And now time for our daily Bloomberg labrary if exploring legal issues in the news. Today, Bloomberg lawhost Student Grosso and Michael Best discussed the insider trading case of Las Vegas gambler Billy Walters, who was found guilty in a New York court on Friday. They speak to Peter Henning, a professor at Wayne State University, and Robert Hacketts, a professor at Cornell University Law School. Peter, how important was this win for federal prosecutors? Well, it was important because
it was so high profile. Billy Walters is maybe the most famous defendant since Raja Gupta, who was the former director at Goldman Sachs. And it just almost had a tabloid feel to it, with Phil Mickelson and Carl Icon's name coming up the government FBI agent leaking information back in twenty uh fourteen about the case. In a sense, it was high profile because it was tabloid. Um, the
legal issues really weren't all that difficult. Um And even if that Newman case from fourteen had remained, the government had evidence that um, some of the inside information was to help pay off loans, so it would not have raised the issue of friendship at least not as much.
So it's important because it's high profile, Bob. The defense seemed to argue that the only way the jury could convict Walter's here was if they believed Tom Davis, the former chairman of Dean Foods, who was passing information to Walter's and they argued that he was lying, he had debts, he was he had done all sorts of unsavory things. Um, how much did the case really rely on Davis's testimony? I don't actually think that the case was all that
reliant on davis The testimony. There was a lot of circumstantial evidence as well, in the form of, for example, phone records, right, so Mr Davis of course would pass on the information uh Toms Walters, and Mr Walters would then oftentimes phone to place his trades literally within the same minute that he got off of the phone with
Mr Davis. So if you've got a pattern of that sort that's sort of repeated over and over and over again, all that Mr Davis's testimony actually ends up doing is sort of providing a little bit of narrative context, a little bit of extra color. But as far as the sort of fundamental evidence, that's needed to convict us concerns. It seems that that was actually all available even without
Mr Davis. That's Robert Hockett, Professor at Cornell University Law School, and Peter Henning, professor at Wayne State University, speaking to Bloomberg Law host stud In Grosso and Michael Best. You can hear Bloomberg Law weekdays at one pm aall street time here on Bloomberg Radio, and that's this morning's Bloomberg Law bree If you can find more legal news at Bloomberg Law dot com and Bloomberg Bienna dot com. Attorneys will find exceptional legal research and business development tools there
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