Three Charged in Penny Stock Fraud: Three...

Three Charged in Penny Stock Fraud: Three men were accused of bilking investors of more than $10 million, U.S. Atty. Samuel A. Alito Jr. charged in a case he said was the first to name a penny stock brokerage as a racketeering enterprise. The men manipulated the prices of six companies by issuing bogus research reports and bribing fund managers to invest in them, and profited by secretly trading in the stock, according to an indictment returned in Newark, N.J. Indicted were New York-based Monarch Funding Corp.’s president and owner, Leo M. Eisenberg, 68, of Woodmere, N.Y.; Newark-based financial consultant Richard O. Bertoli, 56, of Rye, N.Y., and Richard S. Cannistraro, who pleaded guilty to related charges in 1987. Cannistraro was an analyst at Woody Gundy Inc.