New York – This time, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the butler really did do it.
Graham Lefford, the former butler to “American Idol” creator Robert Sillerman, made $48,525 in illegal stock trades after learning his boss would buy a stake in Elvis Presley’s estate, the SEC said in a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday.
Lefford, 44, bought $600 in stock of the company used to buy the stake just 12 minutes after faxing Sillerman’s signed contract in 2004, the SEC said. Shares in the company, now called CKX Inc., jumped by more than 9,000 percent after the $100 million purchase, for rights to Presley’s music and his Graceland mansion, was made public in December of that year, according to the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York.
“It’s certainly an unusual set of facts – he’s a butler, and it involves Elvis,” said David Rosenfeld, an enforcement official at the SEC’s New York office. Though a relatively small case, “the message here is you can’t fly under the radar,” he said.
The SEC suit seeks to force Lefford to surrender his profit on the trades and pay an unspecified fine.
