Wall Street Journal-Law Blog
By Amair Efrati
April 22, 2009
John Ashcroft, the U.S. attorney general during President Bush’s first term — and noted singer of “Let the Eagle Soar” (YouTube clip here) — is spreading his wings.
*Michael Sullivan, U.S. attorney in Boston and former acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives in Washington.
*Catherine Hanaway, U.S. attorney, St. Louis
*Johnny Sutton, U.S. attorney in El Paso, Texas, who prosecuted two former border patrol agents for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler in 2005. (On his last day in office, President Bush commuted the agents’ prison sentences.)
*John Ratcliffe, U.S. attorney in Dallas.
In other DOJ-related news, U.S. attorney Ben Campbell (pictured, below) and his crew at the Eastern District of New York can breathe a sigh of relief.
Ben CampbellSix former stockbrokers and traders were found guilty on Wednesday afternoon in a case that first made waves on Wall Street in 2005. Eastern District prosecutors alleged the defendants schemed to misuse information broadcast over brokerage-firm “squawk” boxes. The stockbrokers, formerly of Lehman, Citigroup and Merrill, were allegedly bribed to leave open telephone lines next to internal speaker systems at their firms so that traders could secretly eavesdrop on big orders of stock by the firms’ institutional clients. They profited by trading ahead of those orders.
The men face a maximum of 25 years in prison for their conviction on a charge of conspiracy to commit securities fraud.
Several individuals initially pleaded guilty in connection with the scheme, but prosecutors ran into a wall when they prosecuted the six men in 2007. The jury acquitted them on most counts but deadlocked on the conspiracy charge. EDNY brought in senior prosecutors Paul Schoeman and Jay McMahon for this year’s trial.