Trader gets jailed in a $47-million case flagged by SEC’s controversial tracker

An Oregon retiree who conspired with a Nuveen LLC trader to profit from confidential market orders was sentenced Monday to one year in prison, closing a $47 million insider-trading case.

Alan Williams, 79, appeared before U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe in Manhattan. Williams, who once ran trading at Sutro & Co. in San Francisco, admitted last year that he used insider tips from Lawrence Billimek, a former trader at Nuveen, to place thousands of timely stock bets. 

Gardephe noted that Williams helped prosecutors build their case against Billimek, but said the sheer scope of illegal trades made a sentence without jail time impossible.

Billimek, 54, pleaded guilty in 2023 and received a sentence of five years and 10 months in May. From 2018 through 2023, he shared details of Nuveen’s planned buys and sells with Williams, allowing the retiree to mirror positions before the firm’s own trades moved prices. 

Investigators said Williams executed 1,697 intraday stock trades flagged by the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT, a database that can log as many as 500 billion trade events each day. 

The SEC found that Williams enjoyed a 97 percent “win rate” during the five-year stretch—odds of less than one in a trillion if achieved by chance, the agency said. Legal scholars have argued that such a pattern could not have been spotted without CAT’s sweeping records.

SEC’s trade tracking tool faces resistance

Citadel Securities LLC and the American Securities Association sued the SEC in 2023, contending the regulator lacked congressional approval to run the database. 

Republican lawmakers echoed those concerns, warning that CAT might expose investors’ personal or political information. Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the publication of the conservative “Project 2025” policy blueprint have pushed the debate inside the commission. 

Paul Atkins, sworn in as SEC chair last week, told senators during his confirmation hearing that CAT’s costs had “ballooned” and that its scope “has kind of veered off.” He has ordered a review of the project.

Financial-industry lobbying began even before Atkins took office. The SEC has already removed direct personal identifiers such as names and birth years from CAT data. In February, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association urged the commission to halt fee collections tied to the system while its future is decided.

CAT has recently triggered two more enforcement actions

Alongside the Nuveen matter, the SEC credits CAT with triggering two other recent enforcement actions. In November, a Federal Reserve Bank examiner pleaded guilty to trading on secrets about firms he supervised. 

The following month, a Florida day trader settled claims that he used thousands of fake “spoof” orders to nudge thinly traded stocks.

Standing before Judge Gardephe on Monday, Williams, who has advanced Parkinson’s disease, apologized “to the court, my family, and Nuveen’s employees and clients,” adding, “I’m embarrassed and ashamed.” 

Federal guidelines called for 57 to 71 months. The maximum possible term was 75 years, though such penalties are rare in white-collar cases. Prosecutors said the pair used prepaid “burner” phones to avoid detection. On one August 2022 morning, they made more than $55,000 by shorting Match Group Inc. shares just before Nuveen unloaded a large block.

Williams had asked the judge to spare him prison, calling himself “an uncommonly decent and giving man.” Gardephe rejected that plea, citing the “blatant nature” of the wrongdoing and the sheer volume of illegal trades.

Under a forfeiture order filed later Monday, Williams agreed to give up more than $35 million held in Charles Schwab Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. accounts, along with a six-bedroom, six-bathroom home in West Linn, Oregon.

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