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Started this discussion. Last reply by Wendy B. Corn Sep 18, 2012. 2 Replies 1 Like
I am just getting back into tennis, but have played on a high intermediate level in the past. Rating is about 3.5. Can play during the week or on the weekends. Any women out there ready to play…Continue
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OR Union Members: Fewer, but Reaching Further
SALEM, Ore. - New national figures say union membership is on the decline across the country. It's part of a national trend that labor leaders say is the result of unemployment overall and anti-union activity in states like Wisconsin and Indiana.
However, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures also point to some changes in union membership that could be beneficial in the long run, according to Oregon AFL-CIO president Tom Chamberlain. Unions are reaching beyond their ranks and into the community, he says, joining with students, activists and minority groups to work on social justice issues.
"When we broaden our base, we become more powerful," he explains. "It's not power that's given to our national leaders, it's community power that allows us to move a grassroots agenda - a workers' agenda, at the local level."
The Oregon AFL-CIO, the state's largest labor organization, also has a young leaders' group, an LGBT group, and black and Latino organizations. The survey says despite the overall drop in union numbers, more Asian, black and Latino workers are joining unions. And it reports that Oregon remains in the 'top 10' states for union membership, with 250,000 workers represented.
Every week, Chamberlain says, his office gets calls from people interested in forming a union in their workplace. He insists there is still some intimidation from employers, although that is illegal. Eroding benefits are workers' most common concern, he says.
"We're seeing more and more employers telling their workers, 'You can't work more than 30 hours, because if you do, we've got to pay for your health care.' We've got to fix that. Employers have got to step up to the plate. They have to be responsible."
In the legislature, the Oregon AFL-CIO is backing a bill to require that public employers stay neutral in any union organizing effort. It is also proposing that lawmakers be able to commit to numbers of living-wage jobs for every piece of legislation they tout as a "job-creator."
The BLS report is available at http://bls.gov.


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His home had appreciated $120,000 in the four years he lived there - not a bad return on his initial investment.
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Dianne Crosby, (925) 743-3501, firstname.lastname@example.com


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So I know basically nothing about the specific books involved and that makes it impossible to form an opinion about what's actually happened in this instance of what is, as Alison Croggon pointed out yesterday, an all-too-familiar pattern. (Don't read the comments on that piece, by the way.) And Kerryn Goldsworthy's comment on the ALR blog clearly and succinctly says all that needs to be said about the fundamental issue underlying the problem: it's a symptom of what the dominant culture holds to be valuable and what it regards as lesser.
No doubt they are the 'best books', but it goes deeper than that. The question is, as it always is when these issues come up, what the criteria are for literary value, and where those criteria come from. The answer is (and it's the basis of all useful discussion about gender and literature) that they derive from the values of the dominant culture —which circumscribes what women, as well as men, can be, think, believe and say—and the dominant culture is still, well, a sausage fest.I really mean it; that's all that needs to be said, and if it could be repeated as often as necessary, in this brief way, perhaps the message would eventually begin to sink in. But perhaps it wouldn't; after all, Virginia Woolf said the same thing eighty years ago:
But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial'. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop — everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.
What I do want to write about then is not the specifics of the MF, or even the issue of women's writing and literary value at large, but the very strong feelings of mingled dread and passion that inform & propel my teaching of writing by women, and which come out in full flight whenever this messy issue surfaces.
A couple of weeks before I went on leave it became clear that the subject I teach called Women Writing is under threat of being cancelled due to low enrolments this year. That is partly my fault for offering the subject on a yearly basis instead of biennially, but it's also a reflection of the fact that a subject with that name is perceived by many students as a niche or special interest course; male students don't take it, and a very intelligent woman student I encountered in another subject spoke for many others when she explained to me that it wasn't for her because she didn't really like literature that was 'all from one perspective or all about one thing.' I think Women Writing will escape the axe this year because it's being taught at a regional campus as well as at the metropolitan one, thus it will have to go ahead so the country students have an English subject, but if that wasn't the case I'd be very upset: that subject is the thing I'm proudest of, in my pretty unstellar academic career so far, and it's also the thing I do professionally that makes the most important contribution to people's lives. Why can be summed up by a remark a student made last year at the end of the semester, to the effect that this subject had occupied her thoughts more than anything else she'd ever studied, once she noticed that almost every day there was something in the news that related to something going on in one of the books we had been reading.
I inherited the concept of a subject devoted to women's writing; if I have it right, a subject of that name has been offered in my department continuously since 1987. (I think the first convenor was Lucy Frost.) It's an anomaly. It assumes that there is a discernible thing that can be called women's writing, that it's different from writing by men in significant and meaningful ways, and that it's worth studying - a set of assumptions viewed as naive at best by many, since the entire notion that the category 'women' exists in any meaningful way is not one that academics should now persist with. I don't feel, with so many books out there urgently needing to be read, we have the time to debate this in the subject. We take 'woman' at face value and look to see what the books themselves have to say about what that actually means.
There is a structural parallel with the perennial debate about the 'Australian life in any of its phases' criterion of the Miles Franklin; one side regards that as an unfixably problematic relic of the discredited belief that Australianness is an idea with content, and another side thinks we can tell well enough whether any given instance fits the description without needing to state in the abstract and in advance what does and doesn't qualify as Australian. There is a distinct tang of the 1950s about the terms Franklin specified; studying, talking about and thinking about women's writing is likewise an idea that is decades old now. I don't quite know why this is taken to mean they're outdated notions. We haven't gotten past them. Au contraire, they are ideas that are durable; yes, mainstream literary culture is (still? or increasingly?) a sausage fest, and put simply, the steady, camouflaged masculine bias momentarily revealed in incidents like the Miles Franklin shortlists just goes to show why we still need to ask what women's writing is and how it is to be valued. I am in the second, muddle-on-with-our-messy-terms camp on these parallel debates, and I think Australian writing (like women's writing), in the actual and as an idea, does continue to matter and should continue to be thought about in an organised way, despite the problems and conundrums it raises.
What I do have very strong doubts about is the continued value of doing this sort of thinking within the very narrow framework provided by literary prizes. Honestly, I don't think I have this opinion just because I would prefer it if all the people who wanted to think about such questions did it by enrolling in one of my subjects rather than through methods like reading their way through (say) the annual Orange Prize shortlist and deciding which novel they thought should win. Actually it's an argument of Virginia Woolf's again, this time from that bleak bleak book Three Guineas, which I think my way towards at times like this: the idea that the only viable response to self-reinforcing patriarchal value systems - whether ones that glorify war or glorify books about manly concerns - is to refuse to participate in them, which also means refusing to take them seriously.
It appears that we can ask them to do nothing; they must follow the old road to the old end; our own influence as outsiders can only be of the most indirect sort. If we are asked to teach, we can examine very carefully into the aim of such teaching, and refuse to teach any art or science that encourages war. Further, we can pour mild scorn upon chapels, upon degrees, and upon the value of examinations. We can intimate that a prize poem can still have merit in spite of the fact that it has won a prize; and maintain that a book may still be worth reading in spite of the fact that its author took a first class with honours in the English tripos. If we are asked to lecture we can refuse to bolster up the vain and vicious system of lecturing by refusing to lecture.* And, of course, if we are offered offices and honours for ourselves we can refuse them — how, indeed, in view of the facts, could we possibly do otherwise?Woolf acknowledges this is a 'lame and depressing' strategy, and doesn't pretend that it comes without costs - followed literally, this advice would see women writers refusing to accept the money that goes with winning a major literary prize, and that is ridiculous. But I think the point is more that we all need to reconsider the type and quantity of attention we mete out to contests and to prizewinning books, and to be much more aware of the very shallow media and marketing events that famous literary prizes have degenerated into.
I have more to say about this, but that'll do for now.


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Twenty-five years ago Wall Street, and much of America, was transfixed by a sweeping set of insider-trading investigations centered on the greatest financier of the age, junk-bond king Michael Milken, of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Day after day, week after week, month after month, stories of U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani's relentless investigation dribbled out to the press. One by one, Giuliani picked off Milken's minions, confronting them at their homes, handcuffing them at their offices, pulling them before secret grand juries, indicting a few, pressing for evidence that Milken had broken the law. It all took on an inexorable quality. In their hearts, most everyone knew that Milken was going down sooner or later—and he did, paying more than $1 billion in fines and spending 22 months in prison. He was banned for life from the securities industry, and his firm was dismantled.
Twenty-five years later it's all happening again. Once more a relentless U.S. attorney, this time 44-year-old Preet Bharara, has seemingly targeted the billionaire investor Steve Cohen, founder of SAC Capital Advisors, the $14 billion hedge fund based in Stamford, Connecticut. One by one, Bharara has picked off onetime SAC traders and analysts, confronting them at their homes, pulling them before grand juries, bringing criminal cases, and pressing them for evidence that Cohen has broken insider-trading laws. So far Cohen has not been charged with anything, but there is the same sense that Bharara, like Giuliani before him, has too much invested in all this to lose. "If Steve Cohen gets off," one hedge-fund manager observes, "he will be the O. J. Simpson of insider trading."
In almost every way, though, today's scandal surpasses the one that brought the Roaring 80s to an end. There have been more arrests, many more convictions; C.E.O.'s have fallen, lives and companies have been ruined, all in a campaign that has increasingly put one man in the government's crosshairs: Steve Cohen, thought to be the most brilliant trader of his generation.
Simply reading the headlines this spring, one could be forgiven for being a bit confused. In mid-March, after years of scoffing at every suggestion any of its traders might have done something untoward, SAC agreed to pay, without admitting guilt, the largest fine in the history of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a stunning $616 million, to settle charges of insider trading in only two trades. Some on Wall Street called it a victory for Cohen, who paid a pittance—for him—to make a messy situation go away. Others were not so sanguine, observing—correctly—that blood was finally in the water, that an S.E.C. fine did nothing to curtail the ongoing criminal investigation, which has already led to guilty pleas from and convictions of at least five onetime SAC employees.
Cohen seems determined to ride it all out with sheer bravado. A week after the settlement, news broke that he had paid the casino owner Steve Wynn an astounding $155 million—a record sum for a U.S. collector—to buy Picasso's Le Rêve (which Wynn had accidentally put his elbow through in 2006). Days after that revelation Cohen paid $60 million for a 10,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom mansion with ocean views, on Further Lane in East Hampton. Taken together, it all had a "Let them eat cake" quality, as if Cohen were waving his billions in the government's face, daring it take him on.
Their looming showdown draws on themes of money, privilege, and class that define the era. Steve Cohen isn't just another hedge-fund billionaire; he is the hedge-fund billionaire. He doesn't live in just another Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion; he lives in the largest of them all, complete with its own two-hole golf course and Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog sculpture adorning the driveway. Inside, the walls are festooned with paintings from his fabled collection of Impressionist and contemporary art, which includes Francis Bacon's Screaming Pope, hanging just outside his bedroom. Doughy and clerk-like, Cohen is nevertheless the Gatsby of our age, a middle-class kid from Long Island who caught the gambling bug fleecing his high-school pals in all-night poker games. Today he tosses around his winnings in transparent attempts to join the social elite that's never quite accepted him and his 48-year-old Puerto Rican second wife, Alex, whom he met through a dating service.
On Wall Street everyone knows the Cohen legend. The awkward kid who stood outside Merrill Lynch offices in college studying the green digital stock prices as they slid silently across screens in the window, finally deducing patterns no one else could see. The years as a wunderkind at little Gruntal & Co. during the 1980s, screaming at assistants who couldn't keep up with his flood of trading orders.
Then came the formation of SAC at the dawn of the hedge-fund age, in 1992, its returns so enormous Cohen could demand as much as double the industry average 1.5 percent management fee and take 50 percent of investment gains, as opposed to the usual 20 percent. The jaw-dropping 70 percent returns he piled up riding the high-tech wave of 1998–99, then the even more mind-boggling 70 percent he earned betting against the very same stocks in 2000, inspired BusinessWeek to crown him "The Most Powerful Trader on Wall Street You've Never Heard Of."
Cohen never wanted the attention, even after buying his Greenwich mansion and moving SAC into its new brick-and-glass headquarters on Long Island Sound. Taking a page from Milken's book, he bought the copyright to photographs of himself—so the press couldn't run them. He dodged reporters for years, until SAC's name began popping up in stories about this new insider-trading investigation, at which point, in 2010, he sat for a series of exclusive interviews with Vanity Fair. "I feel like Don Quixote fighting windmills," he groused. "There's a perception, and I'm trying to fight that perception. I find it offensive that they lump SAC into these articles. I really do. The press, I mean, they don't understand what the hell—they don't understand what they're writing about."
Yet even Cohen would admit that this "perception"—that SAC had to be doing something illegal to make such astounding returns—had been around for a while. In the 1990s, SAC earned a reputation for pumping brokerages for advance notice of analyst recommendations, a rumor that was never proved. In the early 2000s it was known as a fund that hoovered up all available information on every conceivable stock, to the point where some of it crossed the line into illegal insider information, another suspicion that was never proved. In response Cohen beefed up SAC's compliance department (its internal police) and began hiring a new breed of trader. The stereotypical Wall Street trader, the hard-charging, foulmouthed kid from Staten Island, began to disappear from SAC's halls; in his place came Ph.D.'s from Harvard and Stanford, traders always referred to as "super-smart," who took jobs at SAC over offers from Google or Microsoft. In his interviews with Vanity Fair, Cohen all but admitted SAC had once steered too close to legal boundaries, necessitating a change in its culture. "Things were different then," he acknowledged. "This was a learning process."
But the whispers about Cohen continued to spread as SAC grew to become one of the world's largest hedge funds, with $14 billion under management.
What you'll hear from SAC's supporters or Cohen's friends is that of course the government is trying to get Steve Cohen. Why? Well, anyone who has earned those kind of returns, who charges the highest fees in the industry, who is personally worth over $10 billion, and who has done all that by trading, well, he must be using inside information to be that good, that rich.
No doubt some of the whispering is fueled by envy, as well as personal distaste—Cohen, people who know him say, can turn nasty on a dime—but SAC courted it by assembling what is by any measure one of Wall Street's greatest information-gathering machines. It's fueled, many believe, by the exorbitant fees SAC pays scores of Wall Street firms for processing its trades and other services; whereas other hedge funds trade via computer at fractions of a penny per share, SAC still does it the old-fashioned way, paying three to five cents, making it, by wide agreement, the largest payer of fees on Wall Street, $400 million a year by some estimates. That kind of largesse, some charge, spurs a blizzard of tips from Wall Streeters eager to ingratiate themselves with Cohen. In addition, former SAC employees have started at least 31 other funds, in which Cohen often invests, and the expectation is that the former traders will continue to feed SAC information, which is why one SAC alumnus calls Cohen "the Godfather."
At one point, in 2008, Cohen was so proud of his information-gathering techniques that an SAC marketing document summarized his trading strategy with one word: "Edge." But when asked about this in a 2011 civil-suit deposition, Cohen said, "I hate that word."
What makes the rumors linger is SAC's business structure. Splayed before five screens at his workstation on SAC's library-quiet trading floor, Cohen himself manages only about $2 billion of the firm's capital; the rest is handled by a hundred or so portfolio managers, known as P.M.'s, each of whom leads a small team, usually of two or three analysts, known as a "pod." They can always see Cohen, thanks to the "Steve Cam," a tiny camera trained on the boss sitting at his 50-foot black desk, divided into eight trading stations.
SAC is a notoriously cutthroat environment; those who don't perform don't last. Each pod typically manages hundreds of millions—although some manage more—and is required to pass its best ideas to Cohen, usually at a Sunday-night teleconference; if Cohen makes money off the idea—a process known inside SAC as "centerbooking" or getting "tagged"—the pod members receive a 4 percent cut.
There's a high hurdle, though: when asked in the deposition what the threshold for a good idea was, Cohen responded, "You don't want to hear an idea that you're going to make 5 percent in a year on. I don't think anyone would embarrass himself by bringing me an idea like that."
Those who believe SAC has, at least in the past, trafficked in dirty information, including onetime SAC traders who spoke to Vanity Fair on background, say this high-pressure structure spurs desperate P.M.'s to resort to the use of inside information—and combined with the potential to make a fortune, this can lead to temptation. And where there's temptation, of course, people will cross the line. As a former SAC analyst puts it, "What happens if the puppet master doesn't want you to have a moral compass?"
The very same structure, however, tends to insulate Cohen, who can say he doesn't know the sources of information behind his traders' tips. "Steve knows his business model protects him," says the former SAC analyst. "There's not a single hedge fund that hasn't somewhere, sometime, gotten sketchy info. But this is different. You think Steve wants you to have inside information but doesn't want to know you do. Why do it? Why did A-Rod take steroids? Because it's worth it.... The payout is huge and you can get swayed. What would you do for, say, 20 percent of $276 million? You do stuff. You fucking do stuff. You can't be in this job without navigating a gray line constantly."
Tom Conheeney, SAC's president, counters that it is "absolutely false" to say that the business model is designed to protect Cohen. "The structure has nothing to do with 'insulating' Steve," he says. "We believe the multi-manager model is the best model to produce attractive, risk-adjusted returns over time."
"Activity that was acceptable no longer is. Steve made the appropriate adjustment," says Anthony Scaramucci, an SAC investor, who runs SkyBridge Capital. "The government has had years to prove its case. If they could, they would have done it by now."
Many of the safeguards came after the S.E.C. initiated the current insider-trading investigation, in 2006. That year, for instance, SAC instituted a rule forbidding any P.M. from using a so-called expert network—a company that provides industry "experts" to help traders analyze stocks—that talked directly to company insiders. SAC says it was also one of the first hedge funds to establish a separate compliance department led by a well-respected professional, and it has steadily strengthened its compliance program over time, increasing its total compliance personnel from 3 in 2005 to 36 today.
Shot Across the Bow
The legal waves lapping at Steve Cohen's feet today spread from the dropping of a single pebble into regulatory waters almost seven years ago, on August 22, 2006, a hot, hazy summer afternoon in Lower Manhattan. It was then, according to The Billionaire's Apprentice, the excellent new book by Anita Raghavan, of the New York Times Dealbook site, that a lawyer named John Moon walked into the S.E.C.'s New York regional office at the World Financial Center with suspicions about a client's trades. Moon worked for the giant Swiss bank UBS, which processed trading for any number of hedge funds, large and small. A month earlier one of its newest and smallest clients—a fund called Sedna Capital Management—had embarked on an incredible run of success, nearly doubling its $2 million in capital with barely a handful of trades. Moon suspected Sedna was benefiting from "cherry-picking," an age-old Wall Street scheme in which a fund manager allocates his most profitable trades to a friend or relative, in this case Sedna, in order to avoid scrutiny. When S.E.C. attorneys Googled Sedna, they realized they might be onto something big. It was run by Rengan Rajaratnam, whose older brother, a rotund Sri Lankan named Raj Rajaratnam, headed one of the world's largest and most successful hedge funds, the $7 billion Galleon Group.
The S.E.C. began examining Raj's trades. Soon federal prosecutors and two teams of F.B.I. agents in New York were on the case. In time the overall investigation came under the supervision of Preet Bharara, the politically ambitious U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Born in India, Bharara came to the United States when he was two years old. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, he attended Columbia Law School and eventually joined the organized-crime unit of the Southern District, where he helped bust up New York's Colombo and Gambino crime families. Next he worked for New York senator Chuck Schumer, who got him the job as U.S. attorney.
Federal investigators discovered that Raj Rajaratnam sat at the center of a vast insider-trading network stretching from New York to Taiwan. It took three long years of subpoenas, wiretaps, and grand juries, but once Rajaratnam himself was hauled away in handcuffs, in October 2009, many of his partners in crime became familiar names on Wall Street, their taut faces appearing regularly on CNBC. There was Roomy Khan, a chatty Silicon Valley trader infamous for allegedly "enslaving" one of her maids. And Danielle Chiesi, a fading beauty queen who gleefully fed tips to Rajaratnam. Most infamous of all was Rajat K. Gupta, a Goldman Sachs board member and former C.E.O. of the global consulting giant McKinsey & Company, who was convicted of funneling tips to Rajaratnam about deliberations inside the vaunted Goldman boardroom itself. In the three and a half years since Rajaratnam's arrest, federal prosecutors have charged 77 people with securities-law violations, most of them insider trading; 71 have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
SAC's name popped up in the early months of the Galleon investigation, all the way back in 2007, according to Bloomberg.com, when F.B.I. agents successfully "flipped" a now infamous Wall Street trader named David Slaine, who provided prosecutors with several examples of what he believed to be insider trading at SAC. During 2008 the names of former SAC traders began appearing on government wiretaps.
The investigation worked like this: if someone was overheard swapping inside information with, say, Roomy Khan or Danielle Chiesi, there was a good chance his phone would be tapped. Traders who were overheard actively swapping inside information—call them "big fish"—might be marked for prosecution. But "little fish," it appears, were often seen to be most valuable as potential informants. Between January and April 2009, F.B.I. teams led by agents David Makol and B. J. Kang approached three of these little fish, confronted them with evidence of their own wrongdoing, and easily gained their cooperation. In doing so they moved the investigation away from Galleon and toward a group of new targets, including SAC. The first of the little fish was an unemployed 35-year-old named Wesley Wang, the son of Chinese immigrants.
In November 2008 investigators received the go-ahead to place taps on Wang's phones. A more unlikely "Patient Zero" for the SAC case would be hard to imagine. When the F.B.I. came calling, he hadn't worked at a hedge fund for months. "Wes," sighs someone who knows him well, "was a schlub." After dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, he worked at three hedge funds: Whitman Capital; Sigma Capital, an affiliate of SAC; and Trellus Management, where he was employed until September 2008. Court filings say Wang knew little about finance and got through the hedge-fund doors only because he was fluent in Mandarin, which made him useful in translating data on Chinese companies. To stay inside, he admitted to the F.B.I., he had resorted to passing inside information.
An F.B.I. agent approached Wang on January 7, 2009, and he agreed to cooperate within a week. If Wes Wang was a mediocre analyst, he proved to be a superstar informant, naming at least 20 people he believed were involved in insider trading. Prosecutors would eventually gush that Wang "was the key witness that was able to open the door to literally dozens of other witnesses." He provided "the government with answers to questions it did not even know to ask," a prosecutor told a court in early 2013. "He has provided so much information that the government has not yet been able to investigate all of it for want of manpower."
What little detail is available on Wang's illegal exploits suggests he was alternately resourceful and a bit pathetic. In one job he boasted that he had an excellent source inside the Target department-store chain; it turned out to be an assistant store manager in Oakland whose tips were, as might be expected, useless. Apparently Wang had better success chatting up a neighbor, a Cisco Systems executive, whose information he was able to trade to others. Among those Wang named was his onetime boss, Doug Whitman, of Whitman Capital, about whom he testified at a three-week trial last summer; Whitman was eventually sentenced to two years in prison.
But perhaps the most useful source Wang led the F.B.I. to was a man he had once worked for as a college intern, Karl Motey. Motey, who was then 44, had been a respected Silicon Valley semiconductor analyst for years before opening his own small firm, the Coda Group, in Los Altos, California. Some of the insights he fed his hedge-fund clients, however, crossed the line into inside information, as Motey revealed to Wes Wang one day in February 2009. What Motey didn't know was that Wang was wearing a wire. Two months later F.B.I. agent Makol walked up to Motey in the parking lot of his gym, where Motey had just finished a workout. The two repaired to a coffee shop where, when confronted, Motey quickly admitted his guilt and agreed to cooperate. Inside a week he was on a plane to New York, where prosecutors briefed him on their unusual plan: Motey was to be the first government informant inserted into the strange world of "expert networks."
These companies—about 40 existed in 2009—had begun springing up after the S.E.C. in 2000 issued the Regulation Fair Disclosure rule, known as "Reg F.D.," which mandated that public companies issue "market-moving" information to all investors at the same time. Until Reg F.D., many companies had given select analysts advance notice of upcoming earnings in private conference calls.
Once companies clammed up, hedge funds and other big investors were obliged to do more of their own detective work. Expert-network firms rose to fill the vacuum. On paper, they connected traders with outside "experts" who could offer insights about a given company; in practice, investigators suspected, these insights often amounted to inside information. Early on, they decided to focus on a single expert-network company in Silicon Valley: Primary Global Research, known as P.G.R., which had a reputation for passing information of borderline legality.
The F.B.I. instructed Karl Motey to telephone P.G.R. consultants, tell them he was setting up a new hedge fund, and secure their services. It worked like a charm. Thanks in large part to Motey, in the fall of 2009 the government was able to ask a judge for a wiretap on the phone lines used by P.G.R. and almost 100 of its clients. That allowed the government to compile cases on at least 10 people, including P.G.R. consultants and their sources of illegal information at several companies, such as Dell. Roughly one of every eight convictions in the Galleon-SAC probe, in other words, was the result of Motey's work.
"Look at the minnows who ended up swallowing the sharks," someone close to the case observes. "Motey is Moby Dick. Anything that gets close to him, he traps and eviscerates."
A Hindu, a Jew, and a Catholic Walk into a Hedge Fund . . .
But Karl Motey did more than simply bring down P.G.R. More than any other single informant to that point, he brought the government within striking distance of SAC. In this he was joined by another of the government's Bay Area informants, a savvy 53-year-old Malaysian named Richard Choo-Beng Lee, known as "C.B.," who had been a high-tech analyst for several funds, including SAC, before starting his own Silicon Valley-based fund. His new partner, Ali Far, however, had previously worked closely with Raj Rajaratnam at Galleon, and when investigators overheard the two swapping tips they confronted both Lee and Far. Both agreed to cooperate.
Lee pointed the government toward another very senior ex-SAC trader. After he left SAC, Lee worked briefly for a hedge fund called Stratix, which was co-founded by Rich Grodin, who had joined SAC in the very early years—so if anyone could help the government understand the firm's culture, it would be he. (Cohen invested in Stratix, which closed in late 2007.) Grodin's calls with Lee were among those being wiretapped, according to a government filing. In the fall of 2009, Grodin abruptly closed down his second hedge fund, Quadrum, although he was never charged. Wall Street insiders wonder if this means he may be cooperating with the government. Lee was less successful when F.B.I. agents, in hopes of planting a mole inside SAC, had him contact the company in a vain attempt to get a job there. In his deposition, Cohen admitted that SAC had rejected Lee "because we were suspicious of his intentions [We] had heard rumors he was wearing a wire."
The wiretaps on P.G.R., which the government secured mainly with the help of the reliable Karl Motey, helped raise the blinds on two other insider-trading rings, which led to both SAC alumni and even a current, high-level SAC trader. The first centered on a pair of former SAC traders who were best friends, Noah Freeman and Donald Longueuil, along with a third man, Samir Barai, who ran his own fund, Barai Capital Management, in New York. Freeman and Longueuil, along with their fiancées, were active athletes, participating in triathlons and cycling events together. The three were so close that Longueuil served as best man at Freeman's 2009 wedding, and Freeman promised to serve as Longueuil's best man at a wedding that was scheduled to take place in February 2011 but never would.
Barai, Freeman, and Longueuil—who jokingly called themselves the Hindu, the Jew, and the Catholic—had been gathering, swapping, and trading on inside information since at least 2006, when they were all at other firms. They called their exchanges "data dumps" or "data smackdowns," and Barai later told the F.B.I. that they'd mark them on their calendars as a "threesome" or as "don, sam, noah—sex." They continued once Freeman and Longueuil joined SAC, in 2008, Freeman in the Boston office, Longueuil in New York. The trio developed a series of valuable sources who had contacts inside several tech companies. One, Freeman later told the F.B.I., was a consultant named Doug Munro, who ran a research firm called Worldwide Market Research and, according to both Freeman and Barai, had inside information on Cisco. Munro, they said, had an e-mail account called email@example.com, and he'd send Barai an e-mail saying "lucy is wet" when he was supposed to check the account for new information. (Munro has not been charged.)
But the trio's best source was a consultant at P.G.R. named Winnie Jiau, whom they nicknamed Winnie the Pooh. She had valuable—and illegal—sources of her own, and they paid Jiau as much as $10,000 a month as well as pelting her with little gifts, from lobsters to gift certificates for the Cheesecake Factory restaurant chain. (At one point Freeman e-mailed his secretary, "Can you please send (12) lobsters to Winnie? I know you hate her but we have to do this." His secretary replied, "Sure thing. I hope she gets sick from the lobsters." The secretary didn't get her wish, because the lobsters didn't get picked up when they arrived. "Typical Winnie to leave 12 lobsters to die at FedEx," the secretary wrote in a follow-up e-mail. "She has no heart.")
The Freeman circle began to fall apart in 2010, when first Freeman and then Longueuil were fired by SAC for poor performance. Longueuil kept trading on his own while Freeman fled Wall Street altogether, taking a job teaching economics at the Winsor School, a prestigious all-girls academy outside Boston. The real blow, however, came on the evening of November 19, 2010, when The Wall Street Journal published online a lengthy story describing how the government investigation was beginning to focus on P.G.R. At his New York apartment, Longueuil panicked. That night, he used two pairs of pliers to tear apart a flash drive and two computer hard drives where he had stored his illegal information. He then slid the components into four ziplock bags, and a little before two A.M. he left his building and spent the next 40 minutes walking behind garbage trucks, throwing each of the little bags in the back of a different truck.
It was too late. The weak link in the Freeman circle turned out to be one of Samir Barai's assistants, a young man named Jason Pflaum. Because Barai was hearing-impaired, Pflaum handled many of his calls, and, as luck would have it, some were with P.G.R. experts who were being listened to by investigators on the Motey-enabled wiretaps. Confronted by investigators a month before the Journal story ran, Pflaum had given up everyone, even leading the F.B.I. to audiotapes of incriminating calls with Winnie Jiau. After reading the Journal's article, Barai texted Pflaum. "Problem is this scope is said to focus on the use of so-called expert network firms Fuuuuuuck." He then told Pflaum: "Shred as much as u can." Barai himself not only went into his office and began shredding, but also asked Pflaum to leave his laptop with his doorman so Barai could pick it up and delete its contents.
Three weeks later, Noah Freeman walked into the Winsor School's parking lot and found B. J. Kang, of the F.B.I., waiting for him. Within days Freeman too admitted everything and agreed to cooperate, becoming one of the government's most valuable sources of information to that date. Not only did Freeman agree to secretly tape Longueuil incriminating himself—it was on a Freeman tape that investigators learned of Longueuil's garbage-truck expedition—he also gave detailed debriefings on SAC and Cohen. He told Kang that insider trading in the hedge-fund business was "ubiquitous," and said trafficking in corporate secrets was expected of him while at SAC. According to a memo Kang wrote his superiors, "Freeman and others at SAC Capital understood that providing Cohen with your best trading information involved providing Cohen with inside information Freeman pitched to Cohen many trading ideas over the 18 months he was at SAC Capital and some of the trading ideas involved dirty information."
("Freeman's assertion that portfolio managers were expected to pass on improper information is categorically wrong," says the SAC president Conheeney. "I am confident that he didn't believe this while he worked at SAC, and that he knew he wasn't supposed to get, trade on, or share inside information. In fact, he testified under oath that he went to great lengths to hide his illegal behavior from us.")
Most everyone Freeman fingered is going to prison. Longueuil pleaded guilty and got two and a half years. After Freeman testified against Winnie Jiau, a jury gave her four years. Freeman himself is still awaiting sentencing but is hoping for no jail time because of his cooperation.
Rule Number One: There Is No E-mail List
The second insider-trading ring Karl Motey helped uncover involved a huge, byzantine group of analysts and traders at a trio of hedge funds. This theater of the scandal sprang dramatically into view on Monday, November 22, 2010, three days after Donald Longueuil's garbage-truck episode. That morning, just after the market opened, black unmarked cars assembled at a parking lot across the street from One Landmark Square, in Stamford, Connecticut, which was the home of a hedge fund named Diamondback Capital. About a dozen armed F.B.I. agents stormed in and began sweeping through both floors of the office. They did the same at two other hedge funds, Loch Capital, in Boston, and Level Global, in Manhattan. Both Diamondback and Level were multi-billion-dollar funds run by prominent ex-SAC people. Loch, run by twins Tim and Todd McSweeney, was a smaller, technology-stock-focused fund, but it was a big name in the tech world and had investments from firms such as Citigroup and AIG.
The next day, SAC sent a letter to its investors, telling them that the government had issued "extraordinarily broad" subpoenas to a number of investment managers, including SAC, which said that the subpoenas "don't shed much light on whom or what the government may be investigating." The firm added, "Neither the subpoena nor any other information of which we are aware suggests that anyone at SAC has engaged in any wrongdoing."
SAC's all-clear signal would turn out to be extremely premature.
The raids were a shock to everyone on Wall Street, but the targets all seemed to make sense. At Loch, nervous investors had been yanking money from the fund, which once had more than $2 billion in assets, ever since the news broke that Steve Fortuna, co-founder of S2 Capital and a close friend of the McSweeneys', had pleaded guilty to insider trading. At Diamondback, Richard Schimel, one of the founders, was married to Steve Cohen's sister, Wendy. Diamondback was started by Schimel, along with two other people, Larry Sapanski and Chad Loweth, who had left SAC in 2005. The word on the street was that the parting had not been amicable, and Cohen had put no money into Diamondback—so, people speculated, who better to inform on Cohen than Schimel? Level Global also had close ties to SAC. The fund was founded in 2003 by David Ganek and his former analyst Anthony Chiasson, who had made their reputations at SAC. By the end of 2010 the fund had gained almost 90 percent since its launch, versus the S&P's 27 percent, and also had more than $4 billion under management.
But the speculation and gossip was mostly wrong. Indeed, although the trail through Diamondback and Level would end up reaching into the very high ranks of SAC, the route was not what anyone had expected. In fact, at Diamondback, the fund's founders were not named on the search warrant, and the government would show no interest in them.
Unbeknownst to the outside world at the time of the raids, two former analysts, one at Diamondback and one at Level Global, were the ones cooperating with the government. Spyridon "Sam" Adondakis, who worked at Level from 2006 to 2010, was approached in October 2010 by F.B.I. agents as he was leaving a lunch in Midtown Manhattan. They asked to speak to him in a nearby park, and they played a recording of him that they'd gotten from the P.G.R. wiretaps. (The government would later credit Motey with pointing them to Adondakis.)
Adondakis, then in his early 30s, agreed to cooperate—and to record his friends. Among them was a guy named Jesse Tortora, who had started working for Diamondback in 2007 as an analyst for a technology-focused portfolio manager named Todd Newman. Tortora and Adondakis had become friends earlier in the decade when they both worked in San Francisco for a stock-research firm called the Prudential Equity Group, a division of the big insurance company. Adondakis later said about Tortora, "We shared all of the information that we got on pretty much everything."
The group gradually expanded to include several Prudential analysts and their friends: a former Dell employee named Sandeep "Sandy" Goyal and Fayad Abbasi, another analyst. Abbasi's roommate in San Francisco was a technology analyst named Jon Horvath. Tortora also started talking to a client named Ron Dennis, a research analyst at the mutual-fund company Waddell & Reed.
Eventually, both Dennis and Horvath got jobs as analysts for portfolio managers at SAC. Horvath worked for Mike Steinberg, who had joined SAC in the early years. In fact, Steinberg, who is reportedly close to Cohen, had worked for Rich Grodin. When Prudential closed down its equity-research unit, the rest of the group soon migrated to New York, too. Adondakis got a job at Level Global working as an analyst for Anthony Chiasson; he and Abbasi, who landed at the mutual-fund company Neuberger Berman, shared an apartment in Tribeca. Abbasi hired Goyal as an analyst. As for Tortora, he'd gotten to know the McSweeneys at Loch Capital, and they referred him to their friend Todd Newman, at Diamondback, which Tortora joined in the fall of 2007.
This was a world where business relationships seem to have been indistinguishable from friendships. A defense lawyer later said about the group, "They traveled together, they partied together, they ate together, they drank together, they rented homes in the Hamptons together. They were very, very close."
In 2009, Tortora e-mailed a group that included Abbasi and Adondakis: "Rule number one about email list, there is no email list, fight club reference. [He was referring to the 1999 movie Fight Club, in which Brad Pitt says, "First rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club."] Rule number two, only data points can be sent, no sarcastic comments. Enjoy. Your performance will now go up by 100 percent in 09 and your boss will love you. Game theory, look it up."
The group shared a lot of legitimate information, obtained by going to conferences and speaking with research analysts. But they also shared a lot of inside information. Tortora and Adondakis both got information from P.G.R. consultants. The group also had its tentacles into other big companies, including Dell and another technology company, Nvidia. Tortora later told a jury that Horvath had a contact at Sun Microsystems, and he passed that contact's information along to the group. He also said that since Dennis preferred speaking on the phone to e-mail, "as a matter of practice, I would talk to Ron very frequently, maybe every other day."
When asked by a prosecutor, "Did Mr. Dennis provide you with confidential information during your time at Diamondback?," Tortora responded simply, "He did." (Dennis has not been charged with any wrongdoing.)
The information sharing, it seems, was a way of life in the high-stakes world of trading technology stocks, which were evaluated not on whether the company was a good long-term investment but on whether it was going to please investors in a given quarter. "We came to the conclusion that that was the way they [people who traded technology stocks] did business," says one person close to events. "They were doing it for so long that it became normal."
"The line had been blurred," says another hedge-fund executive. "It became extremely fast and furious, and all that mattered was who you were and what you knew." He adds, "It was: What data points do you have? That was your Edge."
The trade that would reach all the way into the highest ranks of Level Global and up to powerful portfolio managers at SAC certainly involved Edge. Goyal, who had worked at Dell, developed a contact in Dell's investor-relations department who began to pass along what Tortora testified was "very specific" inside information on Dell's revenues and profits. Goyal would then send the information to Tortora, who would then pass it along to the rest of the group.
Both Tortora and Adondakis later told a jury that the reason they gathered inside information and passed it to their friends, such as Horvath, was so that the analysts could relay it to the portfolio managers for whom they worked. The trade that would cause so much trouble for so many happened in late August 2008. Dell's second quarter had finished at the end of July. It took time for the company to figure out what its revenues and profits were in a given quarter, but the Dell contact started telling Goyal that the company's G.M., or gross margin—a measure of profitability—would be less than investors were expecting. In the volatile world of trading technology stocks, even a small "miss"—profits that are less than investors are expecting to see—can send a stock plummeting. Goyal told Tortora, and Tortora later testified that he had told others, including Adondakis.
Indeed, the morning of August 5, after Goyal had had a late-night phone call with the contact, he called Tortora. While they were on the phone, Tortora e-mailed Newman bullet points from the conversation, including that it looked as if the gross margin was going to be lower than investors were expecting. "The Dell from Sandy [Goyal]?" asked Newman. "[Yes] on with him now," Tortora responded. That day, Newman began to build a short position in Dell, according to trial testimony.
Tortora also immediately forwarded that same e-mail to others, including Adondakis and Horvath. At Level Global, Chiasson eventually built a far bigger short position, at least in part due to Tortora's information, according to the government. Adondakis testified that Chiasson knew exactly where the information was coming from. A few days after getting Tortora's e-mail, Adondakis testified, he met with Chiasson and a senior analyst at Level Global named Greg Brenner in Chiasson's office. They talked about the information, and Brenner said that, if the numbers Adondakis was getting were right, the Dell trade was the best idea at the firm.
At another meeting in August, Chiasson, according to Adondakis, warned others that the large short position was based at least in part on information from a contact, so no one should discuss it outside the firm. As August 28, the date when Dell would announce its earnings, drew nearer, Chiasson wanted frequent updates, and it appears that he was updating his partner, David Ganek, too, but there is no proof Ganek knew where the information was coming from.
Over at SAC, they were also talking Dell. On August 18, Horvath, three minutes after getting another update from Tortora, called his boss, Mike Steinberg, according to the government. A minute later, Horvath sent Steinberg an e-mail. The headline: "Pls keep the DELL stuff especially on the down low." Steinberg returned, "I will." The government later alleged that Steinberg began to short Dell's stock that day.
Even when you have inside information, trading technology stocks ahead of earnings isn't a sure thing in the way that buying a stock before a big merger announcement is. It still takes work—and some luck—to figure out how the market will react to the numbers. The information is just Edge. It's not certainty. And so, everyone was getting nervous. On August 22, a trader at Diamondback texted Adondakis. "Dell's getting bigger," he said, meaning that Chiasson was increasing the size of the bet. "I'm wearing depends now," Adondakis replied.
At SAC, Cohen himself was paying attention to the trade, because of a particular problem: another portfolio manager, Gabe Plotkin, was on the opposite side of Steinberg's trade. Although Plotkin didn't join SAC until 2006, he is a superstar there. He manages more than $1 billion of SAC's capital and is hugely profitable for the firm. "The guy who is killing it at SAC Capital," Reuters called him in 2011.
On August 26, Steinberg wrote to Horvath and Plotkin, in an e-mail with the subject line "DELL," "Guys, I was talking to Steve [Cohen] about DELL earlier today, and he asked me to get the two of you to compare notes before the print [meaning before Dell officially announced its earnings], as we are on opposite sides of this one. Gabe—we think GMs [gross margins] are at risk this qtr … " "I do think that is the biggest risk," Plotkin wrote back. Horvath responded, "I have a 2nd hand read from someone at the company—this is 3rd quarter I have gotten this read from them and it has been very good in the last two quarters. They are saying GMs miss by 50–80 bps [basis points] … Please keep to yourself as obviously not well known." Steinberg responded, "Normally we would never divulge data like this, so please be discreet. Thanks."
The S.E.C. later alleged that 24 minutes after getting Horvath's e-mail Plotkin began selling his Dell position and, as a result, was able to avoid $2 million in losses.
A day later, Steinberg e-mailed Horvath again. With the subject line "Dell action," he asked, "Have u double checked JT [Tortora] this week?" Horvath responded, "Yes he checked in couple days ago, same read no change." Steinberg shorted more Dell, according to the government.
When Dell's number came out, the gross margin was even lower than what Goyal had told Tortora—so the stock began plummeting and eventually fell more than 13 percent.
Chiasson wrote to Adondakis, "Nice call." Indeed: according to the government, Level made more than $53 million in illegal profits on that one trade. At Diamondback, Newman, who had taken a much smaller position, made almost $3 million for the fund.
Ron Dennis wrote to Tortora, "You da man. I owe you."
Tortora checked in with Horvath. "You there on Dell," he asked. Horvath responded, "nice man, you nailed it."
The government later alleged that Steinberg's fund earned $1 million in illegal profits.
Ultimately, the government indicted Chiasson, Newman, and Horvath not just for the big Dell trade but also for conspiring to swap information on other stocks, including Nvidia. After a month-long trial, a jury found Chiasson and Newman guilty after deliberating for just two days. (Both men are appealing the verdict.) Six weeks before the trial, in late September 2012, Horvath pleaded guilty to insider trading in both Dell and Nvidia. In his plea, he said that he provided information to his portfolio manager—Mike Steinberg—who then traded on his tips.
Although the judge ruled that there was an "inference" that Ganek "was aware of the source and nature of this information," Adondakis testified that he had never told Ganek his source. Ganek was not charged. Immediately after the raid, he hired an outside law firm to do an investigation and told investors that he was "highly confident that my conduct in leading the firm and its investment process was lawful and ethical at all times," but he couldn't say the same for Chiasson. On February 11, 2011, he sent a letter to investors telling them he was shutting Level Global down, which he called a "very difficult and painful personal decision."
Diamondback ultimately paid a big price, too, even though the senior people were never implicated. The firm eventually struck a non-prosecution agreement with the government, meaning that it wouldn't be held criminally liable, and it paid the government $9 million, which is small for an insider-trading fine. But a combination of some rocky performance and the continued torrent of bad news about the industry-wide insider-trading investigation finally caused investors to say, Enough. At the end of 2012, Diamondback announced that it was closing its doors, too.
As for Loch Capital, soon after the raid the McSweeneys reportedly told investors that they were not the focus of the investigation, but by the end of the year Loch Capital had closed, too.
In late March, Mike Steinberg was indicted for insider trading on Dell and Nvidia. He is—by a long shot—the person closest to Cohen who has been caught up in the probe.
Once Steinberg's name started appearing in connection with Horvath, many had the sense he was next. Including Steinberg. Which is why, according to Reuters, he jumped from hotel to hotel for weeks, hoping to avoid the embarrassment of being arrested in front of his wife and two children, while his lawyer tried to arrange a deal wherein prosecutors allowed him to turn himself in. This tactic had worked for Chiasson; when F.B.I. agents showed up at his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, the doorman handed them a note, instructing them to call Chiasson's lawyer. (Chiasson turned himself in later that day.)
Steinberg was not so lucky. At six A.M. on March 29, agents arrested him at his $8 million Park Avenue apartment. He had just returned from a trip to Florida, while his family, thankfully, had stayed behind. Steinberg's lawyer, Barry Berke, says, "We are preparing for a full-fledged and full-throated defense, and we have every expectation that he will be vindicated."
Gabe Plotkin, who also allegedly traded Dell shares at SAC, has not been charged with any wrongdoing, but even the mention of his name is potentially a much bigger problem for the firm. Not only is he a big deal in terms of the profits he makes, but, as one person familiar with SAC says, Plotkin has also been in front of investors as one of the faces of the firm. And SAC is defending him vigorously. "Gabe Plotkin has not been accused of wrongdoing and has done nothing wrong," says an SAC spokesperson. "He has built a successful career on a commitment to sound fundamental research."
Maybe so. SAC insists that its compliance system is extraordinary and emblematic of the new SAC. But the first line of defense against insider trading is supposed to be the portfolio managers, who are required to go to the compliance lawyers immediately if they even suspect they've gotten inside information. Another hedge-fund executive, when asked what the compliance lawyers should have done after seeing Horvath's e-mails, laughs. "After the lawyer had a heart attack or lost his lunch, you mean?"
And so, what some others in the industry can't understand is why the Dell trade wasn't a red alert for SAC's lawyers long before the government got there.
Implausible Deniability
In the fall of 2012, just after Chiasson and Newman's trial began, the government unveiled yet another shocker. On November 20, the S.E.C. filed a complaint against a former SAC portfolio manager named Mathew Martoma, alleging that he'd orchestrated the largest insider trade in history—$276 million in illegal profits and avoided losses, more than five times the size of the Dell trade—by getting advance information about the clinical trial of an experimental Alzheimer's drug. He allegedly used that information to persuade Cohen to take a big long position in the stocks of the two drugmakers—the Dublin-based Elan, and Wyeth, a New Jersey company (eventually acquired by Pfizer)—that were developing the drug. In July 2008, a week before the results of the clinical trial were due out, Martoma helped persuade Cohen to do a 180 and not only sell his huge stake in the two stocks but bet against them with big short positions.
In late 2011, F.B.I. agents confronted Martoma on the artificial front lawn of his $1.9 million, 8,000-square-foot home, in Boca Raton, Florida, while his wife, Rosemary, took their three children inside. Agent Matthew Callahan pressed him to become an informant against Cohen; when he refused, the agents leaned on him, reminding him of the damning evidence they had against him and of how much time he might spend away from his family if he were sent to prison (as much as 45 years). Martoma then fainted, but, soon on his feet, he remained defiant.
"The charges unsealed today describe cheating coming and going," Bharara told the press on November 20, 2012, the same day the S.E.C. also filed a complaint. "Specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side." It is this trade that accounts for the lion's share—more than $600 million—of the $616 million fine that SAC agreed to pay the S.E.C.
In the narrative of how the government continued to pick away at SAC, this particular case came out of left field. The investigation into the Elan trade was not begotten by Karl Motey, or Wes Wang, or Richard Choo-Beng Lee. It did not involve Primary Global Research, or even a technology stock, for that matter.
But in the narrative of the evolution of SAC—and, perhaps, the evolution of insider trading—Martoma makes perfect sense to Wall Street insiders. He didn't drop off a big bag of cash to get advance word of an impending merger or pay big commissions to get an early call on a stock from a Wall Street analyst. He was a smart, hardworking guy who did an enormous amount of legwork—and who also allegedly used his expertise to cultivate a source who then gave him that extra bit of Edge.
Born Ajai Mathew Mariamdani Thomas to Indian immigrants, Martoma was raised in Florida and graduated summa cum laude from Duke in 1995. According to The New York Times, he studied biomedicine, ethics, and public policy, worked briefly at the National Human Genome Research Institute, in Washington, and spent a year and a half at Harvard Law School before dropping out to go to business school at Stanford. He worked at a small Boston hedge fund called Sirios Capital, and then joined SAC in 2006. Well coiffed and always dressed in neatly pressed slacks, he was "articulate, well put together, smooth, and calm," according to someone who knows him, who adds, "You can see how he would be persuasive in a credible way."
Elan, the company that got Martoma in trouble, had a history of controversy, "decades of accounting fraud, overstated clinical trials, and blowups," says a hedge-fund manager, and indeed, in 2005, Elan had to pay the S.E.C. $15 million for violating the anti-fraud statutes of the federal securities laws. But by 2007 it was making a comeback thanks to excitement about an experimental Alzheimer's drug called bapineuzumab, or "bapi," that it was developing with Wyeth. Results from the drug's clinical trials, which would show whether it was safe and effective, were due in the summer of 2008. On the Street, Elan's stock generated strong feelings. Detractors said the company simply couldn't be trusted. On top of that, experienced health-care traders are always suspicious of companies that claim success with Alzheimer's drugs, because they think the area is rife with pipe dreams.
By 2007, Elan's stock was "a battleground," says another trader. "People were getting into fights at medical meetings. Guys were getting really violent, not in a physical way, but verbally." And it was a battleground within SAC, because the other health-care pods there wanted not to own the stock but to sell it short, according to one person familiar with the situation. The dissenters included a health-care pod run by David Munno and Benjamin Slate.
But Martoma remained an enthusiastic buyer of Elan and Wyeth—he included Elan on the list of his best ideas that he submitted to Cohen—and Cohen "centerbooked" them, meaning that he bought their stocks in the "Cohen account."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Martoma was not well liked within SAC. "A lot of guys hated him," recalls the person familiar with events. "They thought he was cocky, he had Steve's ear on this giant trade, and he didn't talk to anyone about it. People thought he was sneaky and selfish."
But none of that—the skepticism of his fellow portfolio managers, the sketchiness of the situation—seemed to matter to Cohen, who was with Martoma, and in a huge way. According to the government, SAC accumulated more than $700 million worth of Elan and Wyeth stock, almost $400 million of which was held in the Cohen account.
The government would later allege that it wasn't just Martoma's knowledge of this industry or his hard work that led to the giant long position. Rather, he had cultivated a relationship with Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan—and the chairman of the committee that was monitoring the bapi clinical trial. Martoma had met Gilman through an expert-network firm called the Gerson Lehrman Group, and SAC wound up paying him $108,000 in total for his insights. The government alleges that Gilman, who came to regard Martoma as a "friend and a pupil," began leaking positive information from the clinical trials to him as early as 2007, even once sending him non-public data labeled "For Your Eyes Only." ("Gilman made a tremendously bad judgment and he'll live with that," says his lawyer, Marc Mukasey.)
Throughout the summer of 2008, Elan's stock continued to soar. But the smart money didn't believe bapi was going to pan out, and they couldn't figure out why Cohen was long. "We were all saying, Why did SAC take a position this big? What the fuck does he know that we don't?" says another trader. The dissent within SAC reached a fever pitch, too. On March 26, 2008, Munno and Slate sent Cohen an e-mail that read, "ELN, (important, please read) negative reads from company and other buysiders." It listed reasons why they were concerned. Cohen forwarded the e-mail to Martoma, who responded, "I read the message. Nothing worrisome here. Let me know when you are free to discuss in detail." Cohen stayed long. In an instant message to another SAC trader, he wrote that Martoma was expecting positive news from the clinical trial, and he was the one "closest" to the situation. "Closer," says a former SAC trader, can be a euphemism for having inside information.
On June 17, Elan and Wyeth announced the preliminary results of the clinical trial. The headlines were positive, and although skeptics thought the data was sketchy, both stocks shot higher still. After that, Cohen "indicated he would no longer consider any investment ideas in Elan or Wyeth" from Munno and Slate, according to the S.E.C. Final results from the clinical trial were due on July 29.
At some point in late June, Gilman started getting even more information about the drug's progress because he was selected to present the final clinical-trial results. In the end, the news wasn't good, although the companies tried to spin it positively. It turned out that patients taking bapi over a long period of time didn't improve. On Sunday, July 13, Martoma and Gilman spoke for about an hour and 40 minutes. Four days later, Gilman received a PowerPoint from Elan in an e-mail labeled, "Confidential, do not distribute." It contained detailed information about the results of the clinical trial. Gilman sent the PowerPoint to Martoma, according to the government, who then called him to request the password needed to open the encrypted file. On the morning of Sunday, July 20, Martoma e-mailed Cohen. He asked, "Is there a good time to catch up with you this morning? It's important." Cohen sent his cell-phone number, and at 9:43 A.M. the two spoke for about 20 minutes.
"Every time there is a fraud, SAC says, We have amazing compliance!" observes another hedge-fund manager. "But the only question that matters is: Were the compliance people on the phone that Sunday morning? If they don't show up for that, who cares that there are a million people in compliance?"
The following Monday, July 21, Cohen's head trader began selling SAC's huge stakes in Elan and Wyeth, according to the S.E.C. He did his best to do so in a way that wouldn't be detected inside or outside SAC. Or as the head trader told Martoma in an e-mail, "Obviously no one knows except me you and [Cohen]." By July 29, the date of the announcement of the clinical-trial results, SAC had a big short position in Elan and Wyeth.
On July 30, the first trading day after the companies disclosed the negative trial results, Elan's stock fell about 42 percent and Wyeth's stock dropped about 12 percent. The government alleges that by selling, and then shorting, SAC was able to avoid $194 million in losses and make another $83 million in profits. That year, Martoma was paid a $9.4 million bonus.
In the fall of 2008, the regulator for the New York Stock Exchange noted the unusual trading leading up to the announcement of the results. According to Bloomberg, the S.E.C. figured out how much money SAC had made and began sending out subpoenas, requesting phone records and trading data, and looking through every phone call made by someone with an Elan connection to someone at SAC. They found Gilman and Martoma and compared the dates of the phone calls with those of SAC activity on the stocks.
In the hedge-fund grapevine, there's another theory floating around: Gilman was very active in speaking to hedge funds and had a reputation for being too chatty, according to one source. The speculation is that a trader who was facing legal problems on another trade turned the government on to Gilman. In any event, after Gilman was contacted by the F.B.I. in the summer of 2012, he agreed to give testimony in exchange for not being prosecuted.
In 2010, Martoma was fired from SAC for poor performance. An SAC employee called him a "one trick pony with Elan," according to the government. As of this writing, he evidently continues to refuse to cooperate, saying he is innocent. Recently he changed lawyers, causing insiders to speculate that he intends to fight.
But it is hard to find a lawyer or hedge-fund trader familiar with the government's allegations who understands why SAC would agree to pay such a big fine if the firm believed in Martoma's innocence. (A source familiar with SAC's thinking says that the firm settled simply to remove the uncertainty.) The government's hope, of course, is that Martoma will flip and hand them Cohen's head on a silver platter, thereby reducing his own sentence. Cohen's supporters claim that, in light of the clear incentives for Martoma, he simply doesn't have the goods on Cohen. Cohen won't discuss it, and the firm has offered a number of defenses for its sudden change of heart on Elan and Wyeth.
There's also an argument that it simply doesn't make sense that a guy as smart as Steve Cohen, a guy who knows that the government has been watching him for years, a guy who already has more money than God, would ever take the risk of using inside information on such a huge trade.
No, it doesn't make sense—unless you believe that Cohen, when faced with the choice of winning or losing on a big bet, simply couldn't stop himself from choosing to win. Just as in the old fable of the scorpion and the frog, that's his nature.
The question remains whether the government can make a case against Cohen, much less prove to a jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Steve Cohen is guilty of insider trading. But maybe that doesn't matter, because, in what is arguably the most important way, the government has already won. In February, investors asked to withdraw $1.68 billion (nearly 30 percent of SAC's investor funds), and more is expected.
"You have to understand, all Steve Cohen cares about is that important people think that he is the world's greatest trader," says someone who once knew him well. "And he is already damaged goods. A lot of what he has worked for has been taken away already."
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Handmade walking canes / walking sticks are not mass produced.
Custom walking cane will be made individually and signed by the artist.
The handle of the walking cane can be cast from 3 different metals:
1. Yellow bronze.
2. German silver ( silver imitation alloy - looks like silver ).
3. Sterling silver ( real silver - 92.5% ), approximately 5.0oz.
The Sterling silver and German silver can be finished with 24K Gold plating trim ( two tone version ).
The length of the handle is 4.7"
The shaft of the walking cane can be made from black Ebony wood or from reddish - brown Rosewood.
The end of the shaft is covered with a metal ferrule and a rubber tip can be placed over the ferrule if needed.
The standard length of the walking cane is 37" and can be changed at the customer 's request.
The diameter of the shaft is 7/8".
The walking cane can be converted to a Sword cane. MORE INFORMATION
A sword section will be installed into the shaft.
Also the walking cane can be converted to a Gun cane. MORE INFORMATION
A gun section will be installed into the shaft (available with ebony shafts only).
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Patients at the Sleep Disorders Centers receive sophisticated testing to establish a precise diagnosis of sleep problems and create the best treatment plan.
Getting help begins with a comprehensive physical examination by one of our expert sleep physicians, with discussion of sleep habits and history. Testing includes EEG, EKG and measurement of oral and nasal airflow, blood oxygen, chest wall movement and leg movement.
If a nighttime sleep study is needed, patients rest in attractive, comfortable private rooms in our modern, technologically advanced sleep laboratories. Sleep rooms include a television and adjoining bathroom, to make the overnight stay as pleasant as possible. Parents may stay with children during overnight testing.
As patients sleep, continuous recordings are made noninvasively of sleep patterns, heart rate, breathing, muscle movement, brain waves and oxygen levels through polysomnographic technology.
Daytime multiple sleep latency tests and home monitoring also are available.
Our sleep physicians review test findings to form a diagnosis and design individualized treatment. Some of the successful therapies we use:
Insomnia – Changes to sleep behaviors and environment, lifestyle adjustments, medication
Sleep apnea – Precise fitting of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) mask to keep airway open, lifestyle changes, other treatments if needed
Narcolepsy – Lifestyle changes, behavioral treatments, medication
Restless leg syndrome – Behavior modification, medication
Circadian rhythm sleep disturbance – Lifestyle changes, light therapy treatments
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Fruit Pizzas For Breakfast?
Kellogg Co., Battle Creek, Mich., warms up the frozen foods aisle with a special and unique morning delivery. New Eggo Real Fruit Pizzas combine breakfast food favorites such as fruit and granola into one delicious offering.
An all-in-one combination of fruit and warm toasted granola on an oven-baked cinnamon and maple-flavored crust, Eggo Real Fruit Pizzas are available in two varieties, Strawberry Granola and Mixed Berry Granola. They meet the growing demand for new, convenient breakfast options that taste great. As breakfast products such as cereal, snack and energy bars, fruit and yogurt gain popularity, this unique and flavorful introduction gives breakfast enthusiasts a convenient and unique option.
"Egg Real Fruit Pizzas will satisfy consumers' desire for great taste, convenience and variety," says Michael Allen, president of Kellogg Frozen Foods. "Innovation and meeting consumers' needs are a key focus of the Eggo brand. Eggo has a history of introducing innovative, new products that provide a convenient, great-tasting way to start your day. Data shows this new product meets growing demands for new convenient breakfast options."
Suggested retail price for a single serving pizza is $2.79.


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Of all the games to feature on my list, this is probably the hardest one to describe and to articulate my thoughts with. Like Flower from 2009, Limbo left a strong and important mark on my gaming career, but for reasons of which I'm not entirely sure.
It's a beautiful game, the silhouette, shadowy art direction being a pleasure to see in screenshots and an absolute wonder in motion. Its use of silence was particularly endearing, both because so few games use silence effectively and because it enhanced the imagery on screen to create an experience that is unique. It's brutal; communicates a sense of longing and bravery; and what you discover is at once terrifying and ominous, yet it's these factors that make progress through the game so compelling and rewarding. It's also short, sweet, and surprisingly emotional: the very example of the potential downloadable games have as well as what amazing things can be achieved within the indie space. Despite some claims that the farther it goes along, the sillier it gets, nothing in Limbo feels out of place and all of it feels like it was included for a reason. The obligatory discussion about whether it's an example of art or not is, in my mind, irrelevant -- what Limbo is, is an experience like no other, and a game that deserves to be played regardless of whether you end up liking it or not. It takes an aesthetic, simplicity in its presentation yet complexity in its design, and contends with themes that don't exist anywhere else, combines them, and creates a game that is just a sheer delight to experience. And, perhaps, it is that last word that explains why it features on this list: it's not just another game and when you are done, it will stay in your mind rather than be forgotten. If that's not the sign of something worth attempting again in the future, nothing is.
Indie darling, breakout hit and my personal addiction, Minecraft surprised everybody when it became a phenomenon, including the game's creator Notch who was suddenly a millionaire. But, when you look at what Minecraft provides and the kind of game it delivers, it's not as surprising as it initially seems.
A true sandbox title, Minecraft's best asset is you, the player. The reason for that is simple: Minecraft is what you make of it. Much has been said about the game's creative side, reminding people of Lego due to its blocky worlds and the enjoyment people have had making insane creations such as replicas of various real life constructs, interpretations of fantasy locations and the demonstrations of ingenuity, particularly using Red Stone. Others again have focused on the kind of experience Minecraft delivers, discussing its survival horror elements thanks to the need to find shelter at night to defend (read: hide) from the game's enemies; its breed of fantasy born out of 'waking up' in a strange new land, uncertain of what you may find; and even on the platforming elements that come from climbing the game's many mountains and caverns. That last one is a bit of a stretch but such is the imagination that Minecraft inspires in people and the dreaming they can't help but do when it comes to the game's world, crucial due to the way in which it is procedurally generated and unique to each individual who plays. So far, I've focused on my own feelings that I've had during the game, and the subtle but effective ways in which it can tell a story, despite not having a predetermined narrative (yet). There's plenty more I want to talk about in the near future so I won't go into detail here, but needless to say, Minecraft is on this list because it caters to a variety of play-styles and player desires, puts us in a world that is at once fascinating and entirely our own, and contains an insane amount of complexity hidden behind its simple art direction and accessible mechanics. It's popular for a reason, amazing for so much more, and is the perfect example of how to captivate an audience and keep them interested through regular additions and, more importantly, through their own, personally defined goals. This is emergent gameplay at its purest and definitely a game other developers, indie or otherwise, should look to as they chase the ever elusive emergent gameplay prize. Amusingly, the game isn't even finished yet and as we play, we're all helping to develop it into something that should be even more special. Based on what we have already, the future is incredibly exciting for not just the game, but the impact it will have on the medium as well.
It is pretty obvious by now that I'm absolutely in love with this game, my praise shortly after release coming thick and fast, and the role-playing series that followed demonstrating a desire to not only experiment with my writing and approach to games, but to inhabit the world of Formula 1 and see what comes of it. Whether that series has been successful or not is up to you but as far as the game itself is concerned, it is the best F1 game to come out in a long time and does everything a licensed game should.
F1 2010 is more than just the tracks, the drivers and the cars; it's about the lifestyle, the spectacle and the celebration of speed, technology and engineering (sound familiar?) as well. It's about the ability to go as fast as possible around a track, as smoothly as possible and with a skill and finesse that isn't just tricky to master, but something that can't be replicated anywhere else. It's about the highs and lows that come with each race, the drama and the emotion that result from it, and the desire to work harder than before to overcome and ultimately master any issues that may arise, be it from performance, mechanical components of the car, or the constant need to improve one's driving style. It's about entertaining the fans whilst satisfying the team, and meeting your own personal expectations, whatever they may be. In other words, it's about the sport of Formula 1 and as such, it delivers the life and passion of motorsport as well as the brand and culture, culminating in a game that transcends its genre (and thus, competititon), elevates a sport that's sometimes hidden behind the celebrities and controversy, and puts people on the track instead of behind the (virtual) wheel. The fact it was Codemasters' first attempt, while impressive, is irrelevant; that it goes above and beyond what it means to utilize a license effectively highlights not only what can be done, but why it should be in the first place.
Which begs the question: when's F1 2011 coming out…? ;)
Something has to be said for a game's quality if it has the power to whisk someone obsessed with another title -- which we'll get to in a minute -- away and obtain their full attention through sheer amazement over what was just experienced. Heavy Rain did this for me, and even now, months after release and after a series of posts discussing the game, I'm still not sure I can explain why.
Ever since it was announced and I heard what Quantic Dream were attempting with Heavy Rain, combined with my enthusiasm for their previous game Fahrenheit, I was hooked and couldn't wait to see what the final product would bring. Despite devouring any morsel of information I could find, the end result still surprised me and, like Alan Wake, I think it is purely because of the story and its characters. Unlike Alan Wake, however, Heavy Rain's narrative was about as real as you can get in games today, focusing on themes that have never been explored (in a serious way, at least) previously, and centering the entire game around a father's love for his children, and the lengths he would go to ensure their safety and wellbeing. Its mechanics may be a mixed bag of success and frustration; some of its characters may have not met their potential or were exploited in an unnecessary, silly way; and the eventual outcome and reveal of the Origami Killer may be disappointing -- both because it may have not been who you were expecting or wanted it to be, and because no matter how your personal story pans out, the person is the same -- but Heavy Rain delivered on its promise of a realistic narrative which ensures its position here. Its characters -- like it or not -- get under your skin, and that's something few other games can achieve. To say Heavy Rain had to happen would be an understatement; to be thankful that it did would be to appreciate what it did manage to achieve, as well as highlight to the industry that this sort of thing -- regardless of how successful or not it happens to be -- needs to be explored further if we're to truly obtain legitimacy as a creative, artistic medium, if not the dominant one.
Surprise, surprise, a BioShock game is on the list. Come on though, as if it wouldn't be -- you are reading a blog whose name was inspired by the franchise.
Personal bias aside, however, BioShock 2 would have made the list anyway because, quite frankly, it was just so damn good. It isn't easy releasing a sequel to a game that has gone on to become one of the medium's best, and one that is constantly referred to when discussing important subjects. Not since Grand Theft Auto III have we had a game (and now franchise) that has inspired such reverence and discussion (Portal aside), and as such any follow up would be scrutinized. And BioShock 2 was, copping criticism by people who were strangely (in my opinion at least) sick of Rapture; who didn't enjoy the gameplay a second time around; and who wanted it to be, perhaps unrealistically, better than the first game. The thing is it was better than the first game, maybe not in terms of the awe and beauty that the original displayed but certainly in terms of refinement of the game's mechanics and definitely in the way in which it framed the hallowed, empty halls of Rapture in a new light. And it is this last point that is the most important: the new perspective BioShock 2 brought to Rapture didn't just show us another side of the city, it changed it from being Andrew Ryan's baby to being everyone's, through its emphasis on highlighting the people rather than the power. The areas we visited in the first game were created for Rapture's dignitaries and people of importance, as well as designed to showcase the unique personality and extreme attitudes that Andrew Ryan so incessantly portrayed, further exacerbated by the opposition struggle led by Fontaine. BioShock 2's version of Rapture, on the other hand, doesn't just showcase the areas in which the 'common-folk' live, it showcases why they're just as important, if not more so, than the big-shot personalities found in the likes of the Medical Pavilion and Fort Frolic. By doing so, it provides insight into the inner workings of the city as a whole and illuminates the emotion, morals and resolve that its inhabitants have -- whether Ryan or Fontaine recognised it or not. It may have introduced a new power, of sorts, with Sophia Lamb, and the importance of family -- particularly as far as the Little Sisters are concerned -- certainly played an integral role, but it was this new perspective with which to view Rapture that elevated BioShock 2 beyond sequel status and into the history books as a game worthy of attention, perhaps more so than its predecessor.
Throw in the astonishing and incredible downloadable add-on Minerva's Den, which further defined the city through yet another perspective and demonstrated so easily just how many stories are still yet to be told within those walls deep in the depths of the ocean, and you have a game that doesn't just improve on what's come before, but reinvents it and boasts to the world that anything you can do, can be done better. It is this mantra, whether you believe it fits the game or not, that needs to be acknowledged in the wider industry and, with any luck, is one that will become a motivation in the years to come. Best of all, for someone like me? Rapture may be dead as far its production and celebration of the self is concerned, but it has never been more alive when it comes to its potential and what can be discovered amongst its walls. All we have to do is visit it and explore it, the rest will happen naturally.
So there you have it, my choices for 2010's best games. Like all of you no doubt, I didn't get to play everything that I wanted to during the year -- and I'm frustrated with myself for not being able to play games that were particularly high on my anticipation list -- but what I did experience was amazing and certainly suggests to me that gaming hasn't just evolved, but that it is well on its way to a bigger, brighter and important future. Personally, the ability to inhabit brave new worlds whilst experiencing fascinating stories -- if not creating them ourselves -- was a really strong thing to take away from 2010, as was the celebration of the old, new and the processes in which they are made. Game spaces, stories and new perspectives were all important to me and, I have no doubt, will continue to be as we turn our attention to 2011. Based on the games I'm already chomping on the bit to play, it looks like this year will certainly give the last a run for its money -- no mean feat when you recall just how packed it was, and just what it brought to the table. Don't you just love videogames?


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The new Organika flick Zach & Walker's Concrete Jungle premiered last night to a full house in Encinitas' La Paloma theater. As most of us derelicts sauntered in with tall cans under our sweaters, it was apparent that who's whos from all over Southern California had made the drive to see Zach and Walker set it off. The LRG homeys were in, as was the Osiris team including Duffel, Rattray, and Caswell. The Sk8mafia was in the house as were the pillars of the North County scene: Kenny Hoyle, Chris Troy, Andy Beaumarchais, Tim Tom, et al. I even saw Chris Hall in the theater. Matt Worley took our tickets, we grabbed a large popcorn and the show began. (con't under gallery)
Zach Lyons kicked it off properly with his skinny steez and creative tricks. I think Quim Cardona had a cameo with a handful of tricks in Z's part. Rodrigo Peteson was introduced via a handful of well-popped maneuvers, and then the crowd ripped up in hysterics when Walker Ryan's name appeared on screen. Walker's part was one relentless string of difficult and gnarly tricks all done with his smooth style. Adelmo Jr. and Karl Watson came in for some cameos, and just when we all thought his part was over—a second song started. The hammers came out, and a lot of pros left the theater searching for the local paper's Classified section. As Terry Kennedy so eloquently put it in Baker 3, "Niggas gonna need jobs after this comes out."


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NEW YORK – Late-night comics are over any initial reluctance to make President Barack Obama the butt of their jokes.
The Center for Media and Public Affairs found that Obama was the most joked-about political figure this year through Labor Day. The Washington-based think tank said Friday that Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Jimmy Fallon joked about Obama a total of 309 times. Sarah Palin, with 137, was a distant second.
That's in line with the level of jokes levied at Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Comics initially had a difficult time zeroing in on Obama — he was fourth behind John McCain, Bush and Palin as a butt of jokes during the year he was elected president.
The center says most Obama jokes portray him as disinterested or ineffective. Much of them are tied to policy.
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Mr. Red Bottoms was born in a worker's family in Paris in 1963, all of which began with a special experience as a child. Once he passed by Paris's Oceanic Art Museum in front of the door, saw a remarkable icon, a tapered heels are two rows of thick lines cross, carved wooden floor to visit the women told the "good" in the hall. Looking at the beautiful high heels, he was obsessed with the 13 year old, as if for the first time that shoes could have been so beautiful.
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Re: Name top 10 Indian player in CC(rating)?
bigbossml wrote:ratan1st wrote:Well, I don't know for sure but here are some top players :-
good_guy, m_swayams, narayansl ( yes, he is an indian ), soundgarden.
A more recent guy, final_legend.
Also, lionhunter is pretty good.
If you want to know their ratings, type their names in 'find friends'.
Final_legend was a cheat
I don't think so, I saw him a few days ago, when he was supposedly banned.