A former Goldman Sachs analyst was sentenced to 28 months in prison on insider trading charges on Wednesday, acknowledging that his actions were “catastrophically stupid.”
Anthony Villano, 27, of Baldwin, Long Island, who also worked at Blackstone, pleaded guilty to securities fraud in January after being accused of tipping off two friends to eight trades that netted him more than $400,000 in illegal profits.
U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni said the sentence would send a message to others in the financial industry.
“You liked tipping your friends and being seen as the big shot,” Caproni said.
Vigiano allegedly used the encrypted messaging app Signal and the Xbox video game console to send classified information to his childhood friend and neighbor, his brother-in-law, Christopher Salamone, raking in more than $300,000 in illegal gains.
Villano passed the information on to a college friend, Steven Forlano, who made about $114,000 from the transaction.
Both men have pleaded guilty. Forlano was sentenced to 13 months in prison in May. Salamone is scheduled to be sentenced next month.
In his letter to the judge, Villano said he believed his actions would help his friends with financial difficulties, but that in retrospect “it was a tragically foolish decision.”
The former analyst also provided information to a friend, a U.S. Army captain, who was not criminally charged and settled a civil lawsuit for insider trading.
While Vigiano himself did not profit from the inside information, he reportedly received a bag full of $35,000 in cash in return for providing the information.
“While it is heartbreaking that Mr. Vigiano has destroyed his family ties and lost the career he worked so hard to build, he is clearly more than the crimes he committed,” his lawyer, Steven Brill, told The Post in a statement.
“His inherent values and work ethic will soon put him back on the right path.”
Prosecutors said the trading scheme began in 2021, when Villano was an analyst at Blackstone and knew about a deal to buy part of American International Group’s business for $2.2 billion.
The SEC said Mr. Villano resigned from Blackstone six months after joining the firm, meaning he was already gone by the time the firm learned of the whistleblower allegations. He later joined Goldman Sachs, where he also served as an insider trading facilitator.
Prosecutors sought a 30-month prison sentence. Vigiano was “much more financially savvy.” He is the “most sinful” person, even more so than his friends.
His lawyers acknowledged he was “immature and unstable” but linked his comments to behavior “that of a seemingly overgrown frat boy” and sought a sentence of one year and one day in prison.
Villano “is not a Raj Rajaratnam, Ivan Boesky or Michael Milken. These cases were driven by astonishing greed, complex methods and hundreds of millions of dollars in profits,” his lawyers said.
Instead, they pointed to the nickname “Rigatoni” given to Mr. Vigiano by his friends and the fact that he took home just $35,000 in tips.
The dubious analyst told the judge that there was “no excuse for my past actions” and that he had “no one to blame but myself.”
After the FBI interviewed Viggiano and Salamone in June 2022, Salamone secretly recorded Viggiano during a conversation about the FBI’s intelligence.
“Here are two guys who executed the trade, and the thing you’re missing is the shit, right?,” Vigiano reportedly said. “They’re giving me at Goldman Sachs access to this information.”
“You don’t need a brain surgeon,” he said.
Vigiano began his business career after he and a friend won a $1,000 prize in an ethics contest at the University of Tampa.
The event focused on “practice how investment professionals apply decision-making frameworks to conduct business with integrity.” A newsletter published by a university’s business school.
“It’s unfortunate that past participants are now involved in things that contradict what they learned,” Maxwell Grimard, president of the Tampa Bay chapter of the CFA, previously told The Washington Post.
“It’s ironic that past performance is not indicative of future results,” he said.
With post wire
