Insider Jury-Room Demonstration Persuaded Holdouts in Ex-Trader’s Trial

After more than nine hours of deliberating in a cramped room so warm that they had to ask for ice, the nine women and three men on a federal jury had reached an impasse.

Two jurors still held doubts about whether Michael S. Steinberg, the highest-ranking SAC Capital Advisors employee to be accused of insider trading, explicitly knew that his analyst had given him illegal tips. Dozens of emails, phone records and trading charts had failed to clear up their lingering hesitations about Jon Horvath, the analyst and the government’s star witness.

Then, on Wednesday afternoon â€" after a lunch of vegetable-and-turkey wraps and burgers â€" the two holdouts had a breakthrough. One juror asked Demethress Gordon, the jury forewoman and one of the holdouts, to walk through a doorway. She complied, and the fellow juror said, “I told you to go through the door, but I didn’t tell you explicitly how to go through the door,” Ms. Gordon recalled in an interview.

“It’s like the elephant in the room â€" it’s obvious you know what to do,” she added.

By 2:59 p.m., the jury had reached its verdict: Mr. Steinberg was guilty on all five insider trading charges related to trades he had made in the technology stocks Dell and Nvidia.

Interviews with five of the 12 jurors â€" a diverse group from New York City, Rockland County and Westchester County that included two accountants and a former postal worker â€" showed that they had grappled with the financial jargon of a complicated Wall Street insider trading case. Over the four-week trial, 13 witnesses took the stand and hundreds of exhibits were admitted into evidence.

Without any direct evidence like wiretaps, the government had to rely on Mr. Horvath as the linchpin of its case against Mr. Steinberg. Mr. Horvath, who pleaded guilty to insider trading last year, testified that he was cooperating with the government in the hope of avoiding a prison sentence.

Under questioning from Antonia M. Apps, an assistant United States attorney and the lead prosecutor in the case, Mr. Horvath testified that he was pressed by Mr. Steinberg to find “edgy, proprietary information,” which he took to mean nonpublic information.

But during a five-day cross-examination by Barry H. Berke, the lead defense lawyer, Mr. Horvath testified that he had “never told Mike Steinberg explicitly that it was illegal information.”

Mr. Horvath’s testimony troubled some of the jurors. The very last juror to hold out, a 71-year-old woman who spoke on the condition of anonymity, accused Mr. Horvath of lying.

“He was trying to save his own skin,” she said.

Ms. Gordon, the forewoman, said she noted 28 times when she thought Mr. Horvath had lied.

“I did not believe him,” Ms. Gordon, a licensed massage therapist from Manhattan, said. “I didn’t believe anything he said.”

But ultimately, the questions about Mr. Horvath’s credibility did not outweigh the jurors’ belief that Mr. Steinberg knew the tips were improper. For the last holdout, it was one email that Mr. Steinberg had sent to Mr. Horvath, asking him to keep a tip “especially on the down low,” that ultimately persuaded her that Mr. Steinberg knew the information was not public.

Trial lawyers for both the prosecution and the defense frequently jumped from one chart to another as they questioned witnesses. At times, members of the jury watched closely, and at other times some appeared to drift off to sleep.

On the first day of jury deliberations, as Judge Richard J. Sullivan of Federal District Court spent an hour and a half walking jurors through pages of instructions, one male juror appeared to nod off briefly.

Mr. Sullivan looked up, called out the juror’s name and asked if he needed to stretch. The juror nodded and sat up in his seat.

After filing into a back room to deliberate, the jurors went through each of the five charges against Mr. Steinberg step by step.

“We said, ‘He is innocent, is there anything in the testimony that makes us believe that he is not innocent,’ ” said Paul Skokandich, one of the jurors.

“If we disagreed, we said, ‘Let’s look at the testimony,’ ” Mr. Skokandich, a bookkeeper at Holiday Inn, added.

Jurors sent a quick succession of notes to Judge Sullivan, asking to see exhibits related to specific trades, emails, instant messages and charts. At several points, Judge Sullivan grew visibly annoyed by the notes, calling one “sloppy” and another nearly “nonsensical.” In both instances, he sent notes back asking the jury to be more specific.

The monthlong trial ended with a dramatic moment as the jury entered the courtroom one last time to read its verdict.

As the jurors filed in, Mr. Steinberg blanched and slumped in his chair, appearing to faint. Judge Sullivan ordered the jury to return to the deliberation room for a half-hour while a courthouse nurse examined Mr. Steinberg in a room nearby.

Such drama at the end of one of the year’s most prominent white-collar crime cases underscored the reality of what Mr. Steinberg, his wife and their two young children were about to face.

“That was horrible for us, being sent back to the jury room,” said a juror who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Even though it obviously wasn’t going to change how we felt, we’re still human beings, too.”