Big breaking story at the end of the day on Tuesday - as reported in the New York Times and made available to you here by the International Herald Tribune:

15 Big Board traders are indicted

By Terence Neilan and Colin Moynihan
The New York Times
Wednesday, April 13, 2005

NEW YORK Fifteen current and former New York Stock Exchange specialists, who match buyers' and sellers' orders on the exchange floor, were indicted Tuesday on charges that they traded to benefit themselves and their firms at the expense of their customers in deals worth millions of dollars....

...In a separate action, the 15 and 5 others face civil charges in an enforcement action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency official said Tuesday. The 15 defendants in the criminal case, who worked for five leading specialist firms at the exchange, had a duty to investors "to execute their trades fairly and to put the investors' interests above their own," U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, David Kelley, said at a news conference.
"Instead, these defendants are alleged to have systematically cheated the investors by putting their own interests and the interests of their firms before the interests of the unwitting investors"....

...The criminal case grew out of a civil action against seven firms, in which they agreed last year to pay $247 million for profiting from unnecessary trades that shortchanged clients from 1999 to 2003. The traders, a number of whom were later fired, were said to have taken advantage of their knowledge of which way the market was moving.

Read the rest at the IHT.

For more on the how the fallout from these prosecutions will effect the New York Stock Exchange (which is catching major league flack for not policing the traders better) check out this Reuters article.

-- MDT