Mark Kurland, a co-founder of the $1 billion New Castle hedge fund, was sentenced Friday, May 21, to two years and three months in jail and ordered to forfeit the $900,000 he earned in illegal insider trades.
The 61-year-old executive from Mount Kisco, New York, was the first to be sentenced in the Galleon Group case, an insider trading scheme that resulted in the arrests of top executives including New York billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, Galleon's founder.
In federal court in Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the defendant had a choice to be a leader of the financial industry, but instead "he became a joiner, surrendering to a spree of mob mentality" that nearly brought down this country's financial system.
