Late on a Friday evening in October 2008, just before 11pm, Danielle Chiesi, a consultant to the hedge fund New Castle Partners and a sometime confidant of Raj Rajaratnam, the president of the Galleon Group, another hedge fund, took a phone call at her New York apartment.
According to transcripts from an FBI wiretap, it was an executive Ms Chiesi knew from Akamai, a Massachusetts-based technology company. “Danielle,” he said, “I have a major present for you.”
Two weeks ago the present – information – and the alleged trades that followed landed Ms Chiesi, Mr Rajaratnam and Mark Kurland, New Castle's founder, in the centre of the biggest insider-trading crackdown by US authorities since the late 1980s. All have since been released on bail.