The Galleon Hedge Fund Inside Tipsters

"Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal outed trader David Slaine as one of the cooperating sources in the Galleon case (although when reached at home and confronted about his role in the ring, Slaine told reporters “you’ve got the wrong guy”). Big D was first approached by the FBI in 2007, when authorities came to him with evidence he’d traded on inside info. Hoping to save himself, Slaine told prosecutors that his friend, Craig Drimal, was part of an “insider-trading conspiracy involving a wide ring of other hedge-fund managers and lawyers.” Obviously, throwing one’s colleague under the bus is no easy thing to do, especially when the guy also happens to be one of your close friends. Drimal and Slaine go way back— they were not just buds, but weight-lifting partners, too, which is probably the tightest bond of all (the two originally met during Slaine’s clubbing days, when Drimal was a bouncer at Vertical and “quickly formed a friendship based on a shared passion for weight lifting and their mutual ability to bench-press 400 pounds”). They were so close, in fact, that soon after taking a gig with Galleon, Big D convinced his bosses to give Drimal— then working as a bouncer at the Roxy— a job as an assistant at the firm. But along the way something must have happened. A confrontation. A blow-up. Something dark, at the gym, involving spotting, for Slaine to rat his special friend out like this. One thing I can tell you about Slaine is that he wouldn’t have done it unless provoked. Like the time at Morgan Stanley, in the nineties, with the French Fries."