The law clerk stole sensitive client information and passed it on to a broker friend who disposed of the notes by chewing them.
A former law clerk at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett has been sentenced to almost four years in jail for stealing sensitive client information in an insider trading scheme.
Steven Metro, formerly managing law clerk at the BigLaw firm in New York, has been given a 46-month jail term by U.S. District Judge Michael Shipp in Trenton, New Jersey.
Metro, 42, pleaded guilty last November to stealing information about transactions including mergers and acquisitions among clients of the law firm.
Metro admitted that the insider trading scheme ran from 2009 to 2013. When he had new information from scouring his law firm’s computer network, he would meet Frank Tamayo at bars and coffee shops in midtown Manhattan.
Tamayo, a friend of Metro’s from law school, would then pass on the information to Vladimir Eydelman under the main clock at Grand Central Station.
Tamayo, who was then working as a mortgage broker, would show Eydelman, who was a Morgan Stanley stockbroker at the time, ticker symbols of the firms tipped by Metro.
When Eydelman finished memorising the information, Tamayo, 42, would chew the napkins or post it notes that contain the ticker symbols.
The 5-year insider trading scheme made $5.6m in profit, prosecutors said, but most went to Eydelman. Prosecutors said Metro pocketed only $168,000 from the scheme.
Federal guidelines recommend a sentence of 57 to 71 months in prison for Metro’s charges.
Tamayo and Eydelman are due to be sentenced by judge Shipp on 21 and 22 September, respectively. Both have also pleaded guilty.
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Morgan Stanley have not been accused of any crime related to the scheme.
