Ex-Goldman Insider States the Obvious

It's hard to see how Eugene Plotkin could have avoided the guilty plea he entered in a New York federal court today.

Plotkin, a former associate in the fixed income research division of Goldman Sachs, admitted he is guilty of one count of conspiracy and eight counts of insider trading. He agreed to forfeit $6.7 million and he now faces up to 165 years in jail.

Defending him would have been a challenge for even the most seasoned white-collar defense attorney. In the time since his 2005 arrest, the evidence against the Harvard University graduate has just piled higher and higher. It seems Plotkin and his partner in crime, former Goldman analyst David Pajcin, had the uncanny ability to use what one suckered cohort called "false promises, deception, intimidation, and flattery" to convince people of all walks of life to help them make money illegally.

First, Nickolaus Shuster, a former worker at a Wisconsin printing plant, admitted that he tipped Plotkin off on what stocks BusinessWeek would tout in its pages before they were published.

Then Jason Smith, who was a New Jersey mailman, told prosecutors he gave Plotkin information from a grand jury on which he was serving for a case involving Bristol-Myers.

And finally, Stanlislav Shpigelman, a former mergers and acquisitions banker at Merrill Lynch, pled guilty to falling prey to the aforementioned false promises from Plotkin and Pajcin and handing over inside information on pending deals.

by Megan Barnett