Usually when the SEC has juicy facts in enforcement cases it goes out of its way to flag them for us in the headline of its litigation release or elsewhere. For instance, when the SEC announced a final judgment in an insider trading case against James McDermott, Jr., the former CEO of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc., and a woman named Kathryn B. Gannon, it made sure to state right up front that Gannon was "a.k.a. 'Marilyn Starr', a former actress in adult films."

And yet in the SEC's insider trading case that settled this week against James Gansman, a partner at a Big Four accounting firm, the agency has been lulling me to sleep since 2008 by simply stating that Gansman tipped a "friend" concerning the confidential identities of at least seven different acquisition targets of clients. The SEC noted that the friend traded in the securities of the target companies, and allegedly made recommendations to others who traded as well, resulting in total illegal trading profits of $596,000.

But there are friends and then there are friends, and as a July 2009 WSJ article that I just discovered explains, there was much more to this friendship than described by the SEC. It turns out that Gansman met his friend, Donna Murdoch, on Ashleymadison.com, a Web site for people in search of extramarital affairs. The WSJ reports that the two began meeting in hotel rooms in various cities, and made more than 7,000 phone calls in two years. At some point, Gansman began tipping Murdoch off on deals he was working on by giving her hints about market cap or industry and making her guess, and later just telling her more directly, the WSJ reports.

But there's more. To obtain the money to make the insider trades, Murdoch then found financial suport from a different man she met on Ashleymadison.com! Murdoch also shared Gansman's tips with this other man, without telling either man about her relationship with the other, the WSJ reports.

In February 2010, Gansman was sentenced to a year and a day in prison after being convicted of six counts of securities fraud related to the insider trading (for which he never made a penny).