Tolstoy on Insider Trading

Last month, a 39-year-old Manhattan hedge fund manager and former altar boy named Anthony Chiasson was slapped with a six-and-a-half year prison term and a $5 million fine for crimes connected to insider trading. It was a very stiff sentence—prosecutors said it was meant to discourage others in the hedge fund “criminal club”—and the judge who delivered the punishment, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Sullivan, scolded Chiasson as he sentenced him. The defendant, he noted disapprovingly, had been “fabulously wealthy”— making $10 to $23 million a year— at the time he used tech-stock tips to make $68 million for his hedge fund, Legal Global. “That’s just staggering,” Sullivan said. “It’s hard to imagine why someone would risk all that to engage in a crime such as this.”