Federal prosecutors have unsealed two sweeping indictments charging 30 people in connection with what they describe as massive, interconnected insider trading networks that operated out of some of the country’s most prestigious corporate law firms. The allegations center on attorneys who allegedly betrayed their ethical duties, misappropriated confidential information about impending corporate mergers, and passed that data to sprawling rings of friends, family, and associates who traded on it for years. The government claims the schemes generated tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits.
The first case centers on Lorenzo Nourafchan and a group of California-based associates. According to the government, the scheme relied on a co-conspirator identified only as “CC-1,” an attorney at Goodwin Procter, the Boston-headquartered firm, who allegedly accessed its internal document management system to pull confidential materials on upcoming deals, including deals he wasn’t assigned to work on. Prosecutors allege he then passed that information to his brother, Lorenzo Nourafchan, who recruited a network of traders to act on it. The indictment names Nowel Milik, Nicholas Rudela, David Makary, and Stjepan Vinski as key players in the ring, all of whom allegedly traded ahead of major corporate announcements, including Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot and Vista Equity Partners’ purchase of cybersecurity firm KnowBe4. In exchange for the tips, the traders allegedly agreed to kick a portion of their profits back up the chain to the people who supplied the information.
The group allegedly went to considerable lengths to avoid detection. Prosecutors say they communicated through encrypted messaging apps, held in-person meetings where everyone was told to put their phones away, and developed coded language to discuss trades and tips. The word “coffee,” for instance, allegedly served as shorthand for inside information. Cash was used to move profits around, and the government claims some participants created fake research notes to make their trades look legitimate after the fact.
The second indictment is considerably larger in scope. It alleges a scheme that prosecutors say began as far back as March 2014 and continued through August 2024, involving 16 named defendants and generating tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits. At the center of it were Nicolo Nourafchan, a Yale Law School graduate, and Robert Yadgarov, both New York-licensed attorneys. The government claims the two men recruited fellow lawyers to funnel them confidential merger information and also misappropriated data directly from their own employers. Nicolo Nourafchan allegedly accessed sensitive deal documents at Sidley Austin, Latham & Watkins, and Goodwin Procter over the course of his career, sometimes while officially on a leave of absence. A fourth attorney, Gabriel Gershowitz, allegedly provided tips from Weil Gotshal and later from Willkie Farr & Gallagher after moving to that firm in 2020. A fifth co-conspirator, identified only as CC-2, allegedly leaked information from Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz before later moving to a boutique investment bank.
The list of deals the group allegedly exploited reads like a decade of Wall Street headlines: Actelion, C.R. Bard, Qualcomm, Express Scripts, Care.com, SailPoint, iRobot, and more than a dozen others. The network allegedly spread across multiple layers of middlemen and traders, with Ilya Gavrilov, a Russian national, allegedly executing trades through foreign brokerage accounts and shell companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and Panama to stay out of reach of U.S. regulators. The government claims participants kept ledgers to track who was owed what, and that millions in kickbacks flowed back through cash payments, wire transfers routed through shell companies, and payments dressed up as business loans. In one particularly vivid detail, a defendant allegedly pawned his Rolex watch to scrape together enough cash to make a payment.
What stands out in the second indictment is how extensively the alleged network ran through a close-knit Orthodox Jewish community in Florida and New York. Several of the defendants share synagogue ties, family connections, and social circles that appear to have served as the infrastructure for the scheme. The Fensterszaub brothers, Brian, Mark, and Simon, are all named as defendants, and Gavryel Silverstein, who allegedly served as a key middleman passing tips from Nicolo Nourafchan to the broader trader network, had married into the Fensterszaub family years earlier. The indictment alleges that Silverstein used that family relationship as a natural conduit for distributing inside information.
The coded language the group allegedly used was steeped in Jewish religious terminology, and prosecutors suggest it was deliberate. Participants referred to upcoming deals as “flights” and “travel plans,” and discussed whether a “rabbi” was scheduled for “surgery” as a way of asking whether a deal announcement was imminent. One exchange has a co-conspirator asking about “flight information” when he wanted to know if a deal was close. Another has defendants discussing whether the “rabbi’s surgery” was still on schedule. When the iRobot deal finally closed, one defendant allegedly messaged another: “Coffee was very good this morning.” The use of religious and community language as cover was not incidental. It allowed the group to discuss sensitive information in plain sight without raising suspicion, and it relied on a shared cultural vocabulary that outsiders would be unlikely to decode.
The broader social fabric of the community allegedly made the scheme easier to sustain and harder to detect. Tips moved through people who had known each other for years, trusted each other, and had every reason to believe that shared background would keep everyone quiet. The indictment describes kickback payments being made in person, in cash, often between friends or relatives. One defendant allegedly sent a payment with the note “just put business loan in the memo section.”
Both cases share the same core allegation: that attorneys trusted with some of the most sensitive information in corporate America turned that access into a personal revenue stream. Lawyers owe strict duties of loyalty and confidentiality to their firms and clients, and the government contends these defendants treated those obligations as little more than an inconvenience. Goodwin Procter said it was “deeply disappointed” and confirmed it had been cooperating with law enforcement. Latham & Watkins said the alleged conduct “would reflect a serious violation of our robust policies and procedures.” Weil Gotshal called the allegations “extremely serious” and noted the firm had cooperated fully with prosecutors. Willkie Farr said it was aware of the allegations and that such conduct would constitute “a severe violation” of its compliance policies.
It bears emphasizing that these are allegations. Every person named in these indictments is presumed innocent, and the government will have to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. But if prosecutors are right, what they have uncovered are two of the most brazen and long-running insider trading operations in recent memory, ones that stretched across years, states, and international borders, and turned some of the country’s most storied law firms into unwitting sources of illicit profit.
