At least four Wall Street workers were running their own bull market in cocaine sales — dealing the drug right on the busy trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Manhattan prosecutors said yesterday.
One of the accused, licensed broker Frank Geneva, 45, faces up to six years in prison after pleading guilty this week to sale and possession charges.
The other three — two messengers and a phone clerk — have pleaded not guilty to multiple cocaine sales.
Geneva — a married father of two from Staten Island who worked for B.R. Doyle & Co. as a telephone clerk — sold cocaine to a limited number of brokers and other co-workers to support his own drug habit, his lawyer said yesterday.
Prosecutors say Geneva even kept scales — to weigh the powdered drug — on hand in his locker at the exchange. He remains free on $50,000 bail awaiting a May 18 sentencing.
The DA’s continuing investigation caught all four peddling cocaine right under the noses of the floor’s frenzied traders, prosecutors said.
They were busted last September after making repeated sales to a narcotics cop who posed undercover in a six-month investigation — delivering paper stock orders on foot while wearing the trademark blue jacket of a floor “runner,” or messenger.
Geneva and the three others, Hector Almonte, 55, Sandra Corson, 37, and Shawn Moore, 35, hand-delivered the coke in $40 to $100 packets — often hidden inside the NYSE envelopes used to hold stock orders, prosecutors said.
The sting was carried out with the knowledge and cooperation of the NYSE, said exchange spokesman Robert Zito, adding that the arrested workers have been barred from the trading floor.
“We believe these are isolated instances in a community of 3,300 people,” Zito said, referring to the number of workers on the floor each day.
Others reacted with surprise and anger.
“This is a black eye for the exchange,” said Daniel Strachman, a former trader and author of “Getting Started in Hedge Funds.”
“But I don’t think there’s any more drug use on Wall Street than anywhere else,” he added.
Still, some exchange workers said they weren’t surprised at all.
“A lot of these guys still think it’s the ’80s,” said one man leaving the exchange wearing a pinstripe suit complete with linen pocket square.