United States prosecutors charged a further 14 people on Thursday over an alleged $53 million (£32 million) web of insider trading surrounding Galleon, the New York hedge fund group, in a case that could come straight from the pages of a crime thriller.

At least 20 hedge fund managers, traders, executives and lawyers across America allegedly used illicit information about some of the country’s biggest companies to bring in almost triple the $20 million profit that prosecutors originally estimated had been made in the scam.

The conspirators borrowed a ploy of drug dealers by using pay-as-you-go mobile phones to try to avoid detection and chewed up a phone chip to destroy evidence, investigators said, but were caught by phone wiretaps and informants wearing recording devices.

Robert Khuzami, director of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission, described Zvi Goffer, one of the defendants, as Octopussy because he allegedly had his arms in so many insider trading schemes.

Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said that the case, which took two years of investigation, “went to the very heart of fair play in the business world”.

The tangle of connections alleged between defendants is so complicated that Mr Bharara needed a flipchart to explain the case at yesterday’s press conference announcing the charges.

The latest charges come after the arrest three weeks ago of Raj Rajaratnam, Galleon’s billionaire founder. Mr Rajaratnam, who is on $100 million bail, was one of six people charged with using inside information on companies including Hilton Hotels and IBM, to make as much as $25 million between 2006 and 2007. Senior executives from Intel, the computer-chip maker, McKinsey & Co, the consultancy, and IBM were charged alongside Sri Lanka-born Mr Rajaratnam.

The FBI yesterday arrested eight people in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut as inquiries extended to others with Galleon connections. The eight were among the 14 charged. Mr Goffer, a trader who worked for Schottenfeld, a broker dealer, and later for Galleon, was at the centre of the trading ring, prosecutors said.

The FBI intercepted a phone call by Mr Goffer, who allegedly paid his informants with bags of cash, in which he warned an alleged accomplice, Jason Goldfarb, an attorney, to be careful that he did not make any suspicious options purchases. He warned: “That’s a ticket right to the **** big house”. Mr Goffer also spoke of his suspicion that an accomplice was a “rat”.

Arthur Cutillo, a lawyer with Ropes & Gray, is alleged to have provided information to the ring on private equity deals on which his firm worked, including Bain Capital Partners’ 2007 takeover of 3Com.

Mr Goldfarb, Craig Drimal, who worked in Galleon’s building but not for the fund manager, Emanuel Goffer, of Spectrum Trading, and Michael Kimelman and David Plate, who worked with Zvi Goffer in Mr Goffer’s own business, Incremental Capital, allegedly traded on secret information.

These six men were charged, as was Deep Shah, a former analyst for Moody’s Investor Services, who allegedly accepted cash to tip off the ring about deals being rated by his employer, and Ali Hariri, an executive of Atheros Solutions, a California communications products company.

Guilty pleas have earlier been made by Roomy Khan, a friend of Mr Shah’s aunt; Steve Fortuna, founder of S2 Capital, a Boston hedge fund; Gautham Shankar, a former Schottenfeld trader; and Ali Farr and Choo Beng Lee, of Spherix Capital, a California hedge fund.

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