"It's hard enough to be a 49-year-old guy and a bit of a job hopper," he said. "Obviously, nobody knew that I was a bit of a crook."
Kluger was relieved to leave the scheme at last, he said.
"I wasn't going to be subject to Ken saying, 'Oh please, please, please,'" he said. "I had the sense that we had pushed our luck beyond where we should have pushed it. It was never intended to be this ongoing, forever thing. It needed to have an end."
Kluger and Robinson had talked about one last score, for $1 million or $2 million, that would have allowed them to walk away, Kluger said.
"I would have happily called it quits," Kluger said.
In March 2011, Kluger started a new job as president of a transportation company. He lived with his children and a partner in Oakton, Virginia, 24 miles west of Washington. Still, he needed to collect his final cut of $88,000 from Robinson.
SEC Lurking
Kluger had no way of knowing that the SEC never ended its 2007 investigation. The agency was using new technology to confirm its suspicions that Bauer had an inside source on Wilson Sonsini merger deals. The Philadelphia office covertly monitored Bauer's trades for three years to find the source, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In 2009, an investigator noticed that Robinson and Bauer often traded in the same stocks, although Robinson avoided the Wilson Sonsini deals. Then the SEC got a break. Robinson himself bought shares of 3Com Inc. before its acquisition by Hewlett- Packard, a deal handled by Wilson Sonsini. Investigators concluded that Robinson and Bauer had a common source, the person said, asking not to be identified because the investigation was confidential.
"The SEC's use of automated trading and relationship analysis in this case was critical to establishing that Robinson and Bauer were part of the same trading scheme and had a common source -- Kluger," said Daniel M. Hawke, chief of the SEC's market-abuse unit and director of the Philadelphia Regional Office.
Regulator Moves
In the summer of 2010, the SEC went to the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey with its evidence. Prosecutors took up the case, working with federal agents who approached Robinson in March 2011. Within days, Robinson agreed to cooperate.