Someone kept making winning trades just before big acquisitions that were being handled by the same Boston law firm. Authorities initially thought it was another case of foreign hackers stealing valuable information from a U.S. law firm.

But hackers weren’t swiping secrets. Investigators discovered it was an inside job.

After closely analyzing the deals and other information, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents traced the well-timed tips back to a single lawyer: Nicolo Nourafchan, who worked at the Boston-based firm, Goodwin Procter.

Nourafchan had a lucrative side hustle providing traders around the world with illicit tips about coming buyouts over a decade, according to federal prosecutors. He also recruited M&A lawyers at other elite firms, Wachtell Lipton and Weil Gotshal, to dish on their deals, prosecutors say.

The case marks one of the most brazen insider-trading schemes in years, ensnaring several of Wall Street’s biggest M&A advisory firms and multibillion-dollar deals that they worked on for clients including Amazon, Johnson & Johnson and Burger King. The participants celebrated their windfalls—which ranged from $2,000 to $3 million—by exchanging memes of “making it rain” dollar bills, the court filings show.

Nourafchan, 43 years old, was arrested last week and charged with securities fraud. The case involves 29 other defendants, including his brother and college friends. Prosecutors say the Yale Law School graduate provided tips about more than a dozen undisclosed mergers and acquisitions.

Nourafchan hasn’t entered a plea and didn’t return messages seeking comment. His lawyer declined to comment. Nine defendants earlier pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors.

Despite his Ivy League pedigree, Nourafchan was a midlevel deal lawyer who hopped among prestigious firms. He got his start at Sidley Austin and spent a few years at Latham & Watkins before he was let go in 2021. Goodwin terminated him in August 2023 after he hadn’t worked on a billable matter for months.

His main reason for showing up at the office, according to court records and people familiar with the matter, was to sift through computer systems to uncover pending deals that he could sell to an ever-growing ring of traders in Florida, New York, Russia and Israel. He even tried to get hired at a public-relations firm that worked on mergers after he left his last law-firm role, hoping to scoop up more tips there, prosecutors said.

“Listen, the fact of the matter is he’s done this forever, so, like, he’s hurting,” one of his contacts told a trader by phone when Nourafchan had trouble finding a new job.

The alleged conspirators compensated Nourafchan with kickbacks from tens of millions of dollars in trading gains, prosecutors say. For example, a few weeks after traders made nearly $90,000 in profits on his insider tip about an Amazon acquisition in 2020, Nourafchan received a $9,765 wire transfer, the court papers show. “Just went through. Thank you bro!,” he replied.

Even the co-conspirators marveled at how good their informant was at getting M&A scoops, according to the indictment. “It’s amazing how he just only works in these types of firms,” a Florida insurance adjuster who allegedly acted as Nourafchan’s connection to the traders, said on a phone call cited in the indictment. “I mean it’s the only reason why he did that type of law.” 

“Genius,” a trader replied. 

Attorneys at large law firms and public companies routinely handle undisclosed earnings releases or proposed mergers, information that could form the basis for illegal insider trading. Many go through extensive training focused on not misusing client information for personal profit or leaving sensitive information in places where it could be overheard or picked up.

But some have run afoul of their duties. Gene Levoff, a former senior lawyer at Apple, pleaded guilty in 2022 to trading on inside information about Apple’s quarterly performance and was sentenced to four years of probation. 

Law firms have also been victims of overseas hackers who illegally accessed internal emails that told them about unannounced deals. Chinese hackers took such information from Cravath Swaine & Moore and Weil Gotshal a decade ago.

Goodwin, Nourafchan’s latest employer, said it was “disappointed that a former employee is alleged to have violated the trust placed in him and misused confidential information as part of a broader criminal scheme affecting multiple law firms and their clients.” The firm said it had cooperated with the Boston U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which filed parallel criminal and civil cases. 

Latham said Nourafchan hasn’t been “associated with the firm for five years, and the conduct as alleged would reflect a serious violation of our robust policies and procedures.” 

Nourafchan and a college classmate, Robert Yadgarov, didn’t trade stocks themselves. Instead, over a decade, the indictment says they used Nourafchan’s tips and funneled them to far-flung traders, including a hair stylist in Santa Monica, Calif., as well as several people in Russia and Israel. The broad network distanced Nourafchan and Yadgarov from the trading, the people familiar with the investigation said.

Yadgarov, who runs his own personal-injury firm in New York, hasn’t made a plea in court. Mark Lesko, his lawyer, said Yadgarov would plead not guilty. “We intend to vigorously defend Robert in this case,” Lesko said.

Nourafchan, Yadgarov and other alleged participants were friends from their undergraduate days at George Washington University. Nourafchan, who attended high school in Los Angeles, was active in a campus group organized around Chabad, a Hasidic Jewish organization, according to a 2015 article in Washingtonian magazine.

After George Washington, Nourafchan went to Yale Law School, where he graduated in 2011, the same class that produced former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and lawyers who took on high-profile roles on Wall Street and in the Justice Department. One of the attorneys he allegedly recruited to his scheme, Avi Sutton, graduated from Yale two years after Nourafchan did.

At Yale, Nourafchan wrote articles critical of China’s foreign policy and the role of American corporations in Saudi Arabia. Nourafchan passed the New York bar in 2012 and joined the New York office of Sidley Austin the following year.

The insider-trading ring started relatively small. Nourafchan got information about a healthcare deal and the $1.8 billion buyout of an advertising-technology company and shared it with a trader in Russia, according to the indictment.

Nourafchan and Yadgarov recruited Sutton, who worked at another big firm, Wachtell Lipton, to give them tips about some of his firm’s coming deals, prosecutors say, including the potential acquisition of Canadian coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons.

Burger King agreed to buy Tim Hortons for $11 billion in 2014. The Tim Hortons trade also was routed to the Russian trader, who bought the shares in the name of a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands, according to court papers.

Sutton, who was recently the general counsel of investment bank LionTree, didn’t respond to requests for comment and hasn’t been charged. A Wachtell spokeswoman said “the responsible party left Wachtell Lipton over four years ago. There are no allegations of wrongdoing against the firm.”

Nourafchan left Sidley Austin around 2017 and joined Latham & Watkins, another Wall Street law firm with a sizable roster of merger clients. Around the same time, he and Yadgarov recruited a college classmate, Gabriel Gershowitz, to funnel them more tips.

Gershowitz worked then at Weil Gotshal and told the group about a $2.5 billion transaction that involved Ardagh, a metal and glass packaging company. Gershowitz was charged in January 2025 and has cooperated with prosecutors. Several defendants cooperating with prosecutors were charged the prior month.

Prosecutors have recommended Gershowitz serve two years in prison. He is set to be sentenced in November, according to court records. A lawyer for Gershowitz declined to comment.

Weil Gotshal said that it was among the victims of the alleged scheme and that it cooperated with prosecutors. “The former employee who misused confidential information as part of a large-scale insider trading scheme has not been associated with the firm for over six years and the transaction involved dates back to 2019,” it said.

Nourafchan didn’t last long at Latham and was told in July 2020 that he would have to depart the following month. A day before his last day, Nourafchan accessed Latham’s systems to learn about J&J’s $6.5 billion offer to buy Momenta Pharmaceuticals, prosecutors say.

He provided the information to his Florida middleman, who gave the tip to a doctor in Florida whose brothers also traded on the tips, as did some of the brothers’ co-workers, according to the indictment.

The group tried to disguise their trading intentions in their text messages, according to prosecutors. Trying to tell Nourafchan that he had lost his trading connection, one of the ring members said his “laborers” had messed up the job. “I’m going to focus on finding a new construction crew and then we’ll be building skyscrapers,” the unnamed participant said.

Nourafchan landed at Goodwin, the Boston-based firm, after leaving Latham. The firm had a large roster of private-equity clients that bought software and healthcare companies, many of them publicly traded. 

The alleged schemers were sometimes impatient. In June 2022, Nourafchan got confidential information from Goodwin’s systems about Amazon’s plan to acquire iRobot and shared it with his Florida middleman, according to court papers. As days passed, traders who bet on the deal worried the tip might be bad because Amazon didn’t announce a purchase of the maker of robot vacuums.

This time, the group referred to waiting on a “rabbi” who needed “surgery.” “We needed that damn rebbe already,” one trader wrote. When the trader didn’t get a definitive response about when the deal would happen, he replied: “At this point I might just start learning the Koran.”

Nourafchan also tipped his brother, Lorenzo, to the iRobot news, which opened the door to a separate network of traders who were less careful with the tips. Lorenzo Nourafchan recruited his hair stylist to do the trading, who in turn involved the owner of an insurance agency and nearly a dozen of his friends or relatives, according to the court papers.

Lorenzo Nourafchan hasn’t entered a plea and didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The alleged schemers made more than $1.7 million in trading profits after Amazon announced [its $1.7 billion deal for iRobot in August 2022, the court papers show, and some of the traders asked for more tips. “Because I want money,” one of them texted. “You told me before that there was another one coming.”

By early 2024, authorities had caught wind of the scheme. In March, an undercover agent contacted one of the participants to ask about the iRobot deal and other trades, pretending to be a securities regulator. The participant quickly contacted the Florida middleman, according to a transcript included in the indictment.

“I just got a terrible call…we might need a meeting,” the trader said.

“Shut up,” the middleman replied, and asked what the call was about.

“About some trades in iRobot and Momentive and some other things that were. Yeah a whole bunch of acquisitions,” the trader said.

The middleman responded: “Holy s—. That is the most nauseating thing I have ever heard.”