Man Receives Probation for Insider Trading

A 35-year-old Orange businessman has been sentenced to three years’ probation and fined $25,000 for illegally profiting from advance information about stocks he knew would be mentioned in an upcoming investment column in Business Week magazine.

“I’m sorry for what I did. . . . I knew what I did was wrong,” Stephen Rasinski told U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. on Monday.

Don Buchwald, a New York attorney representing Rasinski, said Tuesday that his client will not appeal. “He’s pleased to move on with his life,” Buchwald said.

Rasinski pleaded guilty to two counts of insider trading for paying a printing plant employee to supply advance information about stocks that would be mentioned in Business Week’s “Inside Wall Street Column.” Stocks receiving favorable mention in the column usually rose in price.

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Rasinski of making $115,000 in illegal profits between September, 1986, and July, 1988. In a separate case, the SEC has brought civil charges against Rasinski. He faces possible penalties of up to $345,000 in that case.

Rasinski was the second person sentenced in the case and the fourth to plead guilty.

John Petit, Rasinski’s former stockbroker at Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co. in Newport Beach, pleaded guilty and was sentenced March 25 to six months in a community treatment center.

Rasinski, the SEC charges, was the person who suggested Petit try to get advance copies of the magazine through a local printing plant, R.R. Donnelley & Sons in Torrance. Rasinski first asked the printer for early copies but, when the company refused, he visited the printer’s offices early in the morning to pick up pre-publication copies in a sitting room, said John Walsh, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. After at least two visits, Rasinski was eventually turned away by a security guard, Walsh said.

Walsh said his office had asked that Rasinski receive time in jail.