Insider trader ate secret notes in $7.78 million scam

FORGET the tech age, this insider trader used a classic spy film tactic to help perpetrate a $7.78 million scam.

2002 Ralph Fiennes as Francis Dolarhyde in film Red Dragon.

IT MUST have seemed like a foolproof plan: writing stock tips on a piece of napkin, then eating the evidence.

But it all came falling down like a deck of cards.

An American mortgage broker used the spy movie cliche to help perpetrate a $7.78 million insider trading scam, Bloomberg reports.

Brooklyn’s Frank Tamayo would meet Vladimir Eydelman, then a stockbroker with Morgan Stanley, at a busy New York train station, write ticker symbols on pieces of paper or napkins and show them to Eydelman before eating them, a US federal court heard on Wednesday.

Both men have pleaded guilty to insider trading, and Eydelman revealed the details of their meetings at his hearing in Trenton, New Jersey.

He said the pair would meet near a clock landmark at Grand Central station’s main concourse, where Tamayo would share information gleaned from computers at New York law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.

Eydelman admitted that he used the tips to buy shares on behalf of himself, family members, friends, Tamayo and brokerage clients, prosecutors said, with the scheme netting US $5.6 million in the five years to 2013.

Eating the evidence is a technique that’s deeply rooted in western popular culture, referenced in many a film and television show, as catalogued by TV Tropes.

Blackadder eats a carrier pigeon for lunch after committing a capital offence by killing it, while Frasier and his brother scoff more than a kilogram of black market caviar to avoid arrest by US Customs.

2002 Ralph Fiennes as Francis Dolarhyde in film Red Dragon.

Ralph Fiennes gave an Oscar-worthy paper eating performance as psychotic killer Francis Dolarhyde in the 2002 film Red Dragon.

Dolarhyde, aka The Tooth Fairy, eats a William Blake watercolour-and-ink painting in a bid to stave off evil thoughts that are driving him to murder the woman he loves.

Real-life examples abound of criminals trying to cover their tracks by chowing down on the evidence.

British bank robber John Ford ate the note he’d flashed to demand cash from a teller in 2009, as reported by the Daily Mail.

Last year, a 62-year-old woman frantically started ploughing through the 20 buns she’d stolen from a Hong Kong bakery, The Telegraph reported.

A New York man arrested for marijuana possession at a McDonald’s in Greenwich Village tried the same technique, eventually giving up and spitting chewed-up bits of weed on the ground, according to DNA.

And a man in Florida Keys man was arrested after allegedly robbing his girlfriend and eating some of the stolen cash, reported NBC.

But nothing beats this brazen act of defiance by Miami cop Richard Masten, held in contempt of court for eating a piece of paper that contained the personal details of a Crime Stoppers tipster.

Hailed as a hero for protecting the anonymity of the information line, Masten told reporters: “I’ll do it again.”