When I noticed this headline in yesterday’s New York Times,I blinked several times. I was tired, it was late, maybe I wasn’t see straight…<\/p>\n
But no. I mean, yes. I was seeing straight: Traders of Tips Meet at Grand Central, and Eat the Evidence – NYTimes.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n What are the chances that I’d be telling you twice in one week<\/em> about people eating evidence? First, there was the ex-cop on the witness stand, chewing away<\/a>, and now there are, as Ben Protess writes:<\/p>\n …<\/span>Secret stock tips scribbled on Post-it notes and paper napkins. Illicit meetings held in broad daylight at Grand Central Terminal<\/a>. Cover-up efforts that involved chewing, and even eating, damaging evidence.<\/em><\/p>\n These techniques, straight out of some dime store novel about Cold War operatives, were used by a three-man team to orchestrate an insider trading scheme, the authorities say. The three men \u2014 a broker at a big bank, a clerk at a prestigious law firm and a friend who served as their intermediary \u2014 employed the primitive cloak-and-dagger tactics over about five years to trade on more than a dozen corporate secrets.<\/em><\/p>\n Can we digest any lessons from these stories? Maybe. Warning to prospective witnesses or current defendants: if documents have already been entered into evidence, no point in swallowing them. I mean, you can’t exactly chow down on a whole deposition transcript, can you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I noticed this headline in yesterday’s New York Times,I blinked several times. I was tired, it was late, maybe I wasn’t see straight… But no. I mean, yes. I was seeing straight: Traders of Tips Meet at Grand Central, … Continue reading