Above And Beyond Promotion

Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

By SUSAN PULLIAM And CHAD BRAY

Raj Rajaratnam privately told colleagues after being arrested in October 2009 on insider-trading charges that the government “would never meet a meaner b—d.”

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Bloomberg News

Raj Rajaratnam

The hedge-fund titan, founder of the Galleon Group, quickly hired a lawyer with a track record of going for the jugular: John Dowd.

On Tuesday, Mr. Rajaratnam and his lawyer will get their showdown, in a jury trial that will be among the most closely followed in Wall Street history.

Mr. Rajaratnam told people close to him after his arrest that he intends to testify on his own behalf. Such a strategy is a relatively rare in white-collar criminal cases because of the risk of a slip-up during cross-examination by prosecutors.

With a net worth exceeding $1 billion, Mr. Rajaratnam is the rare defendant wealthy enough to take on the government. His legal bill by trial’s end could reach $40 million, people familiar with the matter estimate, including the tab for a nine-member team from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer Feld LLP assembled by Mr. Dowd. He is a partner and co-head of white-collar defense there.

Galleon’s Web

Criminal complaints and developing disclosures in the Galleon insider trading case allege a far-reaching and complex scheme. Here, the known and alleged relationships.

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In late January, prosecutors contacted Mr. Dowd to explore whether Mr. Rajaratnam was interested in negotiating a plea agreement, people familiar with the matter say. Mr. Rajaratnam quickly brushed aside the overture, so a specific potential deal never was discussed, they say.

Mr. Rajaratnam, raised in Sri Lanka, has told associates he is confident he will win. For months, he has gathered trading data and other material to help Mr. Dowd build his case.

Mr. Rajaratnam was inspired, according to a person who knows him, by an early call of support from entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who himself is battling the U.S. in a civil insider-trading case. Mr. Cuban says he told Mr. Rajaratnam: “Just because the government says something doesn’t make it true.”

Mr. Dowd has pursued a defense strategy that is combative, even by the rough-and-tumble standards of large criminal trials. In May, for instance, he accused prosecutors of lying in their attempt to use wiretaps in the case. A judge disagreed.

The Galleon saga is the largest insider-trading case in a generation.

It involves a cast of technology executives and other hedge-fund traders that the U.S. has alleged is a symbol of a culture of insider trading in the financial markets. Nineteen of 26 defendants have pleaded guilty in an investigation marked by the government’s extensive use of wiretaps, including about 90 hours of calls involving Mr. Rajaratnam that could be used at trial.

If the 53-year-old defendant is found guilty on the 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy he faces, he could spend more than 20 years in prison. If the government loses, that will be a major blow to its heavy focus on insider-trading cases—and make it more difficult to pursue future cases at trial.

Key to Mr. Rajaratnam’s defense will be the argument that the data he received didn’t constitute inside information—and that he wouldn’t have known if it did, according to court filings. Mr. Dowd will also attack the credibility of the government’s witnesses, people familiar with his strategy say.

Behind Mr. Rajaratnam’s fighting stance is Mr. Dowd, a 69-year-old former military lawyer known for being willing to mix it up with legal foes. “He has a Marine’s view of combat and takes it to court with him,” says Washington lawyer James Sharp, a longtime friend.

The son of a retail executive in Boston, Mr. Dowd is a Red Sox fan who tools around the harbor at Chatham, Mass., in his 26-foot fishing boat and sometimes entertains relatives by rubbing lobsters on the back of their shells to put them to sleep, colleagues say.

Mr. Dowd showed his skill in picking apart evidence to help his client when he represented Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) two decades ago in the “Keating Five” scandal; five senators were accused of corruption in their dealings with Charles Keating, chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed in 1989.

Mr. McCain—who was reprimanded by the Senate committee for “exercising poor judgment,” but never charged—declined to comment.

Mr. Dowd was hired by baseball in 1989 to investigate charges that batting star Pete Rose had gambled on games when he was manager of the Cincinnati Reds. Mr. Dowd’s investigation subjected him to heavy public criticism from Mr. Rose and his legions of fans. In a report, Mr. Dowd said Mr. Rose bet on dozens of games. Mr. Rose voluntarily agreed to a ban from baseball. He wasn’t charged. Mr. Rose didn’t return calls for comment.

Mr. Dowd’s last major criminal trial was in 1997, when he defended Arizona Gov. J. Fife Symington against bank-fraud charges.

In that case, Mr. Dowd at times shouted at prosecutors, a person close to the situation said, and lost his cool during a pretrial meeting when a prosecutor suggested that a slide Mr. Dowd wanted to use in his opening argument might not be permissible. A spokesman for Mr. Dowd denied that.

“John does not broach disagreement kindly,” said David Schindler, one of the prosecutors on the case. Mr. Symington was convicted at trial but later pardoned by President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Dowd attempted to persuade the judge overseeing the Galleon case to throw out evidence the government gained through wiretaps of Mr. Rajaratnam’s phones, asserting that the government left out details about a cooperating witness’s history and behaved dishonestly when applying to a magistrate judge for the wiretaps.

“They gamed the system,” Mr. Dowd said in a filing.

Mr. Dowd lost that argument in November when U.S. District Judge Richard Holwell, who is overseeing the case, allowed the recordings to be admitted as evidence. He criticized the government, however, for “glaring” omissions in its applications.

At trial, Mr. Dowd will argue that Mr. Rajaratnam’s activities at Galleon involved legitimate stock research.

In proposed instructions for the jury, Mr. Dowd said, “The law does not place professional investment advisers like Mr. Rajaratnam at their peril simply because they seek to obtain information about the companies they invest in on behalf of their clients.” He also argued that the law allows investment advisers to speak with corporate insiders to obtain information.

—James Oberman contributed to this article.

Write to Susan Pulliam at susan.pulliam@wsj.com and Chad Bray at chad.bray@dowjones.com

What’s it like to work for a world class SEO? What secrets could you glean on website promotion? The SEO business is sexy, exciting and challenging. While most people want to improve and promote their site, web promo companies often deal with such diverse clients, it sharpens their instincts for what works and what don’t work in the SEO game. This article presents a few tricks, tips and myths about how to SEO your website into GOOGLE heaven.

Content + SEO = Top GOOGLE Positions

If you have great content and decent SEO techniques, you’re webs site should do pretty well in the search engines. If you have SEO stuffed pages full of garbage keyword phrases, sooner or later, you’re gonna pay the price. There are too many billions of dollars at stake for cheap tricks to raise search engine rankings for long. Combine great content with great SEO instincts and bang… you’re website traffic will skyrocket. Here are some common tips, you may have heard, but are worth repeating.

Website Design – SEO Strategy

If you can’t highlight and grab the text off of your website – look out! If you can’t grab it and paste it into a document, how do you think a search engine is gonna read it put it in their search engine. Sure, people will tell you, don’t worry, the search engines index it not problem. Maybe they are right, my gut say Watch Out! Keep it simple!

Keyword Selection – SEO Strategy

You can spend hours researching your keywords, try lots of combo’s and still get zero results in the search engines. What the problem? CONTENT! The key words and the content have to flow together. For example, if you write about dog grooming and switch to a few cat grooming examples, you may defeat your SEO efforts. If you write for the search engine like you were talking to a ten year old, you’ll probably get much higher SEO results.

Meta Tag Mania – SEO Strategy

There are tons of meta tag how to’s to read and confuse you. Here’s a tip for writing better meta tags – pretend you’re asking them out on a date and just say what you have to say without all the bull corn. For example, “I’m ah, going to be in the area this evening, and wonder if you would ahh. oh yeah and I just rebreed something… ah, what was I trying to say is ahh, there’s a nice film tonight if you would like to ah… Now compare that speech that never got to the point with, “Look girl, I think you’re beautiful, would you like to see a movie with me?” And shut up!!!

Copy Writing – SEO Strategy

Ditto for the copy writing – less is more. Pretend you’re writing for NPR. What do they do? They tell you what they are going to tell you, tell you what the have to say and then tell you what the told you. NPR are no dummies, if that’s what they do, it must be good so jump on the band wagon and blow your trumpet.

Image Tags Copy – SEO Strategy

By the time you’re concerned with adding image tags to SEO your website, you either have a great site way, way up their in the search engines or you’re a SEO junky that needs help. No body can assure you #1 rankings on Google so don’t set your sails for impossible goals. Someday, we’ll all wake up in the 1980′s again and discover the sense of freedom people back in pre-internet era.