When you’re desperate to make a good deal, breakthroughs can come at unexpected times and places. Consider what happened when Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Elias was looking through a sheaf of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. documents while taking care of his newborn son in 2012. At the time, directed by President Barack Obama, the federal government was launching expanded probes into the role of the largest U.S. banks in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. But the investigations got off to a slow start, with officials finding little of the evidence they would need to win a large fraud case, write Andrew Grossman, Emily Glazer, and Christina Rexrode in a December Wall Street Journal article.