Merrill Lynch, Sachs workers charged with insider trading

NEW YORK — Two Goldman Sachs employees made more than $6.7 million through insider trading by enlisting an analyst who provided information on Wall Street deals and a forklift driver who leaked copies of a market-moving magazine, authorities said Tuesday.

Prosecutors called it one of the most extensive insider trading cases in decades, and it has no shortage of salacious details. The case includes allegations that the men tried to get strippers to coax stock tips from investment bankers who had inside knowledge of pending mergers and acquisitions.

“We’ve never seen before a case involving so many different attempts to obtain information illegally,” said Mark Schonfeld, regional director of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which brought civil charges against 13 people.

He said the case was discovered by regulators who noticed unusually high trading volume before a merger announcement. A closer look showed that a 63-year-old retired seamstress in Croatia — the aunt of one of the defendants — had made more than $2 million.

Schonfeld said she was “either the most successful investor in the history of Wall Street or something more nefarious had taken place.”

U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia told a news conference that the case shows that two of Wall Street’s most important firms had workers “who, motivated by greed, are willing to place their careers and their liberty in jeopardy.”

The FBI Tuesday arrested Eugene Plotkin, 26, of Manhattan, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst, and a friend from college, Stanislav Shpigelman, 23, of Brooklyn, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.’s mergers and acquisitions division.

Both were held on $3 million bail after brief appearances in federal court.