Eugene Plotkin, former Goldman Sachs associate involved in insider trading was sentenced yesterday to almost five years in prison. The 28-year-old Harvard graduate got the minimum possible sentence under his plea agreement.

Plotkin was arrested in early 2006 for a huge insider trading scheme that involved one of his coworkers, David Pajcin. Also involved were a Merrill Lynch analyst and two employees of Wisconsin-based Quad/Graphics, Inc.

Plotkin and Pajcin recruited Nickolaus Shuster and Juan C. Renteria Jr. to get jobs at a Quad/Graphics printing plant that printed Business Week magazine. Their part in the scheme was to steal advance copies of the magazine so that Plotkin and Pajcin could hear about information from the IWS column before the information was available to the general public. The Goldman men trade on the information themselves, or passed the insider information to other traders invovled in the scheme.

The Merrill Lynch analyst, Stanislav Shpigelman, illegally gave Plotkin and Pajcin information on upcoming mergers, including Adidas and Reebok. In total, these two schemes netted about $6.5 million.