Bob calls people-in-the-know at publicly traded companies. He says, "Hey, wanna do consulting?"

What kind of consulting? "Oh, you know. Just handing over corporate secrets. Easy money."

Bob then calls hedge funds: "Hey, wanna buy some stock tips?"

Hedge-fund managers have wealthy clients who pay them a premium to beat the market. And what better way to beat the market than to fix the market?

Insider trading? Nah. This is "expert networking."

Too bad for the little people who blindly send their retirement savings to Wall Street believing in a dopey lie called the free market.

They can't afford an expert networker like Bob. They're just so honest and forthright and hardworking, they rarely consider that big players, with rich clients, can buy inside information from expert networkers and then eat all the little players for lunch.

It would be comforting to write off Bob as a cynical urban myth. But Bob is not only a real person, he likely represents an entire industry.

Last week, 32-year-old Bob Nguyen, of Stockton, Calif., pleaded guilty to fraud charges in a Manhattan federal court.

From January 2008 to February 2010, he had been a technology analyst for Primary Global Research, a Mountain View, Calif., firm that does -- you guessed it -- "expert networking."

Mr. Nguyen flat out told the court his job was to get information from corporate insiders and sell it to money managers. He said this was pretty much what the firm did. The firm itself hasn't been charged, but several of its associates have, including Winifred Jiau, 43, who was arrested last month and remains in jail after being denied bail.

Mr. Nguyen faces up to 25 years in prison, but he'll likely get less for helping prosecutors nail anyone he knows in the good ol' expert-networking business.

Charges against Mr. Nguyen follow a federal probe of hedge fund Galleon Group, where six people were arrested in October 2009, including Galleon co-founder Raj Rajaratnam. The feds allege these defendants made $25 million from illegal trades. And their probe continues to widen.

Just as we learned that Enron accounting was ubiquitous before the tech bubble burst, with our largest investment houses and accounting firms as co-conspirators...

Just as we learned that fraudulent lending and bogus mortgage-backed securities were everywhere just before the housing bubble burst, with our most cherished, too-big-to-fail banks as accomplices...

...Isn't it likely the lucrative business Mr. Nguyen describes is systemic as well?

Hey, what's wrong with being "a consultant" or a "networker"? It's just business, right?

Overzealous free-market enthusiasts have long argued that the insider trading deemed illegal by securities laws is somehow victimless and should be lawful.

Any information you can get your hands on in the market is yours. Become an officer of a publicly traded company and short your own stock as you mismanage the enterprise. Or better yet, sell all the company secrets to the highest bidder.

Apparently, there's an industry that will buy it.

That's the free market. So free, it's easy to fix.
