A former securities trader was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday for insider trading in another victory for prosecutors in their probe of suspicious trading on Wall Street.

Emanuel Goffer, 32, was found guilty by a Manhattan federal court jury in June along with his older brother, Zvi Goffer, and a third trader, Michael Kimelman. Emanuel Goffer was convicted on one conspiracy charge and two securities fraud counts.

The Goffer case comes from a wide-ranging government probe of insider trading by hedge funds and traders, noted for the use of FBI wiretaps, which also led to the conviction of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam.

U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan, who presided over the trial, sentenced Zvi Goffer last month to 10 years in prison. Kimelman will be sentenced next week.

Prosecutors said Zvi Goffer was the ringleader who paid tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to two Ropes & Gray lawyers to learn what corporate deals the law firm was working on. The lawyers, Arthur Cutillo and Brien Santarlas, have pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

Zvi goffer once worked at Rajaratnam's Galleon Group hedge fund firm. Rajaratnam faces sentencing next week.

This was a deliberate scheme to procure inside information, privileged information, from a law firm by bribing lawyers, by corrupting them to breach their duties to their firm and to their customers, Sullivan said.

Emanuel Goffer was ordered to pay $760,000 in forfeiture.

The Goffer case is USA v Zvi Goffer et al, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 10-00056.

(Reporting by Basil Katz; editing by John Wallace)

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