US authorities Tuesday charged a clutch of hotshot young traders connected to Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch over what they described as one of the biggest insider trading cases ever uncovered.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said the "brazen" trading scheme - which ran the gamut of topless dancers, covert information and stolen magazines - netted the individuals at least 6.7 million dollars.
The top US market regulator said the masterminds were Eugene Plotkin, 26, a research analyst in the fixed income division of Goldman Sachs, and David Pajcin, a 29-year-old former employee of the premier bank.
Plotkin and Pajcin persuaded a mergers and acquisitions analyst at Merrill Lynch, Stanislav Shpigelman, 23, to provide tips on upcoming mergers in return for a share of the trading profits, the SEC alleged.
It said they also recruited two other young men to obtain jobs at a printing plant in Wisconsin to steal advance copies of BusinessWeek magazine, and then traded in companies discussed favourably by the influential publication.
"Plotkin and Pajcin also contemplated various schemes involving exotic dancers, including having them garner information from bankers while dancing, and using them to induce investment bankers to provide Plotkin and Pajcin with information," the SEC further alleged in a statement.
Mark Schoenfeld, director of the SEC's north-east regional office, said: "This fraud is one of the most widespread, varied and premeditated insider trading rings we have ever prosecuted.
"The defendants sought out individuals working in our nation's leading financial institutions hoping to get them to betray their employer, their clients and the investing public," he said.
Shpigelman was also charged with insider trading after an investigation that began in early 2005 over suspicious trades in German sportswear maker Adidas just before it acquired smaller US rival Reebok.
Prosecutors said Shpigelman leaked confidential information to Plotkin and Pajcin concerning at least six mergers or acquisitions on which Merrill Lynch was working.
Also arrested were Nickolaus Shuster and Juan Renteria, who worked at the Quad Graphics Printing Plant in Hartford, Wisconsin.
Additional charges were filed against relatives and associates of Plotkin and Pajcin living in the United States, Croatia and Germany.
"We will move quickly and aggressively to prosecute cases such as this where fraudsters try to steal market-moving information from our premier financial institutions," said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the SEC's enforcement division.