In a world where reality is often more intriguing than fiction, this Wall Street Journal ($) article reports that Carl Icahn needs no stinkin’ stock tips:

By now, everyone knows how Martha Stewart was alerted by a Merrill Lynch & Co. brokerage assistant that Sam Waksal, her friend and founder of ImClone Systems, was trying to sell the biotech company’s shares.
Less well known, however, is the story of how financier Carl Icahn was buying ImClone shares that very day, possibly even snapping up the same shares that Ms. Stewart was unloading.
Mr. Icahn recently disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that he owns 5.24 million shares of ImClone, a stake he first began accumulating with a purchase of 10,000 shares on Dec. 27, 2001, people close to the situation say.
After his purchase on Dec. 27, Mr. Icahn stopped buying ImClone for a few months. As the scandal unfolded and the share price fell to below $10 in the summer of 2002, Mr. Icahn began buying ImClone shares again, adding 3.6 million shares to his holdings. He bought the stock again earlier this year, picking up 1.63 million shares. That purchase brought his average purchase price to $19.58, according to the SEC filing.
His profit, with ImClone shares now at $70 each, the level where they were before the scandal hit would be a cool $250 million.

Shaking his head from it all, Professor Ribstein places this latest development in appropriate perspective with earlier events in this saga:

So let’s take inventory. The stockbroker’s tip that Martha supposedly relied on, which as I have written likely was not illegal inside information, may not even have been material. But that’s ok, because she was not convicted of this non-crime, but of covering it up. The person she would have defrauded had she committed a crime has made a quarter billion dollars on the stock. The guy who invented the drug that produced these profits is already in jail.