This is reminiscent of the 1980s. Randi Collotta, 30, a lawyer for Morgan Stanley, and her husband, Christopher Collotta, 34, have been criminally charged as part of an insider trading ring. Supposedly, the two were able to rack up $15 million in illegal gains. Mitchel Guttenberg, a former executive in the equity research department of UBS Securities, was charged with tipping off traders about upgrades and downgrades. These two are headline arrests in a very uptown-ish scheme that also involved employees of Bear Stearns and Bank of America. Hedge fund managers, compliance professionals and registered reps also figure in. As usual the scheme includes a cloak-and-dagger element. Apparently, when some supervisors discovered the dual rings, they resorted to blackmail. I'd like to hear how it all fell apart. Someone likely got greedy.

For more:
- here's a New York Times article
- read up on some past insider trading here