Marc O. Litt, who was one of the lead prosecutors in the Bernard Madoff case, is leaving the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office.
Litt, an Assistant U.S. Attorney who worked in the office for eight years, will join Baker & McKenzie LLP, the Wall Street Journal reported. He had stopped working on the Madoff probe in May to avoid conflicts during his job search, the Journal reported.
Marc Litt (Getty)
Litt and fellow Madoff prosecutor Lisa Baroni were often out-gunned in the sprawling probe of Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme. They labored to sift through what the Associated Press called a “massive blob of amorphous evidence,” and went up against lawyers from seemingly every high-priced law firm in New York. Their offices were shabby, and they didn’t have an army of assistants.
While Madoff is behind bars and several employees of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC are under indictment or have pleaded guilty, prosecutors haven’t succeeded yet in bringing criminal charges against any of the allegedly most culpable big fish.
Instead, attention has been on the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard of Baker & Hostetler LLP, who has filed a blizzard of civil lawsuits to recover funds for the victims.
He’s made allegations against the banks (UBS, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Chase and other institutions) that he says helped funnel investors into the scheme or turned a blind eye.
He’s all but accused other wealthy individuals of being partners in the Madoff crime. (“In Sonja Kohn, Madoff found a criminal soul mate, whose greed and dishonest inventiveness equaled his own,” says a complaint against the Austrian banker whom Picard said received at least $62 million, and probably “far more,” from the Ponzi scheme.)
And Picard has been trying for more than a year to settle with the estate of Madoff pal Jeffry Picower, who died last year while swimming in his Palm Beach pool after allegedly taking $7 billion from the scheme. (Picower’s long-time personal lawyer is William Zabel, father of SDNY Criminal Chief Richard Zabel, who recused himself from the case).
Criminal cases, with their higher standards of proof, are harder to bring than civil allegations. But none of the alleged major beneficiaries of the scheme as outlined in Picard’s civil lawsuits have been charged.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Julian Moore is now assisting Baroni as lead prosecutor on the case.
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[...] O. Litt, who was a lead prosecutor in the Madoff probe, will join Baker & McKenzie LLP. He stepped away from the Madoff investigation in May to prevent conflicts [...]