You might think insider trading cases are boring, filled with nothing more sordid than stories of muffled late-night phone calls to brokers from inside the boardroom, addled CFOs reeking of rum and cigarettes, hair sweaty and dishevelled, shirt half-untucked, screaming “Sell! Sell! Sell!” to an empty room and an uncaring world before the abysmal news before him becomes public knowledge and thus erasing his fortune and with it, his very identity as a captain of industry. And usually they’re just that, if not less. But that was all before Donna Murdoch came to destroy the insider trading scene.

To know Donna Murdoch, you must first know Ashley Madison. Ashley Madison is a website for busy professionals on a mission, if their mission is extramarital sex. Think of it as a high-class Craigslist Casual Encounters website. Ashley Madison gets like-minded individuals together for marriage degradation, for a small fee. Donna was a member of this upstanding website, which is how she comes into our story. Also a member was a partner at Ernst & Young, a gent by the name of James Gansman. Naturally, these two crazy kids found each other, nearly five years ago now, and began on what I can only hope was a wild sexual adventure, because that’s kind of the idea.

Over the course of a couple of years, the pair met up in various cities around the country, spoke and texted frequently, and by all accounts became quite close, as one can expect to happen when one is frequently dipping his johnson into someone else’s hoo-hoo dilly. Gansman, being a Pretty Big Deal at E&Y, was boastful about his high-powered position at the firm, and eventually began letting slip secrets that he perhaps should have reserved for his wife.

Mr. Gansman held an important post at Ernst & Young. He advised companies doing mergers about how to combine work forces. As a senior partner, Mr. Gansman was privy to what Wall Street calls “flow” — secret dope about companies that swings billions of dollars of stock value in a day.

And there’s where the “insider” comes from. Information not on his own company, but on other companies. Major companies. And after a while, as these things tend, simply meeting up with a new woman for secksytime was no longer enough of a thrill. That’s when things took a turn for the kinky.

Eventually the two settled into a comfortable day-to-day routine in their respective offices in New York and Philadelphia, staring at the same Yahoo Finance screen. Mr. Gansman led Ms. Murdoch in a guessing game about which deals he was working on, she said.

“The game was that I wouldn’t be looking and he would give me hints: The market cap of two billion or market cap of 400 billion, and here’s what they do, and he’d read it to me, and ultimately make sure I guessed,” Ms. Murdoch testified.

Think of it as an MBA-level game of “where’s the sausage” I guess. Already he’s sort of crossing a professional line. But, of course, even that got old, and as men are wont to do, he got tired of this twisted foreplay and started delving right into the main event, telling her outright the names of the companies he was working and all the secret information he felt like.

“But wait,” I hear you protesting, “where does the actual insider trading come in?” I’m glad you asked! There are two parts to insider trading: the insider information, and then the actual trading on that information. You need money to do the trading part, and since Ms. Murdoch is really not a prostitute, she didn’t have any. Or rather, she didn’t have enough to make it worth her while on her own. What she did have, however, was a giant subprime mortgage hanging over her and her husband’s heads, to the tune of one and a half million dollars, which I’m told is what some people somewhere actually pay for their homes for some god-damned reason.

Now say what you will about James Gansman, but he does draw the line somewhere, and she did not get money from him. Enter Ashley Madison once more, and a second fellow, one Richard Hansen (no relation to Chris, alas), a broker-dealer out of some stupid city near Philadelphia. She went to work at Hansen’s firm (heh heh, “firm”), feeding Hansen stock tips she picked up from Gansman. She didn’t tell either man about the other, because wouldn’t that have been awkward, and presumably kept both men secret from her husband, and can I just say that if all this is true she’s kind of a terrible person but holy CRAP am I impressed at her ability to keep everything straight. I mean it’s one thing to keep up an affair, but then to keep up an affair on the first affair? That’s some organizational talent being horribly misused. Franklin-Covey ain’t got jack on her.

But oh ho, we’re not done yet! Gansman gave Murdoch part of his 06 bonus, and leaked her some news about an upcoming takeover to be used in a school stock-market simulation one of her children was participating in. Yes, he did that. That is the lessons that are being taught to our children from such a young age, ensuring the SEC will have plenty to do for many years to come. Of course, having scruples meant that Murdoch didn’t act on that tip, because that would have been wrong, just as wrong as the 18 trades she made on Gansman’s information over two years. Being new to the fraud game, though, she didn’t quite know how to work it to stay under the radar, and by May 2007 the SEC had added her name to The List and given her The Phone Call. She didn’t tell Gansman about this little development, because I think we all understand that thinking ahead was not one of her strong suits.

He did find out, though, and what do you think his reaction was? Did he:
a) immediately take steps to break off contact with her,
b) sell her out to the SEC, hoping for leniency,
c) have her killed, or
d) tell her to buy a pre-paid cell phone so he could continue talking to the woman who was about to ruin his personal and professional life?

If you picked d) you’re absolutely right. So instead, she pled to 15 counts of securities fraud and agreed to testify against Gansman, who is probably re-considering option c) right about now after being found guilty of 6 counts of securities fraud himself.

So in summary, kids, stick with Redtube.