A former commodities trader was on Friday sentenced to 28 months in prison for threatening to kill dozens of US officials at the nation’s top securities and commodity regulators, including posting a 250,000 euro (US$327,417) bounty on Facebook.
Vincent McCrudden, 51, was accused in January last year of posting an online “execution list” of officials, including US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Mary Schapiro and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Gary Gensler.
McCrudden pleaded guilty in July in the US District Court in Central Islip, New York, to two counts of transmission of threats to injure.
The sentence handed down by US District Judge Denis Hurley includes nearly 13 months of time served, said Sarita Kedia, one of McCrudden’s lawyers. He had faced up to 10 years in prison.
McCrudden was employed on Wall Street for more than 20 years, working his way up from a New York Mercantile Exchange floor broker to running trading desks specializing in commodities, derivatives and foreign exchange, according to his biography on the Web site of his firm, Alnbri Management LLC.
Federal prosecutors said he began a five-year campaign of threats and harassment after becoming “enraged” in 2005 after the National Futures Association denied his application to trade futures on behalf of others.
He wrote “vulgar and threatening” e-mails, letters and public postings to public officials including those at the SEC, CFTC, the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the National Futures Association, authorities said.
“Go buy a gun, and lets get to work in taking back our country from these criminals,” McCrudden allegedly wrote, in a statement calling for the four regulators to be abolished. “I will be the first one to lead by example.”
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