Imagine The Sopranos, The Wire and Gordon Gekko’s Wall Street all rolled into one. You don’t have to: the FBI has just broken one of the largest-ever insider dealing rings in Wall Street. It wire-tapped its way into a seedy world of secret tips, kickbacks and disposable, pre-paid mobile phones. A network including staff of New York law firms, hedge funds and share-trading companies, with links extending to top Plcs, investment banks and consultancies has been revealed. Five people have pleaded guilty, while others maintain their innocence.
The reputation of the financial markets is already at rock bottom. The crash, the bailouts and the extravagant bonuses have convinced ordinary Americans as much as us ordinary Brits that morality and fair play are not values much found in the financial markets. And now there is this.
The alleged ringleader is a thirtysomething called Zvi Goffer – or “Octopussy” – a nickname earned because his tentacles gathering scraps of illicit but profitable information seemed to extend everywhere. But if he had not spent eight months working at the $6bn Galleon hedge fund, whose founder and CEO, billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, happened to be under a wire-tap (and has been subsequently charged for being central to a $20m trading ring), the FBI would never have picked up his network. In good police work, one lead tends to generate another.
The wire-taps suggest Goffer as the spider at the centre of the web. In one exchange, a lawyer called Jason Goldfarb tells him that the “boys” – the other members of the syndicate – were “nervous nellies”, but were “hungry” because their cash was running out: “They needed to replenish” and: “That’s what we are going to do.” It is straight from a script from The Sopranos, except that these are white-collar professionals at the heart of Wall Street.
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