Insider trading case as much Sopranos as Wall Street

By Steve Eder

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Zvi Goffer could have passed for Tony Soprano when he warned confederates in his alleged insider-trading ring that "someone's going to jail."

Don't be too obvious about making big money, he said in a cell phone conversation intercepted by investigators in February 2008.

"Someone's going to jail, going directly to jail, so don't let it be you, OK?" Goffer said, according to a criminal complaint. "That's a ticket right to the (expletive) Big House."

According to federal prosecutors, Goffer was the boss of an insider trading operation that paid sources for non-public information. He and 13 others were charged on Thursday as the scandal centered on Goffer's former employer, hedge fund Galleon Group, widened dramatically.

A criminal complaint naming Goffer, head of the trading firm Incremental Capital, and his alleged accomplices reads like a script for TV dramas like "The Wire" or "The Sopranos," in which drug and Mafia criminals try to stay one step ahead of the law.

Federal prosecutor Preet Bharara told a news conference that investigators resorted to wire taps and other methods "traditionally reserved for the mob and narcotics traffickers" when the accused began "taking a page from the drug dealers' playbook (and) deliberately used anonymous, hard-to-trace, pre-paid cellphones in order to avoid detection."

Calls recorded by law enforcement officials were littered with nicknames like "the Greek" and "the Rat," and even jokes about getting information from a guy fixing a pothole. Current and past targets were code-named the "Hilton hit" and the "Apple."

There was talk about "cash lying around," and investigators observed what they believed were hand-offs of white bags and cases packed with cash.