Early this year, the Journal ran a very memorable piece on the Galleon trader David Slaine, outing him as “a government mole who wore a wire strapped to his torso, helping prosecutors to build the biggest insider-trading case in two decades.” Later that week, I spent time with the trader’s ex-wife, Elyse, one of the most interesting ex-wives on Wall Street, and a woman on a public crusade to deny the paper’s claim. “I feel,” she said over a nine-dollar cup of coffee at the Pierre Hotel then, wearing studded Louboutin boots, a ruby ring on her right hand and a Harry Winston diamond watch on the other, “like someone has to tell the truth.”
An announcement from the S.E.C. says otherwise. To settle insider trading charges, Mr. Slaine has agreed to pay the strangely specific sum of $836,385. And things weren’t worse, the S.E.C. says, because of “Slaine’s cooperation with the Commission.”
The Galleon case has been awfully cinematic, and it’s been big: Mr. Slaine was the 14th person charged, and no less than a dozen of the 14 have already pled guilty.
