problem with modern finance.
That narrative does not address the idea that serious systemic problems demand real reform to make a better, fairer form of capitalism.
Yet, ironically, the symbolic villain for those who make that other argument and for vast swathes of Main Street America was actually a witness at the Galleon trial.
Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, testified about Mr Rajaratnam's activities. It was a moment of supreme irony.
For many, Goldman has become symbolic of the greed-orientated casino capitalism that lay behind the Great Recession. With its billions of dollars of profits and supercharged bonuses, Goldman's was infamously dubbed a "vampire squid"by Rolling Stone magazine.
Mr Blankfein himself did Goldman's image no favours when he claimed - at the height of the crisis - that the bank was doing "God's work". So the truly fascinating thing to come out of the Galleon trial so far had nothing to do with Mr Rajaratnam.
Instead it was when Mr Blankfein, whose bank is enjoying rude health once more, appeared to repeat his line that Goldman-style banking was for the good of the rest of us. Asked about Goldman's services, he described banks as a "middleman". "It's a service we do for the world," he said, before perhaps realising how bad that sounded and changing the last words to "our clients".
Later, once his testimony was over, Mr Blankfein further stunned observers by going up to Mr Rajaratnam and shaking his hand. It was those little Freudian slips that said a lot about the enduring need for reform on post-crash Wall Street. They certainly were more meaningful than anything that has yet emerged from the Galleon trial itself.
