I think it's probably along the lines of: Before your malfeasance is found out and punished, you're a rockstar. Some rockstars are rockstars, and some are yet t

I think it's probably along the lines of: Before your malfeasance is found out and punished, you're a rockstar. Some rockstars are rockstars, and some are yet to be caught criminals. You won't always know beforehand. And in a story like this that covers years of time it's not that unusual to describe the person as how they're perceived at the time in points of the story. It gives you a sense of the journey and how far they've fallen. "Crook in jail" doesn't carry quite the same gravitas as "wealthy banker on top of the world, definitely one of the 1%, now fucking fucked". If anything it's clickbait only because it suggests the inevitable consequences will be serious. But who's betting for pretty weak prison sentence and he'll still be a multi-millionaire at the end of it all?