Steve Cohen’s top lieutenant at SAC Capital Advisors struck out in federal court on Thursday.
A dapper, smiling Michael Steinberg, 41, appeared in a downtown Manhattan courtroom with his high-paid legal team trying to get some favorable emails and trading records admitted during his upcoming trial, while excluding others.
But Judge Richard Sullivan denied the motion.
Steinberg, the seventh SAC money man to face insider-trading charges, is scheduled to go on trial starting Nov. 19.
Cohen’s hedge fund pleaded guilty to five counts of wire and securities fraud last week, but a judge put off accepting the plea until March.
Steinberg is alleged to be part of an insider-trading conspiracy surrounding trading in technology stocks Dell and Nvidia. Others involved in that conspiracy have pleaded guilty and will testify at Steinberg’s trial, including the government’s main cooperating witness, Jon Horvath.
Steinberg had hoped to exclude information about trading in Dell by other hedge funds. But, in order to show the conspiracy, the judge said it was “pretty clear that parallel trading [evidence] is permissible.”
One of the alleged conspirators, former Diamondback analyst Jesse Tortora, who pleaded guilty and has cooperated in other hedge-fund insider-trading trials, will be one of the government’s first witnesses.
The barred emails and trading records involved SAC trader Gabriel Plotkin and were to be used to counter Horvath.