Age: 58
Company: The Wall Street Journal
Years before Martha Stewart, Foster Winans was the public face of insider trading. As co-author of The Wall Street Journal's influential "Heard on the Street" column in the early 1980s, he sometimes told stockbroker Peter Brant and others what he was going to write, allowing them to get a jump on ordinary readers and the market. Winans's tips made his co-conspirators almost $1 million. His cut was only $31,000. He served about eight months in prison and paid a $5,000 fine. A few years after getting out of jail, he moved back to his hometown of Doylestown, Pa., and began ghostwriting books - sometimes up to eight a year. Upcoming is a memoir by one of Mao Zedong's top deputies. As for insider trading, Winans says, "Maybe it's time they just made it legal. I'm only half-kidding." The big problem with the laws, he says, is that they are so vague. As he wrote in a March New York Times op-ed, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on his case in 1987, the Justices agreed that he had defrauded the Journal but split on whether it constituted insider trading.
