‘Bro, I’m Going Rogue’: The Wall Street Informant Who Double-Crossed the FBI

On the night he cut a deal with the FBI, Guy Gentile was on his way to a Connecticut casino for his cousin’s bachelor party. He’d jetted up from the Bahamas, where he was running an online stock brokerage that cleared a million dollars a year without much effort on his part. Then 36, he was a working-class kid who’d finagled his way into the dicier edges of finance, and he dressed the part, with neatly trimmed stubble, designer jeans, a silver Rolex, and sunglasses that hung from the collar of his tight T-shirt, just below a few tufts of chest hair.

Gentile was feeling edgy about traveling stateside. It was July 2012, and regulators had been making calls about a stock play he’d been involved with a few years earlier. He’d been part of a group that the FBI suspected had suckered investors out of more than $15 million by manipulating the market for shares in a Mexican gold mine and a natural gas project in Kentucky.