In addition to Rajaratnam, the following people were arrested in Friday: Rajiv Goel, of Intel Corp.; Anil Kumar, a director at global management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co.; Danielle Chiesi and Mark Kurland of New Castle Partners LLC, the one-time equity hedge fund group at Bear Stearns Asset Management Inc.; and Robert Moffat, a senior vice president at IBM.

Lawyers for those involved have proclaimed their clients’ innocence, and all are free on bail.

The case involves the stocks of some of America’s top companies, including Google and Advanced Micro Devices.

The presence of tech executives among the accused, and the fact that trades involved Silicon Valley stocks, is likely to produce a clampdown on information about tech firms’ plans, Bloomberg reports.

“It’s going to have an immediate chilling effect on communication between company sources and people in the investment community,” Boston University Professor James Post told Bloomberg. “I imagine that general counsels will immediately send out strong reminders—not to be sharing information that has not been made public.”

Rajaratnam, who was born in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo and educated at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, is known as a hard-driving boss dedicated to the art of making money for his clients.

When asked over the years about the success of Galleon, which at one time held $7 billion in assets, Rajaratnam told questioners he was just hungrier than everybody else, the New York Times reports. “After awhile, money is not the motivation. I want to win every time. Taking calculated risks gets my adrenaline pumping,” he told Lois Peltz for her book, “The New Investment Superstars,” in 2001.

But he has also been active in giving to charities, including one that later was found to have funneled money to the Tamil Tigers rebel group in Sri Lanka. Prosecutors do not allege he had knowledge of where that money went.

Rajaratnam, who holds dual Sri Lankan and U.S. citizenship, also helped with money and organization to rebuild homes destroyed by the devastating South Asian tsunami of 2004.

Those weren’t the only charities Rajaratnam has supported, and his arrest has come as a shock to many Indian Americans, the Journal reports. He contributed to such causes as development on the Indian subcontinent and to programs for underprivileged Indian youth in the New York area.

The Wall Street Journal points out that many of the players involved in the case, from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara—Indian-born and Ivy League educated—to Rajaratnam and some of his fellow defendants come from South Asia.

That is, says the Journal, a quintessentially American story about how a relatively small immigrant group has had a big impact on some key areas of the economy.

About 2.5 million Indians live in the United States, but many have found their way into the fields of high-finance, law, and technology. It has to do with a change in the U.S. immigration law in 1965, which abolished quotas in favor of opening up immigration to the best and brightest from around the world.

Among Indians who have made their mark are PepsiCo Inc. Chief Executive Indra Nooyi, and venture capital legend Vinod Khosla. Such organizations as Indus Entrepreneurs, or TiE, have helped draw Indians known for ideas and work ethic into such fields as venture capital and hedge fund management, Vish Mishra, president of Silicon Valley TiE, told the Journal.

And, as with other immigrant groups historically, many of the entrepreneurs originally from the Subcontinent have been drawn into friendships and business relationships with each other.

"How do you develop friendships in a new country?" Mishra, venture director at Clearstone Venture Partners, told the Journal. "Rajiv Goel was Rajaratnam's college mate. That happens in every society in every community."