Former roommate charged in ex-Eagle Mychal Kendricks’ $1.2M insider trading scheme

Federal authorities charged a former roommate of ex-Eagle Mychal Kendricks, alleging in an indictment unsealed Tuesday that the man carried out many of the insider stock trades threatening to send the NFL linebacker to prison.

Prosecutors say Mark Wayne Ramsey, who also goes by the name Christian Ramsey, accessed Kendricks’ laptop and online stock-trading portfolio to trade on confidential financial information, netting a profit for his football-star roommate of $1.1 million between 2014 and 2015.

The indictment alleges Kendricks knowingly used Ramsey, 29, as a buffer to mask his own involvement in the illegal trading.

In exchange, he allowed Ramsey to live with him in Northern Liberties rent-free and bankrolled several businesses he launched during the period, including a cell-phone app tied to barbershops and a vegan sandwich restaurant he ran for a time out of Kendricks’ apartment.

The new charges come eight months after Kendricks, 28, pleaded guilty to counts of conspiracy and securities fraud, and appear to vindicate his claim that while he knew what he was doing was illegal, others carried out most of the illegal trading on his behalf.

“These trades and the execution of them were not done personally by Mr. Kendricks,” his lawyer Michael A. Schwartz had said at a September hearing before U.S. District Judge Gene E.K. Pratter. “But he understands he’s responsible for them.”

Ramsey, who now lives in San Francisco, could not be immediately reached for comment Tuesday. It was not clear from court records whether he had retained an attorney.

He describes himself on LinkedIn as a “life hacker,” “raw vegan,” “deep learning researcher,” and a researcher conducting “a long-term ethnographic study on players in the NFL.”

A civil suit filed against — also Tuesday — by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission laid out a brief history of his connection to Kendricks.

The two grew up in Fresno, Calif., and attended high school there, it says. And two years into Kendricks’ contract with the Eagles, Ramsey came to live with him, serving as a personal assistant, scheduling meetings, and performing household chores in exchange for room and board.

When Kendricks began receiving illegal stock tips from Damilaire Sonoiki, a Harvard-educated Goldman Sachs analyst whom he met at a party in 2013, the lawsuit alleges he turned to Ramsey to handle that part of his life as well.

Ramsey and Sonoiki — whom Kendricks paid with cash kickbacks, NFL tickets, and invitations to celebrity-filled events — coordinated most of the details of the transactions carried out through the linebacker’s account.

Sonoiki left the financial sector in 2015 to pursue a TV writing career on sitcoms including Black-ish and The Simpsons. He pleaded guilty to the insider trading charges in September.

During six seasons with the Eagles, Kendricks was paid more than $20 million. He was released by the team in 2018.

Now with the Seattle Seahawks and living in California, he could receive up to three years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines at a hearing later this year.

“As Mychal has said from the very beginning, he regrets deeply being involved in this criminal activity,” Schwartz, his lawyer, said Tuesday. “He has both accepted responsibility and cooperated completely with law enforcement authorities and will continue to do so.”