UD used to cover insider trading stories, especially when the insiders also sat on university boards of trustees. Yeshiva University – Land o’ Madoff – was the most brazen offender – not only with insider trading, but with pretty much any other form of malfeasance available to it.
And now here’s a really massive insider trading story featuring Yeshiva grads – and other orthodox and less orthodox members of UD’s tribe – stealing confidential M and A information from all over town and selling it.
One wee example of how it went down:
[A cooperating witness] was staffed on the Enstar deal because his firm was advising Sixth Street on its roughly $5 billion acquisition of Enstar. He shared news of the deal with his former [college] classmates, who told him a few days later they had purchased between $2 million and $3 million in Enstar shares. After the deal was announced, [the witness] was allegedly due a $30,000 kickback…
More broadly:
[The ringleaders] [who met at UD’s George’s Washington University! Maybe she explained The Confidence Man to them and got the ball rolling] recruited attorneys with access to confidential information at elite firms, paid them kickbacks of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, and then fed those tips through a layered network of traders and middlemen who placed trades ahead of nearly 30 public merger announcements, using burner phones, encrypted apps, and coded language, including referring to tips as airline “flights” and upcoming deal announcements as dates when a “rabbi” was scheduled for surgery. The whole thing generated tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits and is one of the largest insider trading cases charged in years.
If you’re an antisemite looking for your very own actual Jewish conspiracy, you’ve come to the right place! The godly even used pious rabbinical language to encode their nefarious texts… which they clearly figured were securely encrypted but gevalt.
All their yiddishisms now appear on the DOJ website.
As for why detection took so long … Yeshiva’s BOT treasurer (Bernie, that is) had a good long run too before they caught him. I’m sure there are people in this current case, like Harry Markopolos in regard to Madoff, who’ve been telling anyone who will listen about the insider conspiracy, but eh. American capitalism’s riding high at the moment. Very little interest in falling off the horse.