(Bloomberg) -- One collects sneakers and estimates she has 145 pairs. Another retired from the New York City Transit Authority, where she was a train inspector. A special ed teacher said she’s a big Grey’s Anatomy fan who’s holding on “to the end.”

The jury chosen Thursday for the trial of Archegos Capital Management founder Bill Hwang and Chief Financial Officer Patrick Halligan on fraud, racketeering conspiracy and market manipulation charges presents a typically diverse cross-section of New Yorkers. Few have financial backgrounds, though, and the judge has said the trial will be “Finance 101” for many of them. 

Opening arguments are set to begin Monday in federal court in Manhattan. 

One of the jurors, now retired, did previously work as a backup specialist clerk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Another works as a software engineer at Bank of America. 

The 12 jurors and six alternates emerged from a larger pool of more than 100 people that was steadily winnowed down over two days by US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein. During the selection process, potential jurors were asked whether they knew any of the people involved in the case or had any associations with institutions that are expected to come up during the trial, such as Archegos’ bank counterparties. 

Read more: Criminal Case Against Archegos’s Bill Hwang Explained: QuickTake

Some jury candidates who had Wall Street ties were excused during this period. These included an examiner for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who specializes in operational and information technology risk and whose portfolio includes Citigroup Inc. and Credit Suisse Group AG. 

Another man who worked in private equity said he had a hedge fund manager friend who lost money being on the opposite of Archegos’ trades. But it was actually the prosecution, not the defense, who asked for the man to be excused after he expressed doubt that Hwang committed a crime.

Though he said he thought he could be impartial, the private equity worker said he agreed with an opinion on the case that he’d read. “The perspective was that, specifically on the market manipulation, that just liking certain stocks and moving the markets is not, in and of itself, market manipulation and that there was no evidence that the defendant, you know, sold out,” he said.

Hwang and Halligan are charged with scheming to manipulate some of Wall Street’s biggest banks into inflating the value of Archegos’ positions to as high as $160 billion before the family office imploded in March 2021. 

The judge joked in April that the case would be an introductory finance course for many jurors. “If you sit through eight weeks of trial, you will be able to go out and manipulate the market,” Hellerstein said.

Prospective jurors for federal trials in Manhattan are chosen at random from a pool of people registered to vote in the borough and the Bronx as well as Westchester, Putnam and Rockland counties. The jury includes:

  • A research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History who enjoys snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking and backpacking.
  • A Parsons School of Design graduate now working as a freelance graphic designer for companies
  • A special education teacher who reads lots of science fiction and historical fiction. She’s also the Grey’s Anatomy fan.
  • A Bank of America software engineer who lives in Harlem and previously worked for Morgan Stanley. During downtime in the jury selection process, he was reading Pachinko, the Min Jin Lee novel about four generations of a Korean family in Japan.
  • An analyst at Deloitte who lives in Manhattan with her parents and previously interned at the New York attorney general’s office.
  • A retired sales trader and former New York Stock Exchange backup specialist clerk who said he “watches a lot of Court TV.”
  • A retired Con Edison worker born in Aruba who served in the military and lives in the Bronx. “I have a lot of spare time,” he told the judge, prompting laughter from the packed courtroom.
  • A professor of molecular pharmacology and neuroscience who lives in Westchester County, loves to ski and is on the board of his coop.
  • A Manhattan native who teaches first grade on the Upper West Side. She loves fiction and regularly reads the New York Times as well as the New Yorker.
  • A former Marine with a computer science degree who plays volleyball and reads Chinese novels online.
  • A retired train inspector for the New York City Transit Authority who likes woodworking and home improvement projects.
  • A Bronx woman with a collection of 145 sneakers. She plans to begin teaching as an adjunct professor of social work in July.

(Updates with more detail on jury selection.)

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