Alleged Insider Trader Garrett Bauer Dumped Evidence In A McDonald's, Couldn't Sleep At Night

Author:: Bess Levin
Updated:: Jan 14, 2019
Original:: Apr 6, 2011

Earlier this morning, Garrett Bauer, a trader who mostly "worked from home" and Matthew Kluger, an M&A attorney, were accused of running a decades-long insider trading scam that involved stealing information from several law firms. Recently, the duo became suspicious that the authorities were on to them and, naturally, went about destroying evidence. Because the feds were indeed building a case against the guys and had obtained permission to record their phone calls, we're privy to a conversation that took place on March 18, 2011, between Bauer and an individual only identified as CC-1. While Bauer doesn't walk CC-1 through the actual steps of how he broke a disposable phone in half (as accused insider trader Donald Longueuil did, noting the use of pliers), he does make us feel like we were in the McDonald's with him that night, particularly when he flipped out thinking some random guy buying a Big Mac was an undercover agent, and proceeded to ask the customer, "Do you know me?"

US Bauer v Kluger [PDF via Dealbook]

Related: If You’ve Ever Wondered What Donald Longueuil Might’ve Sounded Like On The Cold December Night He Told A Colleague How To Destroy Evidence Of Insider Trading, Wonder No Longer (MP3)

Remember Garrett Bauer? For those who need a refresher, GB was a trader (who "mostly worked from home") who was charged last year for running a decades-long insider trading scam with an M&A attorney, Matthew Kluger, that involved stealing information from several law firms. (In April 2011, 20 FBI agents knocked on Bauer's door to arrest him which, while terrifying, didn't come as much of a shock-- the duo had recently become suspicious that the authorities were onto them and, naturally, went about destroying evidence, a process Bauer recounted to a cooperating witness in a conversation he didn't realize was being recorded, telling the CC: "My heart was beating ten thousand miles an hour. I went right up to my apartment and I broke the phone in half and went to McDonald's and put it in two different garabage cans. And someone was watching me. I thought it was an FBI agent. And I asked him, 'Do you know me? You look familiar.' And, like, I was so panicked. I literally didn't sleep that entire night...I can't sleep. I am waiting for the FBI to ride into my apartment. I am on edge all night thinking they are coming in.") Anyway, Bauer ultimately pleaded guilty and is set to be sentenced today. Though he could receive up to 11 years in the big house, a judge will be taking into consideration letters "expressing support or urging leniency" sent on Bauer's behalf, some of which were written by fans he's gained working the college lecture circuit the past few months, explaining to undergrads why they don't want to follow in his footsteps (hint: it involves sleeping on bunk-beds). “I’m here hoping you won’t commit the same crime I committed, insider trading,” Bauer told the students at NYU’s Stern School of Business in February. “I feel remorse. That’s why I’m here. It’s my way of trying to apologize to everyone for what I’ve done and try to make amends.” Bauer said he hopes that his “scared straight” message, delivered in 147 speeches since last fall at business schools, law schools, churches and synagogues, will move the judge to grant him leniency. Sentencing judges can consider whether a defendant has accepted responsibility and shown remorse for his acts. “I’m not blind anymore,” Bauer said in an interview. “I see how wrong it was, how unfair it was to everybody else that’s trading. You get away with it once, and then you think you can get away with it every time. I almost never considered the question of getting caught. It was more a question of let’s figure out a way to make money and not lose money.” Bauer spoke several times a week in person or via Skype at schools including Harvard University, Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Texas, the University of Michigan and Duke University. He booked his own speeches, sometimes called “Confessions of an Inside Trader.” Bauer gave the same basic narrative in two appearances observed at NYU, as well as at Cardozo Law School in New York, Drexel University in Philadelphia and a Rutgers University class in Jersey City, New Jersey. Bauer, lean at 5-foot-11 and 145 pounds, favors button-down shirts and khaki pants. He speaks rapidly in a nasal voice, lacing his account with jokes...In every talk to students, Bauer discussed how 20 FBI agents came to his apartment to arrest him and how they played the tapes for him, as well as his time in the Hudson County Jail. He tried hard to show no emotion to violent criminals. “Saying it’s a scary place kind of understates it,” he said. “It’s the scariest place on earth.” At least one professor believes Bauer's talk scarred his students for life, which should count for something. And according to Sameen Singh, a recent Stern grad who will soon start a job at Morgan Stanley, U.S. District Judge Katharine Hayden ought to go easy on the guy, who is just another bro. “I was impressed by how human he was and how his friendships and relationships played a role in his crimes. My friends were quite taken aback by how similar he was to them. He came from humble beginnings, and he’s not a deviant mastermind criminal. He’s just a regular guy.” Prison-Bound Bauer Reprises ‘Confessions Of An Inside Trader’ [Bloomberg]

Remember Matthew Kluger? To recap, he's the mergers and acquisitions lawyer who spent two decades feeding inside information to convicted insider trader Garrett Bauer, that he picked up from partners at the six different law firms he worked at over the years. The operation, which included Kenneth Robinson, an old friend of Kluger who acted as the tips mule between MK and GB, went very smoothly for a very long time (17 years), and would have continued going smoothly had Robinson stuck with the plan instead of deciding to start making the same trades as Bauer, raising suspicion with SEC, which was watching the men and used "relationship analysis" to determine they were "part of the same trading scheme and had a common source: Kluger." In March 2011, federal agents showed up to Robinson's house and after thinking it over for a couple days, he decided to cooperate by giving prosecutors a step-by-step guide to how the scam operated, telling them Kluger's name, and recording conversations with Kluger and Bauer in which the two said things like "I went right up to my apartment and I broke the phone in half and went to McDonald's and put it in two different garbage cans" and "I can't sleep. I can't sleep. I'm waiting for the FBI to ride into my apartment" and "We have to get all the fingerprints off that money. Like you wearing gloves or something and wiping every bill down or something" and "There is no way [these cell phone conversations] could ever be recorded." Robinson was ultimately sentenced to 27 months in prison, Bauer got nine years (despite his 147 speeches about how insider trading is a bad idea on the college lecture), and Kluger was handed 12 years, beating Raj Rajaratnam for "the longest insider trading U.S. history." Recently, Kluger sat down with Bloomberg to offer a few more specifics re: how the scheme went down ("Sometimes it was a deal I was working on, sometimes it was a deal I heard being discussed in the office"; "I would call Ken and say 'X/Y/Z company is considering a takeover of Q company") but what he really wants to talk about? What was the biggest surprise and hardest punch to the gut in all of this? Is what it was like finding out that his buddies were stiffing him on cuts of their ill-gotten gains. "On the day I was arrested, when they showed me the criminal complaint against me, finally that day, I saw the amounts that had been traded and I was absolutely shocked. Our agreement from the beginning was always that that profits were being shared equally three ways. I felt very used and manipulated, that he was basically pumping me for information, that he was then lying to me about how he was using and then allowing his obviously better friend to make millions and millions of dollars while telling me that that was not happening. “Maybe you want to laugh and say of course there’s no honor among thieves,” Kluger added. “But even when you’re doing something you’re not supposed to do, I trusted that they were honoring the commitments that they had made.” You can imagine Kluge's utter dismay to find out that such was not the case. It's one thing to get nailed for insider trading, it's another to find out you could've been making 10 times the profits while doing so.

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