We found this article in the LA Times.
WALL ST. ROUNDUP
Business Week plant worker pleads guiltyA former worker at a Wisconsin printing plant pleaded guilty Monday to charges that he leaked the names of stocks mentioned in Business Week before the magazine was mailed.Nickolaus Shuster, who worked at Quad Graphics Inc. in Sussex, Wis., told a judge in Manhattan federal court that he tipped two people, whom he didn’t name, to the names of the stocks that were to be favorably mentioned in the Inside Wall Street column.”I would steal pre-publication copies of Business Week and call these two people and relay to them the contents of the Inside Wall Street columns,” Shuster, 25, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman. Shuster, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud, will be sentenced in January.The guilty plea is the third in what prosecutors said was a three-prong conspiracy involving two former employees at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Eugene Plotkin and David Pajcin.In Wisconsin, Shuster stole advance copies of Business Week for Plotkin and Pajcin, prosecutors said. In New York, former Merrill Lynch & Co. mergers analyst Stanislav Shpigelman, who pleaded guilty in July, leaked secret information about a pending deal to the pair, authorities said.In Newark, N.J., Jason Smith, a mailman sitting on a grand jury, tipped Pajcin and Plotkin to details of a confidential U.S. accounting probe of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., prosecutors said. Smith pleaded guilty in August.”I knew what I was doing was wrong,” Shuster said.Shuster told Freeman that, during an October 2004 meeting in the Union Square section of Manhattan, his two co-conspirators asked him to travel to Wisconsin and get a job at the Business Week plant.In January 2005, one of Shuster’s co-conspirators bought 3,500 shares of Arbitron Inc., the biggest radio-ratings supplier in the U.S., after learning of a forthcoming mention in the column, Assistant U.S. Atty. Benjamin Lawsky said in court.
Shuster agreed to forfeit $20,000 paid to him as part of the scheme. The judge said Shuster, who previously lived in New Jersey, had been cooperating with prosecutors. Charges are pending against a second printing-plant worker, Juan Renteria, along with Plotkin.
It seems that some enterprising soul decided to cash in on a position in which he was entrusted. If you think employee theft doesn’t happen all that often, Corra suggests you think again. Many companies have gone out of business thanks largely to corporate theft. Some have been relieved of valuable databases and intellectual property. This theft if not only costly, it can ruin reputations and damage employee morale.In the case listed in the article Corra is sure this proved quite embarrassing to Business Week, a great institution with respect to business publications. Here a whacked out theft plot, something so low tech, threatened to undermine its credibility.The best way to guard against employee theft is prevention. Run employment screens on your job candidates. A pre-employment background check won’t guarantee an otherwise good citizen won’t get shady ideas, but employee screening goes a long way to weeding out the bad seeds.Corra knows it is not just the criminal records you look for, but behavior patterns that can be revealed in anything from MVR Records to Credit Records. Even civil cases can tell you quite a bit about behavior if you know what you are looking for. Remember, bad credit, substance abuse and domestic issues are serious red flags to bad employee behavior, as well as the more obvious criminal background.So remember what Corra says, check them out before your hire.
