A cash-strapped, luxury-loving Walt Disney Co. secretary was busted yesterday in a plot to peddle inside information with her boyfriend so she could live out a Cinderella fantasy of designer handbags and shoes.
But the Mickey Mouse scheme collapsed when nearly every one of the investment firms they contacted ratted them out to the FBI, which then snagged the boyfriend in a sting earlier this month, authorities said.
Bonnie Jean Hoxie — whose Facebook status reads, “I go shopping shopping shopping!!” — allegedly told failed restaurateur Yonni Sebbag to spend some of their illicit profits on a $700 Stella McCartney “hobo”-style bag in metallic navy fake patent leather from Neiman Marcus.
“Here is the bag that you are going to get for me — thank [sic],” the 33-year-old e-mailed on May 11, helpfully including a link to the purse on the store’s Web site, court papers say.
Sebbag, 29, allegedly wrote back promising to make the purchase, “I may be able to [buy] u 2 of them, lol.”
“In that case, i also love love these shoes,” Hoxie replied, giving him a link to a pair of Stella McCartney blue, open-toed ladder-strap stilettos at the Neiman Marcus site, according to a civil suit filed yesterday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Since 2007, Hoxie had worked for Disney’s head of corporate communications, Zenia Mucha, once a top aide to former Gov. George Pataki and ex-Sen. Al D’Amato. But on Tuesday, Hoxie was expelled from the Magic Kingdom’s corporate headquarters in Burbank, Calif.
She was later released on $50,000 bond and ordered to show up for a June 3 Manhattan court hearing.
“I was really shocked. She was shocked, too,” said Theodore Hoxie, 25, who called his sister “a really good person” who “had fallen in with the wrong people.”
He said he had to tell their parents about her arrest over a pay phone because his big sis can’t afford a cellphone or a land line.
Meanwhile, Moroccan-born Sebbag, who was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, has been having his own share of money troubles. His Yonni’s Coffee Shop in Hollywood went belly-up earlier this year amid mounting tax liens.
A criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court alleges the pair embarked on their insider-trading scheme in March, based on Hoxie’s “access” to Disney inside information.
In an anonymous letter sent to dozens of investment firms, they offered to share information about the company’s upcoming quarterly earnings report “for a fee,” the feds said.
Once the FBI caught wind of the scam, undercover agents posing as hedge-fund traders began corresponding with Sebbag, who used the name “Jonathan Cyrus.”
On May 8 — three days before the earnings report was to be released — he sent them copies of a 107-page document titled “The Walt Disney Company Q2 Fiscal 2010 Key Topics Speaking Points.”
On May 14, Sebbag flew to New York to meet with two agents on Long Island, where they handed him an envelope stuffed with $15,000 in cash.
At the meeting, Sebbag also cut a deal to continue leaking information in exchange for 30 percent of future profits, the feds say.
He’s been ordered held without bail and transferred to Manhattan.
Disney said it has been “fully cooperating with this information.”
Additional reporting by Kelly Hartog, Ada Calhoun and Jeane MacIntosh