The State - News from Jan. 19, 1987

A San Francisco stockbroker, Rick Ackerman, will get $200,000 for providing the first clue in a case involving the arrest and imprisonment of the first person in the nation charged with drug tampering. The reward money was offered by the Proprietary Assn., a Washington-based group that represents over-the-counter medicines, in a poison-capsule case involving Edward Arlen Marks, 25, who pleaded guilty in an Orlando, Fla., court to putting rat poison into Contac, Teldrin and Dietac capsules, repackaging them and putting them on store shelves in Houston and Orlando. Marks is accused of later buying options on the stock of the manufacturer of the medicines in hopes that panic would cause the firm’s stock to drop, allowing him to make a profit on a $10,000 investment. Ackerman learned of an unusually large number of options on the manufacturer’s stock, traced the transactions to a brokerage house in Pasadena and reported them to the FBI.