Danielle Chiesi Said Insider Trading was "Like an Orgasm," According to Fortune
NEW YORK (CBS) The story of Danielle Chiesi has all the sex and glamour of a Hollywood movie - and this Wall Street drama features the kind of greed Gordon Gecko famously called "good".
In a lengthy article in Fortune magazine, a blueprint is laid out for how a pageant queen from upstate New York climbed the hedge fund ladder and wound up at the center of a scandal that is indicative of what's thought to be wrong with Wall Street.
Prosecutors allege that Chiesi maintained a "stable" of well placed sources within the tech companies she covered for the Bear Sterns hedge fund New Castle, and that she fed that inside information not only to her boss, and former lover, Mark Kurland but also to the head of another hedge fund, Raj Rajaratnam, who apparently was the big fish the government originally targeted before uncovering Chiesi's "network," according to the Fortune profile.
One of those sources was Bob Moffat, the senior vice president of IBM's systems and technology group, and one of the most prominent tech executives snagged in the federal dragnet. In the article Moffat is portrayed as a number cruncher who was perhaps dazzled by attention from the bubbly blue-eyed blonde who reportedly liked to tell people "I love the three S's: sex, stocks, and sports." She compared insider trading, according to the article, to an orgasm.
Moffat pleaded guilty in March 2010 to knowingly passing along inside information to Chiesi and was sentenced to six months in prison, but in the article he continues to dodge questions about the affair that allegedly brought this tech "golden boy" down. When Moffat learned that the Fortune article would touch on the affair between Chiesi and himself, he downplayed the affair.
"Everyone wants to make this about sex. Danielle had an extensive network of business people," Moffat told Fortune. "And she added clarity about what was going on in the business world...I know in my heart what this relationship was about: clarity in the business environment."
That and "orgasmic" information, apparently.
Chiesi, says the article, is out of jail and is apparently planning on fighting the charges against her.