PALO ALTO, Calif. (CNN/Money) - When it comes to conflicts of interest on Wall Street, the apparent unraveling of investment banker Frank Quattrone represents far more than an incremental development.

It's actually the beginning of the end of these scandal-ridden times. That's because Quattrone is bigger than Blodget. And he's bigger than Grubman. Symbolically, he's the big fish, as big to this era's story as Michael Milken was to his.

After all that's been written about him, Credit Suisse First Boston's Quattrone remains relatively unknown. But the head of CSFB's tech banking practice is the ultimate prize for regulators intent on punishing somebody -- anybody -- for all the sins of Internet age.

Quattrone reportedly faces an obstruction of justice probe. The issue is whether he knew of federal investigations into CSFB's involvement in tech IPOs that had crashed in value when in late 2000 he sent an e-mail urging the destruction of certain records. ("I did nothing wrong," Quattrone said in a statement, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

That CSFB placed Quattrone on paid administrative leave Monday, according to reports in the Journal, means investors finally might be able to breathe a sigh of relief. Only after the powers that be declare this scandalous era over can investors move on.

"Getting" Quattrone would allow that declaration to be made.

It's useful to take a step back and understand who Quattrone is and why he's so important. In the early 1990s Quattrone was a relatively unimportant Morgan Stanley banker based in California.

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Unimportant because his overlords in New York weren't impressed with the smallish technology companies that were so fascinating him.

Yet Quattrone was a true believer, and when technology started soaring in the mid-1990s, he started to remind New York that he'd been right all along. Because Morgan Stanley wouldn't let him call his own shots, he and some partners bolted to Deutsche Morgan Grenfell in 1996. There they led Amazon.com's IPO, though they left two years later for CSFB over, waddya know, control issues.

If Quattrone ends up losing his job, being sanctioned by regulators or even going to jail, it ultimately will be precisely because he ended up with too much control. He oversaw both banking and research, a rare occurrence on Wall Street. He never saw anything wrong with the situation, arguing that his analysts were independent -- they just happened to report to him.

Now the critics say he was overseeing a research department that wasn't independent and was steering lucrative IPOs to friends and other executives who would then award banking business to CSFB.

(For an exhaustive account of Quattrone's style, read the major article in Fortune that explained it to the world.)

A veteran Silicon Valley type I know commented to me the other day, "Well, nobody really much liked Frank, right?"

Of course, that's what happens when your company hangs you out to dry. As I remembered it, I told him, "Frank always had lots of fans." He cultivated a reputation as a guy from humble origins who was committed to his family, didn't dress like a fancy-pants banker and would do anything for his clients.

I interviewed Quattrone in Palo Alto in February, 2001, about two months after he allegedly wrote the e-mail CSFB is citing now in which he told employees they'd need to "clean up" their e-mail folders. I asked him how a certain IPO that was scheduled to be offered soon and that I knew CSFB was underwriting was expected to do. "I don't know," he replied. "You'd have to ask capital markets," meaning CSFB's desk that handles securities offerings.

Frank Quattrone didn't personally have his finger on the pulse of a client's offering? Impossible. He must have known even then how ugly the road ahead might become.

Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.

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