14 more charged in insider trading

NEW YORK (AP) | Two lawyers and Wall Street professionals were among 14 people charged Thursday in a widening $53 million insider trading case that has snared one of America’s richest men and accused white-collar suspects of using the cover-up tactics of drug dealers.

The actions raise to 20 the number of people who have been charged in the case first disclosed last month with the arrests of Galleon Group founder and hedge-fund operator Raj Rajaratnam and five others.

At the time, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara called the first arrests “a wake-up call for Wall Street.”

“Today the alarm bells have only grown louder,” he said at a news conference Thursday.

Mr. Bharara said the defendants borrowed a “page from the drug dealer’s playbook” by using anonymous hard-to-trace prepaid cell phones to dodge detection by law enforcement. He said they also discussed falsifying company files to make it appear trades weren’t based on secrets.

“When sophisticated business people begin to adopt the methods of common criminals, we have no choice but to treat them as such,” he said.

Two tactics that prosecutors routinely use in drug cases - confidential informants and court-authorized wiretaps of phones - were used in the insider trading probe on a scale wider than ever before.

The complaints also described FBI agents trailing suspects as they do in drug cases to spot them passing money between one another. Court papers said agents observed cash appearing to be delivered in “an item that appeared to be approximately the size of a VHS tape.”

Mr. Bharara said that according to prosecutors, total profits were $40 million while the Securities and Exchange Commission raised the total to $53 million, saying it includes millions in profits not described in the criminal complaints. He said he knew people would ask whether the insider trading case was the tip of the iceberg of illicit trading on Wall Street.

“We don’t have an answer to that, but we aim to find out,” he said.

Mr. Bharara said that eight people were arrested Thursday on securities fraud charges and that five others have already pleaded guilty and are cooperating. Another person is still at large, he said.

@$: At a bail hearing for Mr. Rajaratnam on Thursday, defense attorney John Dowd criticized the government’s case, saying it was “not as overwhelming as the government would like to believe.”