The New York Times has another background piece on the cast of characters in the most recent insider trading ring involving former Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch employees. Much of it is a rehash, but there is some new info in the piece: Monica Vujovic raked in $6,000-7,000 a night performing exotic dances according to a transcript of David Pajcin’s bail hearing. Yowsah! Pajcin badly impersonated Vujovic, his girlfriend, on the phone with Ameritrade where he did some of the illegal trading in her account, although Ameritrade didn’t monitor the account despite their suspicions. Oops. Pajcin and Vujovic made trades in her account over coffee at Starbucks. Pajcin had aspirations to manage a hedge fund — uh — probably not much chance of that now. And Eugene Plotkin is still sitting in the pokey, still not able to make his $3 million bail….
Indeed, its cast of characters would be more likely to be found appearing on "Jerry Springer" than the Wall Street program "Squawk Box." They include Ms. Vujovic, an exotic dancer who earned $6,000 to $7,000 a night, according to a transcript of Mr. Pajcin’s bail hearing; Mr. Pajcin’s aunt, who was a retired seamstress in an underwear factory in Croatia; Mr. Plotkin’s father; a driver in Croatia; a wealthy investor in Germany; and a softball buddy from Brooklyn named Elvis….
DAVID PAJCIN and Eugene Plotkin are ambitious children of Eastern European immigrants. Both men went to prestigious schools and sought careers on Wall Street. They apparently hit it off when they met at Goldman Sachs in 2000, but their careers quickly took different paths. Mr. Pajcin left Goldman after just five and a half months; Mr. Plotkin remained there until his arrest on April 11. But even as their careers diverged, the two remained friends.
At Harvard, Mr. Plotkin expressed a strong desire to succeed on Wall Street, former classmates said. One friend recalled him talking about how his family did not have much money when he was growing up, fueling his own drive to succeed. She said that "it was definitely a big part of his identity" and that when he became an "I banker" or investment banker, he made it clear he still wanted more from life.
Mr. Plotkin was born in Moscow, and his family eventually settled in Palo Alto, Calif. After a year at the California Institute of Technology, he transferred to Harvard in 1997. According to Katherine Foshko, who said she was a friend at Harvard, he sent videos of himself playing pool as addenda to his transfer application.
Former classmates say Mr. Plotkin thrived at Harvard, where he discovered competitive ballroom dancing and participated in the Russian Club as well as performing well academically. He seemed to love attention, on or off the dance floor, they said. "He was very entertaining and always wanted to be the life of the party," Ms. Foshko said.
When he graduated in 2000, Mr. Plotkin got a job at Goldman Sachs but continued to pursue outside interests, including competitive dancing: he is ranked 49th in the United States in professional Latin dancing.
According to two people, he rented a small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights until just after the authorities began their investigation of his trading last year; he then decided to rent space in a large house in Airmont, N.Y., about 30 miles northwest of New York City.
Mr. Pajcin had shown much of the same promise as Mr. Plotkin. Born and raised in Clifton, N.J., except for a few years in Croatia, he graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 2000.
Soon after he graduated from college, Mr. Pajcin, like Mr. Plotkin, landed a job in the commodities group at Goldman Sachs, a highly competitive position in a small, highly profitable unit within the bank. But his career seemed to falter from the start. After his quick exit from Goldman, he took a job at First New York Securities, a far less prestigious firm, but lasted only four months there. For the next two years, he drifted through various positions, none longer than a few months, at small brokerage firms, day-trading shops and one electronic bond futures shop.
Mr. Pajcin hinted at the reason for this rapid turnover while giving a deposition to the Securities and Exchange Commission last August. "I had my own ideas about how I wanted to trade," he said, "so I was trying to find a firm that would allow me to trade the way I wanted to trade."
Finally, in 2003, Mr. Pajcin stopped working for securities firms and focused on trading for himself, sometimes using accounts he set up with the help of friends and family members around the world. At the same time, he and Mr. Plotkin wrote, directed and starred in their own movie. Made in 2003, it was called alternately "One Way" and "Blindside" and it depicted the life of Dean, a successful Wall Street banker whose perfect life — beautiful girlfriend, raucous parties — is shattered when he finds a bloody body in his bathtub and is framed for the murder. The character then tumbles into a nightmare world of drugs, violence and unusual sex. The film was never distributed.
Mr. Pajcin came to realize that day trading was not supporting the life he had envisioned, a life built around his passion for clubs, movies and girls, according to people who know him. It is unclear if he even had a fixed address at this time. When F.B.I. agents turned up at his father’s apartment in Clifton, N.J., last fall, looking for Mr. Pajcin, his father had to call Mr. Plotkin to try and find his son, according to a recording of Mr. Pajcin’s bail hearing.
Mr. Pajcin told regulators he had dreams of starting his own hedge fund someday. But the bulk of the profits he made in 2004 and 2005 came not from sophisticated hedging strategies and risky bets, but from virtually risk-free investments based on inside information they had started to receive from Mr. Shpigelman, a 23-year-old Merrill Lynch analyst whom Mr. Plotkin had met while on a college recruiting drive at the State University of New York at Binghamton, investigators have charged.
Mr. Plotkin had coached Mr. Shpigelman when he was preparing to interview for Wall Street jobs. After he landed the job at Merrill, he called Mr. Plotkin for lunch, said a person with knowledge of the meeting. At the time, Mr. Shpigelman lived at home with his parents in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn….
An Insider-Trading Case With a B-Movie Plot – New York Times
Tags: Eugene Plotkin, Insider Trading
