Jay McInerney - The rich and powerful in handcuffs: one of the great sights of New York

The timing was weird. I'd just returned to New York from Paris, where I'd heard a fair amount of discussion in Montparnasse and elsewhere about the next elections, and about the likelihood that someone named Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be the Socialist candidate, and quite possibly the next president. And here he was in my town, being paraded in handcuffs in front of the cameras.

The image apparently inspired a fair amount of indignation, and even outrage, in certain quarters in Europe. New Yorkers, however, are fairly inured to seeing rich and powerful men in handcuffs. Certainly it's been a major source of entertainment since I arrived here back in 1980. There's something deeply satisfying in the apparent incongruity of a well-cut business suit and handcuffs.

Back in the 1980s, during one of Wall Street's earlier bursts of irrational exuberance and criminal excess, then prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani made a specialty of cuffing white-collar criminals and presenting them for the cameras. Giuliani was criticised by some people for this behaviour, especially after some of the accused were acquitted, but the general public enjoyed seeing stockbrokers and investment bankers treated in the same fashion as other putative thieves.

More recently we saw Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire head of the Galleon fund, being taken from FBI headquarters in New York after his conviction on insider-trading charges. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to criticism of the so-called perp walk, defended the practice: "The public can see the alleged perpetrators," he said. "I think it is humiliating," he added. "But if you don't want to do the perp walk, don't do the crime." The mayor seems to have forgotten about the presumption of innocence, but his statement probably reflects the attitude of his constituents pretty accurately. New York's a tough place. Deal with it...

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@'The Independent'