“Greed and corruption. That’s what this case is about.” So intoned lead prosecutor Jonathan R. Streeter in his opening remarks to the jury in the largest insider trading case ever brought by the government, US v. Rajaratnam. Two months later, in May 2011, the conviction of the Galleon hedge funds manager on all 14 counts crowned Streeter’s 11-year career as a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York. In successive positions in the Major Crimes Unit, as Assistant US Attorney on the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force, and as Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division, Streeter prosecuted 17 federal jury trials to verdict, losing only one. He secured convictions in complex white-collar criminal cases against lawyer Marc Dreier for swindling hedge funds, and trial victories against the CEO and CFO of Duane Reade for accounting fraud and against Ernst & Young partner James Gansman for insider trading. In 2010, Streeter received the Attorney General’s John Marshall Award for Asset Forfeiture. Having put in his quota of 100-hour weeks as a federal prosecutor, he crossed over to white-collar criminal defense at Dechert LLP in 2012. Prior to joining the US Attorney’s Office, he was an associate at Arnold & Porter in Washington DC representing Philip Morris during the mass tort litigation of the ‘90s. Streeter earned his AB cum laude from Colgate University and his JD cum laude from Northwestern University School of Law.
Clare Cosslett: Who inspired you to be a litigator ?
Jonathan Streeter: My father was a corporate lawyer at a big law firm in Cleveland. My uncle was a lawyer in New York City when I was growing up and was kind of a well-known guy named Michael Armstrong, who did some high-profile things while I was a kid. He was chief counsel to the Knapp Commission, which investigated police corruption in New York City and gave rise to the book and the movie Serpico. He was the chief prosecutor and was on TV every day in the summer during the hearings in New York City. He was also a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office, where I ultimately took a job. So, between my uncle and my father, I’ve always been inspired to be a lawyer, even when I was a kid.
I knew I wanted to be a litigator from the beginning. My father’s corporate practice included taking companies public, and mergers and acquisitions, but I never understood what he did day to day. My uncle—my mother’s brother—was a litigator, and that I understood. He was in the courtroom, he was trying cases, he was arguing—and that appealed to me. I always knew I wanted to do that. Also at a very early stage, I identified being a federal prosecutor as a way to combine my interest in doing public service work with being at the top of the profession—doing the hardest stuff and the most interesting stuff available.
Cosslett: The New York Observer reported that your brother remembers a time when you were in fourth grade and got into an argument about racism with older kids on the school bus. He said that you had “a very, very strong moral compass .” Do you remember feeling that you were an advocate for justice even then, or did you just like to argue?
Streeter: I think a little bit of both. I’ve always loved to argue. I think the first job I ever wanted, after wanting to be a fireman or a cowboy or whatever a six-year-old kid wants to be, was to be a lawyer. I think I probably identified that when I was seven or eight years old. People used to joke about how I liked to argue a lot, so that was definitely a part of it. But, yes, I always had—and I’m flattered by my brother’s comment—a strong sense of right and wrong.
I remember the argument on that bus. We grew up in a town called Chagrin Falls, which is on the east side of Cleveland. It was an upper middle-class town and it was almost all white, almost all Protestant, and almost all Republican. My family was one of the few families that were Democrats. I remember when I was a kid and Jimmy Carter was running against Ronald Reagan. In a middle school class, the teacher took a poll and it was twenty-six to two . . . twenty-six voting for Ronald Reagan versus me and, I think, the teacher, voting for Jimmy Carter. It was a conservative place, and I often found myself in the minority. That was the context in which that argument on the bus took place.
Cosslett: Was your father involved in local politics ?
Streeter: He wasn’t himself a politician, but he was always active in the community, serving on boards of charities and things like that, and that’s probably part of where I got that moral compass my brother says I have. And my mother certainly is very politically active—just very interested in what was happening in the day, and talking to us about it. My mother is a psychotherapist. And my wife is also a psychotherapist.
I remember having a George McGovern sticker on my little car when I was a kid in 1972. There was a long string of Democrats that got destroyed in elections, including McGovern. But my parents talked to us about politics at a very young age, and they talked to us about moral issues, such as race. This was the early seventies, and issues of economic justice were important to them. Those were the causes they were involved in.
Cosslett: So on your way to law school, after college, you went to work in a national forest . What was your thinking in doing that?
Streeter: It’s funny. I almost always knew I wanted to be a lawyer, but I had one brief period when I doubted that, and it was my senior year in college. I knew I wanted to do something public service-oriented, at least for part of my career, and I thought that lawyers just practice at big law firms. I worried that there wasn’t enough opportunity to do public service work as a lawyer. I thought about becoming a journalist.
Since I was undecided, I didn’t go to law school right out of college and I took a year off. During that year, I decided that I did want to go to law school and once I had made that decision, I wanted to do something interesting with the remainder of my time before I started. I applied for a bunch of jobs at national forests out west and ended up going to work at the Mount Hood National Forest as a wildlife biology assistant. I didn’t know anything about biology other than what I had taken in eighth grade, but I went out there, and we did things like tag trees and build structures and streams to help fish. You know, I’ve never been that interested in environmental issues, but it was a summer of doing something interesting.
And I think it actually helped me get into Northwestern Law School. I was on the waitlist there and about two weeks before school was scheduled to start, I wrote them a letter saying, “Here’s what I’ve been doing for the summer”—and a day or two later, I got in off the waitlist. So I think maybe they said, “Well, this isn’t what our typical candidate is doing—chasing around spotted owls and tagging deer.”
Cosslett: You also interned at the Department of Justice ?
Streeter: I did. That was the summer after I finished law school, before I started my judicial clerkship. During that summer, I went to the Department of Justice and worked in the area of judicial appointments at the Office of Policy Development. The Office works with lawyers appointed to the federal bench, preparing them for their judicial confirmation hearings. There are two offices in the administration that work together to perform this function: the White House Counsel’s Office and an arm of the Department of Justice.
The Office of Policy Development —now called the Office of Legal Policy—did research on candidates before they were picked to make sure that there were no problems in their background. It interviewed candidates. So a candidate for a federal judgeship would come in and someone from the department would interview them about their perspective on issues to make sure it was consistent with the president’s goals in picking candidates. And then, once the president had nominated them, the Office prepared them for their Senate confirmation hearings.
The summer I worked there, Stephen Breyer, now Justice Stephen Breyer, was nominated to the Supreme Court. I worked on his judicial confirmation. I was responsible for reading anything he had written, an op-ed piece or anything like that, and writing a memo about it, which the folks from the White House and the folks from the Office of Policy Development would review and use in preparing him for his hearings. For instance, I became the point guy on Breyer’s view of airline deregulation, one of the issues he was involved in when he worked for Senator Kennedy. So we did this background workup, wrote memos so that the people knew what the issues in the confirmation hearings would be, and then ultimately—just like prepping a witness for a trial—people at the Office of Policy Development would prepare the candidates for their hearing, give them mock questions about what they might be questioned about, and discuss ways to phrase their answers so as to not ruffle feathers.
For a long time I thought that this was the best job I ever had: meeting all these interesting people who were about to be nominated to the federal bench, from Stephen Breyer to Second Circuit judges to District Court judges. I was traveling between the Justice Department and the Hill to meet with Senate staffers, and I was reading about really interesting things and then watching the hearings happen, where I could see the candidates saying things that I knew I had refreshed their memory about or helped to prepare them for. It was a great experience right out of law school. I would have loved to have done that for a long time, but it was a summer job and I had a clerkship that I was going to.
Cosslett: You clerked in the Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuit. Was that a one-year or a two-year clerkship ?
Streeter: It was a one-year clerkship, and it was the Court of Appeals, so it was less interactive than the job I have just described. It was me, my two fellow co-clerks, and the judge, writing memos and opinions for the judge and sitting in chambers and having a very academic existence. The late Judge Brunetti was an incredibly warm, friendly person. He was a very pragmatic guy, so it wasn’t as if we had to write a constitutional law treatise. He just wanted to make good decisions and write clear opinions. And that is what we did. We didn’t seek to make his mark in any way. He had been on the bench for about ten years and was a Ronald Reagan appointee. I didn’t try to find someone who was in my political vein—it didn’t seem relevant for the job. I remember one case that had a very political feel to it in which the judges split on political lines, but my judge actually ended up joining the liberals to provide the deciding vote in an en banc decision, six to five.
Cosslett: So you then went to Arnold & Porter in DC and you joined them as a litigator. Why Arnold & Porter?
Streeter: I knew that eventually I wanted to work in the government, probably the Department of Justice, but I had student loans to pay. After law school and a clerkship, the easiest path is to go to a law firm for a couple of years and cut your teeth. So, not having any kind of geographic moorings anywhere—grew up in Cleveland, went to law school in Chicago, clerked out west on the Ninth Circuit—I thought, “Where’s the place you go if you want to work in the government? Well, Washington, DC.” And what are the best law firms in Washington, DC? Arnold & Porter was always one of those.
And Arnold & Porter had a strong tradition of people passing in and out of government, and it had a strong tradition of doing public service work . And so it was one of a couple of choices in DC that made sense, and that’s the one that I picked.
Cosslett: How was your life as a junior litigator at Arnold & Porter?
Streeter: You know it was funny. Six months into it, I thought, “Wow, this is going to be awful.” But after about a year, I loved it. During the first six months, I was working on a document production, which is incredibly grueling, and I thought, “I’ve entered the law firm associate nightmare world.” But I got out of document production and moved on to other things and, for the next five years that I was there, I did incredibly interesting work. I got to take a lot of depositions. I got to argue motions in court. I got to write a lot of briefs on cutting-edge legal issues. I got to prepare expert witnesses. I got to work on a number of trials. I got to argue jury instructions at a trial. I was lucky enough to get on the right things and, I guess, skillful enough to do well enough at them to get more good work.
The work that I got initially that really gave me incredible experience—and you’re going to be surprised by this—was working on tobacco litigation for Philip Morris. Philip Morris was a big client of Arnold & Porter. This was at the height of the tobacco wars, when the tobacco companies were being sued by fifty different states to recover Medicaid costs and their backs were against the wall. And there were issues about whether they were going to go bankrupt if they lost all these lawsuits. And there were really big issues about who was responsible for smoking? Is it the smokers? Is it the tobacco companies? Did the warnings get the tobacco companies off the hook? Lots of interesting questions about whether the states could or could not sue. So there were tons of cutting-edge legal issues that we were writing briefs about all the time.
There were fifty lawsuits. Most of the states in the country were suing, so there was tons of work and really interesting work that got pushed down to very low levels inside law firms. Ordinarily, you think that junior associates at law firms don’t get to take depositions, but there were so many depositions to be taken, so many experts to prepare, so many trials to prepare, and so many motions to argue that if you were any good, good work got pushed down to you. I found myself, for four of those five years, running around taking depositions, meeting with experts, working on two different trials, and getting to argue motions and do jury instructions at those trials.
Cosslett: Did the nature of the work trouble you?
Streeter: My mother was very upset that I was working for tobacco companies. But to be honest, for me, the worst part about it was the losing. The tobacco companies had had an incredible string of success in litigation, and as soon as I started working on those cases, they started losing. I don’t think I won a single thing, a single motion, a single anything. The tide had turned against the tobacco companies, and they were starting to settle. For four-and-a-half years, just about everything you did would have an unfavorable outcome. You would lose a motion or have to agree to a multi-billion-dollar settlement. And that was very hard. I believed in the positions that we were taking.
At the same time, I recognized that there were some public policy problems with the way that the tobacco companies had conducted themselves in years past, but they were also reforming themselves at the time. For the first time, while I was working on these tobacco cases, Philip Morris came out and said, “Smoking causes disease. Smoking is addictive.” They had not said things like that before. I was okay with the positions that we were taking, but it was a challenge, out in the world, to tell people what I was doing. And, to people like my mother, it was awful. But in terms of the work I was doing and the briefs I was writing, and the arguments I was making, I believed in them.
Arnold & Porter had this great liberal tradition. And I think part of the reason why Philip Morris hired them was to say: “We can get these guys to argue for us and find the positions that are the good positions. We’ll have a lot of credibility.” When the firm first took the matter on, a long time before I got there, there was a lot of tension about that. There were associates in the firm who refused to work on those matters, and they were allowed to do that. I think the people working on the team liked what they did and thought it was really interesting. In fact, two of my best friends who were associates from that time at Arnold & Porter are now in-house at Altria, the successor of Philip Morris. And the partner who was my rabbi at the firm is the head of litigation there. So these are people who were like me, who were in the law firm working on this stuff, and now their entire careers are devoted to working for this company. And they seem to enjoy it. They’re taking positions that they think are right and they believe in.
Cosslett: You make choices. And sometimes interesting law presents itself in unusual situations. It’s not always easy to be the white knight. So you tore yourself away from Arnold & Porter and came to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Is it possible to go right out of law school into the US Attorney’s Office?
Streeter: It’s rare that people do that. There are some people who go, not straight from law school, but from a judicial clerkship, but it’s one in a hundred. Often people will do a clerkship and then they’ll work in a law firm for two, three, four years, and then they apply to the US Attorney’s Office. That’s the typical path, at least in the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan.
Cosslett: Let’s talk about how you actually got the job at the US Attorney’s Office. It’s extremely competitive . It’s extremely prestigious. You had a great background. But other people have great backgrounds, too. What separated you out in this case?
Streeter: This is another one of those instances where, I have to say, there’s a little bit of luck and a little bit of skill. I had the credentials to get into the interviewing process, but there are a lot of people who have credentials like mine: went to a good law school, clerked, went to a good law firm, and got in the door. I don’t know why I got the job. I think I interviewed well. A lot of people do in that situation. Later, I worked on the hiring process inside the office, and I learned there’s a lot of luck to which day you come into the hiring committee.
I got in there and thought, “Wow, I never thought I’d get the job.” I applied to ten different US Attorney’s Offices, figuring that the Southern District was the Harvard of US Attorney’s Offices. And I hadn’t gotten into Harvard, so I didn’t think I was going to get into the Southern District. And lo and behold! I got in. Now, it’s very hard to get in there, but it’s also a place where there’s much more turnover than other US Attorney’s Offices. People stay there for between five and ten years, whereas they make careers at other offices: they stay there for twenty years. So there are more jobs because people leave and new people have to come in. It’s a place where you work incredibly hard for low pay in New York City. And you can only do that for so long if you have a family. You can only work law firm hours on government pay for so long. Frankly, the last three years there, I worked much more than law firm hours.
Cosslett: How can you do that?
Streeter: If you’re on trial, you’re working all the time. And, in New York City , it’s particularly hard to live at the government pay level when you can go earn much more at a law firm. Especially if you have kids—you just can’t afford it anymore. Also, I think it’s the culture of the place. There’s new blood and new energy and new people ready to work hard, and they’re not jaded. I think people who stay there too long become a little bit jaded: you lose that fresh, ideal perspective. The experience helps, but the fresh energy helps as well. And the culture of the place is such that you go three, four years out of law school. Stay there for five, six, seven years, and then you go on to do something else. If you stay longer, well, all your colleagues have left and the people around you are all younger than you and are from a different generation than you. You start to feel out of place.
Cosslett: Could you tell me about the work of the Southern District ?
Streeter: New York City is the only city in the country that has two US Attorney’s Offices. The US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District covers Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester, and other counties north of the city. The Eastern District covers Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island. In terms of the staffing, there’s a criminal division, which has about one hundred and sixty lawyers, and there’s a civil division, which has about sixty lawyers. In terms of the subject matters that the offices cover, it’s a big picture. I can’t speak much to the civil division, but in the criminal division there’s an organized crime unit, a violent gangs unit, a narcotics unit, a public corruption unit, a securities and commodities fraud unit, and a complex frauds unit, which covers all white-collar crime that’s not securities fraud. And there’s a general crimes unit, which is where everybody starts.
Cosslett: Where does the federal jurisdiction come in for something like a violent gangs unit?
Streeter: A couple of things. Number one, narcotics, because a lot of the violence in gangs is connected to narcotics. And number two, oftentimes we charge RICO1 against an enterprise like that. You use RICO to prosecute organized crime, loan sharking, and murder for hire—those kinds of activities. When I was thinking about becoming a federal prosecutor, someone told me, “Go somewhere where there’s good crime.” And there’s good crime in New York City.
Cosslett: Yes, we pride ourselves on the quality of our crime .
Streeter: I mean, there’s everything. There’s violent crime to organized crime to white-collar crime to terrorism work. Everything is there, and this office does everything, from the street crime stuff, which involves a lot of narcotics and guns and gangs, up through Bernie Madoff. That was one of the great things about working there: you could pick and choose.
How it works is that everyone starts out in the General Crimes Unit, which is a unit that handles a grab bag of simpler federal crimes: a felon in possession of a gun case, for example. If you’ve got a felony conviction, you can’t possess a gun. That would be a case we would do. A simple credit card fraud case: a guy at a gas station steals the credit card numbers and runs up bills on them. A simple bank-fraud case: someone working inside a bank uses checks to steal money from the bank.
Cosslett: If something could be prosecuted at both a federal and a state level , how do you work in conjunction with other offices to decide who will have the pleasure of prosecuting the bank felon?
Streeter: At times there was tension between my office and the local prosecutors. The District Attorney’s Office of New York, formerly headed for many years by Robert Morgenthau and now headed by Cyrus Vance, didn’t particularly want us stealing their cases. For the most part, we would try and take the bigger, more complicated stuff, and they’d probably resent that. There was a lot of overlap and, to tell you the truth, a lot of it was happenstance: it could depend on which law enforcement agency was investigating it. If detectives in the NYPD were investigating it, for the most part it would go to the New York District Attorney’s Office, although we worked a lot with the NYPD, too.
If the FBI or the Secret Service were investigating it, then they’d generally bring it to the US Attorney’s Office. Now, there was overlap. The FBI works with the District Attorneys. The NYPD works with us. But generally, that’s where the decision would start. If the DEA2 is working on a major narcotics case involving multiple kilograms of heroin coming from Colombia, they’re going to bring that to the US Attorney’s Office. Small-scale narcotics organizations in the projects in the Bronx that NYPD detectives are working, they’re going to bring that to the DA’s office. So there are some natural lines that developed over time that would drive the process.
Everybody starts in General Crimes, grab-bag stuff. You learn. Because I had done no criminal work before this, I had to learn all that.
Cosslett: How quickly were you in court litigating a case ?
Streeter: It might take nine months or a year before you actually get a trial, but you’re in court right away. When a person is arrested, the first thing that happens is they show up in court and you argue about whether they’re going to be detained or they’re going to get bail. And then the person is indicted, you go to court and they make a motion to suppress some of your evidence. They say that you did an illegal search. So you’re litigating about that right away: calling witnesses to a hearing, and saying, “No, this police officer did the right thing when he pulled over this car and searched the trunk.” And you’re putting witnesses on the stand. You’re arguing the legal issues right away and during your first year, you’re in and out of court all the time.
When I first started, I had probably done more in the courtroom and taken more depositions than the average assistant: in part because of the kind of work I had done at Arnold & Porter, and in part because I had been out of law school for six years. I was a little bit more senior coming in. So, right away you’re going to court almost every day, or multiple times a day, to do all this other stuff that needs to be done in a criminal case. But it usually takes a while for one of your cases to make it to trial, and most of your cases plead out. For me, it wasn’t until the end of my first year that I tried my first case.
Cosslett: Are you disappointed when they plead out and you don’t get to go to trial?
Streeter: Yes, you are. I mean, sometimes you’re not. If you think it’s really a tough case and you might lose, you’re happy when it pleads out. If you thought it was going to be a lot of fun to try the case and you had great evidence, then you’re disappointed. But the problem is if you have great evidence, it’s probably not going to go to trial. It’s really the cases in between, where both sides think they have a good argument that are going to go to trial.
We used to say that there are three kinds of cases that go to trial at the US Attorney’s Office. Number one: cases where the evidence is close and the defendant has a real reason to take it to trial. Number two: cases where the defendant is crazy. They’re not making good decisions and so they go to trial. You usually get a longer sentence if you go to trial. Number three: cases where the stakes are exceptionally high, such as a drug dealer facing thirty years or forty-five years. The difference between the sentence they could plead to and the sentence that would come with a guilty verdict is not significant and they figure, “Why not go to trial?” So it takes a while to get your trials going, and then after your first year, you switch to the Narcotics Unit. And you do those kinds of narcotics cases I described earlier.
Narcotics cases can have a broader scope than the neighborhood-level, kilogram-quantity kind of narcotics cases. You work with the DEA, you do search warrants, wiretaps, and that kind of stuff.
Cosslett: Were you ever frustrated in those cases because you weren’t going after the big guys?
Streeter: I didn’t like the narcotics work very much. I always knew I wanted to do white-collar work because it interested me more. With the narcotics work, sometimes you end up prosecuting the low-level people, the “mopes”—the guy who got on an airplane in the Dominican Republic and carried two kilos of heroin into the country and got paid $5,000. This guy is not the bad guy at the top of the chain. You know that guy is in Colombia. Yes, the mopes were low-level—not street-level, but people with relatively minor roles inside a narcotics organization. But they carried a lot of drugs and we had to prosecute them.
We would always try to “cooperate up”—use a person to “flip up” in the organization. The US Attorney’s Office gets a lot of high-level people in the organizations as well. It extradites people from Colombia and Mexico, and it does some really serious prosecutions of the high-level guys who are ordering the violence and are making tens of millions of dollars selling drugs. That’s completely worthwhile stuff. I was only in that unit for a year and I had only a few cases reach that level because I knew I was going to go on to the white-collar practice. Some lawyers make a career out of narcotics at the US Attorney’s Office, and they go down to Colombia and go after members of rebel organizations involved in drug trafficking, like FARC3.
I liked the substance of the work I was doing because I got a lot of trials. I went from no trials at the end of my first year to five trials at the end of my second year. And I did some money-laundering cases , and I did some narcotics distribution cases. They tend to go to trial. They tend to have hearings. They tend to have interesting ways of gathering evidence, like wiretaps and search warrants and things like that, which are interesting to work on. So the substance of the work was great, but it wasn’t where I wanted to end up.
Cosslett: Let’s talk about the Securities Fraud Task Force . That was really what you had been chomping at the bit to get involved in. When did you go into that area?
Streeter: So, a year in General Crimes, a year in the Narcotics Unit, and then I spent a year and a half in something called the Major Crimes Unit, which is now called the Complex Frauds Unit. The unit covered white-collar crime—every kind of white-collar crime except securities fraud. So I spent a little more than a year doing that. That was great because I got to try four cases that were white-collar crime cases, but weren’t quite as complicated as the securities fraud cases to come. And I got to learn the white-collar world a little bit before I went into the Securities Fraud Unit.
And so in May of 2004, about three-and-a-half years after I got to the US Attorney’s Office, I went to the Securities Fraud Unit. And the Securities Fraud Unit at the time was prosecuting the Martha Stewart case. In my first year there, the Martha Stewart case, the Bernie Ebbers/WorldCom case, and the Rigas/Adelphia cable company accounting fraud case were happening. Accounting fraud was the crime of the day. This was right around the time when Enron had unraveled. Our office did not do that. A task force at the Justice Department did that, but that was one of the big crimes of the day. Enron and WorldCom and Adelphia. It was exciting. I was a junior person in the unit, making my way. The senior guys in the unit were doing those cases and I remember thinking, “Wow, I really want to do those big cases.” Later, I was lucky enough to get to work on some big cases.
There were about twenty to twenty-five lawyers in the unit as well as a chief and a deputy chief who supervised the lawyers on a day-to-day basis. You worked on cases that come in the door mostly from the FBI and a few from the Postal Inspection Service. The FBI is working on these cases and you get your cases through your relationships with the agents: they know you and so they bring you a case. People viewed the FBI agents as their clients. They’ve investigated a case and they want you to now be their lawyer in the courtroom. Now, your role ends up being much more than that of client and lawyer because you become an investigator yourself.
One big difference between the DA’s office and our office is that prosecutors get involved in the investigation at a much earlier stage. In fact, on those big accounting fraud–type cases and those big insider-trading cases, prosecutors are involved from day one. And we would be involved from day one with FBI agents. Sometimes the SEC4 would refer cases to us. Sometimes a supervisor would come to you and say, “Are you busy? Why don’t you work on this?” Sometimes the FBI would bring us our cases. And, as a junior person, you start out doing the less complicated stuff and you try to work your way up to the more complicated, high-profile cases.
Cosslett: You talk about doing the investigation . Could you elaborate on that?
Streeter: So, a case comes in the door. Either the SEC refers it, saying, “We saw something in a case we were working on that looks like it might be a criminal thing.” Or a victim refers a case to you and says, “Hey, there’s a Ponzi scheme going on here. I lost my money. Can you investigate this?” Or some cooperating witness tells you about insider trading that’s happening. And what that means is interviewing witnesses—usually bringing the witnesses into the US Attorney’s Office. Some of the interviews are done out in the field: an FBI agent goes and knocks on someone’s door at six in the morning and interviews them and scares them, maybe.
But a lot of times, as federal prosecutors, we get involved in the interviews at a very early stage. Maybe the FBI does one interview and then we try to get that person into our office for an interview. So you’re interviewing witnesses, reviewing documents, and reading e-mails to try to figure out what happened. In the white-collar context, you subpoena documents from banks, telephone companies, broker/dealers, and so on.
Cosslett: Are you investigating every case that is presented to you by your normal referral channels?
Streeter: No, there’s an initial decision made either by the chief of the unit or by the chief of the unit in combination with what we call the “line assistant,” which is one of the other assistant US attorneys in the group. Often they decide, “No, this case isn’t worth us spending our resources on”—either because it’s too small or not important enough and we’ve only got limited resources. Or it doesn’t look like we’re ever going to get the evidence. Or a crime never actually happened here. You try to make that judgment at the beginning and not work on the case at all.
Then, you might take a case in and it might be obvious right away. You’re going to bring a case. And it might be fast-moving—you’re going to have to write a complaint that afternoon and arrest someone the next day. Or you might investigate for three months and decide, “We don’t have a case here.”
Cosslett: There seem to be two issues: is there a case, and is there a winnable case?
Streeter: If our view was that there was a crime that occurred, we’d try to get to the point of having a winnable case . It was pretty rare that we gave up on something simply because we didn’t have the evidence, even though we thought there was a crime. If we thought there was a crime, we’d work really hard to try to uncover it. Oftentimes, what you conclude is there wasn’t a crime, or sometimes, “We’re never going to be able to prove it, or we’re never going to figure it out.” A lot of times you just don’t ever figure it out. So you do an investigation, you review documents, you interview witnesses. You might search a place to get documents—if it’s the kind of operation where you need to get documents in the context of a search—because you’re afraid that if you serve a subpoena, documents will be destroyed.
Additionally, at the US Attorney’s Office, we did wiretaps. That was relatively new to the white-collar world, at least in an insider-trading context. And you gather evidence any way you can, and you try to flip people, too. You try to use cooperators. You try to use someone who has criminal exposure. You convince them that it’s in their interest to cooperate with you and they’ll get a lower sentence. They agree to plead guilty and then you use them to record an undercover phone call to a person you’re investigating. The FBI sets up the whole scenario and records the call and helps direct them in that process. These are all ways that you can gather evidence, and in the context of securities fraud cases at the federal level, the prosecutor is involved almost from the beginning, often before the FBI agents.
Sometimes we would go to the FBI and say , “Hey, we got a case and we want you to help us investigate.” You work hand in glove with an FBI agent, decide what documents to subpoena, decide whether to use a cooperator to make an undercover phone call, decide which cooperators to try to convince to flip, and sometimes you’re the one sitting in the room across from a person trying to convince them, “It’s in your interest to flip.”
Sometimes it’s the FBI agent out in the field doing that at six in the morning on their doorstep. You make strategic calls with the FBI agent—what makes more sense, whether it’s them or you. You work with the FBI closely to decide whether to do a search or whether a subpoena will do, decide what documents to get. They review the documents, you review the documents. You decide where the evidence is taking you. Sometimes you decide the evidence is taking you nowhere and you’ve got other things to do. Sometimes you decide, “We got a good case here,” and you investigate further, and eventually you charge someone. It’s very rare that the agents do all the work and just present you with something wrapped in a bow.
Cosslett: How many case s would you work on simultaneously?
Streeter: When I started in the Securities Fraud Unit, I probably worked on five to ten cases at once, and by the time I was leaving, I was working on one or two cases because the cases got bigger. If you’re working on a big case that’s going to trial, you don’t have time to do anything other than that big case. And if it’s an important case, you devote all your energy to it. As you become more senior and as the cases get bigger and more complicated, they demand more of your time. My last three years I essentially worked on only four different cases, toggling between them. I would think, “Okay, these three months I work on this case.” And sometimes I’d be working on two at one time.
Cosslett: And some of these cases go on for a long time.
Streeter: They do. Look at the Raj Rajaratnam investigation from beginning to end at the US Attorney’s Office. The office got involved in March of 2007. He was charged in October of 2009. He went to trial in March of 2011 and he was sentenced in October 2011. The case is still ongoing because of the appeal. It’s not unusual for a case of that complexity to take that long. In fact, it was shorter than some others. I think a year and a half is getting toward the higher end, but it’s not like that was an uncomfortably long time. We weren’t thinking, “Boy, this thing is getting old and it’s been kicking around forever.” We were working that whole time and the defense was, too. It takes that long when you’ve got tons of documents, exhibits, wiretap calls, and witnesses.
Cosslett: Tell me about the momentum of your role on a case like the Raj case. At what point do you start thinking, “I haven’t seen my wife. I haven’t seen my dog. I haven’t had a shower. I don’t know what the weather is outside”? How long does that go on for? What do you do during that time?
Streeter: In the investigation stage of a white-collar case, you oftentimes don’t have emergencies. You don’t have hard deadlines unless someone is a flight risk: a person who is passing through the United States or someone who you think might take off at any moment. Then you have a rush, and you have to write a complaint and pull all-nighters to get the person arrested so they’re in the system. For the most part, in the white-collar cases, you have the time to investigate at the pace you want. So in that investigation stage, you’re seeing your wife, you’re going home, you’re coming into work every day, and you’re working relatively manageable hours.
Now, you’re working on other cases, too, and they may have you writing a brief or going into court to argue something. You have some late nights doing that, but the investigation in a typical white-collar case doesn’t need to be frenetic.
Unlike a drug case—where the drugs are going to be gone, and the person’s going to be gone, and you’ve got to do it now—most white-collar cases can be investigated fast, but not at breakneck speed, so you don’t have to work crazy, all-nighter hours. So then you charge the person, and now you’re in litigation. You’re in front of a federal judge. You’ve got schedules that you’ve got to keep with the federal judge. You’ve got discovery. You’ve got to respond to motions. You have to start preparing for trial. You’ve got to try the case. The craziest time of all is the trial itself. But along the way you’re going to have very busy periods. In a big white-collar case you’re going to have very serious motions made by the other side that you have to respond to: a seventy-five-page brief that you have to write a similarly long brief to respond to.
Cosslett: The counsel for the defendant in these white-collar cases is often a big law firm capable of generating a lot of paper. You are not staffed that deeply in the US Attorney’s Office, so how do you deal with that?
Streeter: To give you an example, in the Raj Rajaratnam case, we had three lawyers working on the case, never more. The other side, Akin Gump, a very prominent big law firm, had about thirty. And they had other law firms helping as well. So in that context, you can really be outmatched in terms of resources. We had three lawyers, two FBI agents, and two paralegals. That was our team up against a law firm that’s got as many lawyers as they need and the client is willing to pay for. In that case, the client had the money to pay a law firm, paralegals, expert consultants, and so on. So, we would work really hard. In that motion stage, you’re working very hard: you’ve got spans of a week or two where you’re working around the clock.
Cosslett: Is part of the defense strategy to try to pull the legs out from under the prosecution team? To give them so many things to respond to that they’re going to miss a deadline or they’re going to get overwhelmed?
Streeter: I would think so, but I haven’t been a defense lawyer long enough to know. There’s no doubt that at the trial stage, we would suspect at times that the defense was burying us in paper—those were the words we’d use—so that we were distracted from focusing on the trial. Generally, the judges give you enough time to respond to things so that you can manage it in the pretrial stage. There’s nothing artificial driving the deadlines then.
Cosslett: Do you think the judges are sympathetic to that imbalance?
Streeter: Not entirely. I think they view the government as having enormous resources. I think everybody does. They view the US Attorney’s Office as having a whole lot of talented people. They view the FBI as having a whole lot of good people. So they think, “If you need more people, put more people on it.” And on a big high-profile case, you would get as many resources as you needed, but there’s a reality to how many people can work on something before you lose control of it.
Also, the defense has to be careful about generating too much paper because the judge doesn’t want to get buried in it either. The judge is one person with some clerks. The judge has to read everything, so the defense has got to be careful not to alienate the judge by filing frivolous motions. So you have that stage of the litigation where it’s a period punctuated by very hard work.
And then you might have a hearing after the briefs are filed: either an argument, where you go in and make an oral argument to the judge and you need some preparation for that, or you might have a couple of days of hearings, where you put on witnesses to prove that some part of the defense’s motion isn’t valid or they try to prove that it is. So you’re putting on witnesses—it’s a mini-trial before a judge having a hearing. And that happens. And then, the trial date is set some point in there. And you’ve got a trial. In these white-collar cases it might be a two-month-long trial. I worked on two, two-month-long trials at the end of my time there. I worked on the Raj Rajaratnam trial and the trial of the CEO of Duane Reade, an accounting fraud case. Those were both two-month-long trials separated by a year.
Cosslett: When you were on trial, were you were working day and night?
Streeter: Yes. Two to three months before the trial begins, you go into trial prep mode. Before that you’re preparing and you’re getting yourself into position, but really about two to three months before, you start working every day, all day, around the clock. So, in the Raj Rajaratnam case, for instance, we all took a little time off at Christmas. We came back and from January 2 until the day in May that the jury got the case, I worked every single day into the night, except for two days. So every single Saturday, Sunday, whatever, from January 2 to early May, I worked every single day, all day long, getting to work at 7 am, leaving at 11 pm, going home, eating, going to sleep, getting up, going back to work. Round the clock, me and my two trial partners.
Cosslett: And did you love it?
Streeter: I can’t say that I love the trial prep , which is why you really try to avoid preparing for a trial and not actually having it go. The trial itself I love. And being on trial is . . . is like the dream. If you’re trying a case like that, you’re in the courtroom every day. You’re doing what you dreamed about doing when you set out to be a lawyer. You’re doing an opening statement, thinking and responding to arguments on your feet, making a presentation to a jury, working with a witness on the stand to try to get the information out that you want and tell the story that you want to tell, and going back at night with your colleagues and figuring out strategically, “What do we do next?”
But for the two-and-a-half months leading up to the trial, you also work every day. And that’s not fun. You’re meeting with witnesses, you’re reviewing documents, you’re meeting with your team to make strategic calls: “What are we going to put on? What aren’t we going to put on? What are we going to cut? What are we going to add? What are we going to investigate?” You never stop investigating as a prosecutor and, meanwhile, you’re responding to motions and writing briefs. It’s incredibly hard work.
Cosslett: And you’re investigating because you’re hoping for what—to get more information to substantiate your case ? Or are you concerned that somehow your case is not in sync with reality?
Streeter: Your responsibility as a federal prosecutor is to put on the truth. So if you start finding out that the truth is inconsistent with your indictment, ultimately it is your responsibility to dismiss the indictment. Now maybe you find out that the truth is a little different than the way you described it in the indictment, so you have to file a new indictment or go to the grand jury and present new evidence and get them to file a new indictment. You might be changing your case a little bit because you find out the facts are a little different than you previously thought they were. And so you’re constantly doing that. You’re constantly interviewing new witnesses, looking at new documents, making new connections. As you look at the evidence that intensively before trial, you realize things you didn’t realize before. You line a document up with a phone call, with something a witness said, and you see, “Oh, wow. This all clicks into place.” It’s like the pieces of the puzzle. You start out with a puzzle that’s not finished. Even when you charge the case, you think you know what the picture looks like, but you’re not positive. And it’s in that intensive period leading up to the trial when you really, really figure out exactly what you know, what you can prove, and how it all fits together, and you have “Aha!” moments constantly—especially just before trial when all you’re doing is thinking about the case. They come in the middle of the night, and it’s all you’re doing.
My wife went crazy when I had trials like this, and it was a real strain on us because my pattern is to wake up very early in the morning and start working. I would wake up at five in the morning, and I would go out into the living room and work, and then take a shower and go to work, and come back at midnight and go to bed. And I would forget to eat. I wasn’t focused on her or what was happening with us.
And you do that for a couple of months and then the trial begins and now you’re at least having more fun. Your spirits are lifted. The tension is incredible. The pressure on you is incredible. But at least you’re doing fun, exhilarating things, like jury addresses, examining witnesses, arguing issues to the judge, and now everything’s happening really fast: the defense files a motion at six o’clock at night, you’ve got to respond by ten o’clock so the judge can figure out what to do at nine the next morning. You’re doing all that stuff, and that’s where the fun is. When I decided to become a lawyer, that was what I wanted to do: get up and try cases and be in front of people and argue things and explain things.
Cosslett: Well, oddly enough, that’s what people think all lawyers do—litigate. How crazy is that? I can imagine that the facts of the Raj case were incredibly complicated, as are some of the other high-profile securities cases. Your trials were long. What’s your approach when it comes to juries? How do you break up a case for them to make it understandable and to engage them?
Streeter: A couple of things. We were lucky in the Raj case because the facts were really interesting. There were a lot of colorful characters and a lot of interesting facts. We had different kinds of evidence: wiretaps, cooperating witnesses, documents, company witnesses. One day Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, is testifying. The next day, we’re playing a wiretap call. It was easier to keep the jury engaged when the facts were as interesting as they were in that case. That said, we made a real effort to make the case short and to only focus on the most important, understandable stuff.
So when I look at a trial, I think about a couple of things that you want to do. You want to tell a narrative, as opposed to just a bunch of little pieces of information. You want to teach. You want to simplify complicated concepts and make them understandable for the jury. And you want to keep the jury engaged and interested. And those are hard things to do, and it’s harder in an accounting fraud case.
Honestly, the Duane Reade accounting fraud case, which I had done the year before, was much harder: facts weren’t nearly as interesting, concepts were much more complicated, witnesses were accountants at Price Waterhouse Coopers, not Lloyd Blankfein. But regardless of the difficulty of the case, you’re trying always to simplify.
In the Raj case, for example, we had thousands of wiretap calls to choose from. We ended up playing forty-five of them at the trial. We took what could have been a six-month-long trial and put in the government’s case in one month. And then the defense put on a two-week-long case, and the jury deliberated for a couple of weeks and a juror was dismissed, and so the deliberations got extended. It ended up being a two-month-long trial: a month of that was the government’s case, two weeks of it was the defense case, and two weeks of it was the deliberations.
Cosslett: That’s a big strategic decision to take a case that has six months’ worth of evidence and to shrink it to one month.
Streeter: There’s a constant tension between making it simple and keeping the jury engaged, on one hand, and losing good pieces of evidence, on the other hand. Anytime you cut a witness call, you’re losing a piece of evidence. We started out with six accomplices who’d signed up as cooperating witnesses to testify against Raj Rajaratnam, but we only called three of them. We had given the defense notice of somewhere between thirty-five and forty stocks that we would tell a story about, and each of those stocks is a different story. The Goldman Sachs story was different from the ATI Technology story, which was different from the Google story, which was different from the Hilton Hotels story. We told all those stories at the trial.
Cosslett: And just to clarify, we are talking about companies in whose stocks Raj was accused of making trades based on inside information?
Streeter: Exactly. We’re talking about either a merger or a company financial performance report that was about to be announced. If you know about these things before they become public and you buy the stock, you can make a big profit when the announcement is made and the stock price runs up or down. And that’s what Rajaratnam was accused of doing, and that’s what he was convicted of doing: getting information from corporate insiders who weren’t allowed to give it out and trading on it before it was public.
We had disclosed to the defense that we had allegations of insider trading with respect to thirty-five to forty stocks. We made strategic calls in the months leading up to trial and during the trial, and ended up cutting down the number of stocks whose stories we told roughly in half. We also cut the number of witnesses we called roughly in half. And we cut down the number of trading records that we were going to put on. So we made a judgment. We don’t want to leave great stories on the cutting room floor, but sometimes we left a story on the cutting room floor because it just didn’t fit in with the bigger chronological story.
You’re making judgments along the way, for instance, about which witness to call first. We called around twenty witnesses in those four weeks. You’ve got to decide what order to call them in. And since they’re telling different stories, you can’t make it perfectly chronological. So we made the judgment, for instance, to call as our first witness of the trial a consultant from McKinsey who pled guilty to insider trading with Rajaratnam who could tell a chronological story, beginning at the beginning in 2003 when our allegations began and going to the end of the story, ending with some wiretap calls that he was on. He was also a witness who was very well-spoken and was able to teach the jury basic concepts. Like, what’s a hedge fund? What’s shorting a stock? What’s private equity? And then later you have other witnesses who tell stories within that timeframe. You want the story to be a story. And your witnesses who come later build on what’s happened earlier. And so the last witness we called was an FBI agent who summarized all the trading records and the phone records.
We had witnesses tell about the deal that was in play, and we’d played some wiretap calls and put up some e-mails and, at the end, we’d layer in: “Here are the records to show the trading Rajaratnam did. And look at this. He traded this stock right after this phone call. Here are the records to show his phone calls.” We didn’t have every phone call recorded because we were only wiretapping his cell phone, not his business line. And the last witness was what we call the “summary chart witness.” He put in those kinds of brute facts such as here’s when the phone calls happened, here’s when the trades happened, here’s when the deal was announced. Information like that wouldn’t have made any sense if it had come first.
Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that the jury is not going to understand why you’re doing certain things because you can’t do two things at once. You can’t put two different witnesses on the stand at the same time and have them alternate in telling parts of the same story. You wish you could do it like a movie, so you have one character talk, and then you have another character talk, and then you have the first character come back and talk again. At a jury trial, you put your witness on just once, and then they’re done. What is hard is sequencing your witnesses to tell a somewhat interesting story that is simple enough so the jury understands, but not so simple that you give up evidence.
Cosslett: Was this was the largest insider-trading case ever?
Streeter: It depends on how you measure it. At the end of the day, at the sentencing, we sought to prove that Raj Rajaratnam made about $75 million in profits as a result of his insider trading. I don’t know how that compares to Michael Millken and Ivan Boesky, and those cases had other elements besides insider trading. I don’t know how you decide whether it’s by number of defendants, number of stocks, dollar amounts. It was big.
Cosslett: What about personal style ? The New York Observer has said that you are “calm and laid-back.” You’re not a “showboater” or “a typical buttoned-down prosecutor.” Do you think that makes a difference?
Streeter: What I’m going for in the courtroom is credibility. I want the jury and the judge to think they can believe everything I say and everything I’m doing. So what I’m going for is: “That guy, I can trust him. I can believe him.” And I do that any number of ways. I do in part by always telling a story that’s fully supported by the evidence. I do it in part by just presenting that kind of calm: “I’m not emotionally attached to this or biased. You can trust me because my life isn’t on the line here, so I’ve haven’t got to win at all costs.”
And I do it, in part, by constantly proving that I have incredible knowledge of the facts: I have exhibit numbers memorized and can just call them out. “Wow, that guy has a mastery of the facts, and therefore I can trust him when he tells me what the facts are.” So that’s what I go for. I also want to be likeable to the jury. I don’t want to bore them. I want them to like me and respect me. That’s what I’m going for in the courtroom.
Cosslett: And is that who you are anyway, or is this something you have consciously adopted for the persona in the courtroom?
Streeter: I think you try to work with what you have. Going back to my brother’s comment about me, that’s what I like to think I am in the real world, and so I try to act like myself in the courtroom. And another person is more of a showman or showwoman. If that’s what they are in the real world, then it works. My trial partner was a more demonstrative kind of character and was much more dramatic in his approach. That was natural and authentic for him. I think the jury can pick up on when you’re not being authentic. I try to be authentic in the courtroom. And if I was more of a showboater, then it would be authentic for me to showboat.
Cosslett: Well, whatever you’re doing has been extraordinarily successful. The New York Observer reports that you have been involved with roughly one hundred and thirty cases to date, you’ve personally tried thirteen to trial, and supervised four jury trials to verdict. You have only lost one of the cases you personally tried, so I have to ask you about that one.
Streeter: The one that I lost was a drug case . It was my third trial and it was a very sympathetic defendant. The drug dealer was a guy in New York who sent his girlfriend and her best friend to Aruba to pick up some drugs, which they packed in their suitcases. The defendant was pretty far removed from the real culpable character: she was the friend of the girlfriend of the drug dealer. She testified at the trial, and I think the jury just decided we didn’t have it on her. The judge said to her afterwards, after the jury was dismissed, “You’re very lucky. Don’t do it again.” I think everybody knew she had done it. But, look, she was not the kind of dangerous person that you would really want to be in jail.
And I will tell you another thing about losing. The former US Attorney in the Southern District of New York had something he called the “Chickenshit Club .” And the Chickenshit Club was made up of people who had never lost a trial. And that meant you’d never taken a risk. What he wanted us to do was, if you know the person’s guilty, go get the evidence and bring them to trial. And tolerate the possibility of losing. You can’t just try the easy ones. And if you only try the easy ones, he said you’re in the Chickenshit Club. So, I got out of the Chickenshit Club on my third try.
Cosslett: What about the other cases in which you were part of what Business Insider called the “prosecutorial dream team?” In 2009, you secured the Marc Dreier conviction for a $700 million fraud. You secured the conviction of a former Ernst & Young partner for insider trading, and then in 2010, the CEO and CFO of Duane Reade for securities fraud. Did those cases garner the same level of attention as the Raj case?
Streeter: The Raj case got the most attention. It had a lot of features the media focused on. It had a lot of money, and it happened to happen right after the financial crisis, so people were focused on white-collar crime generally. It had colorful characters. It had Goldman Sachs, and Google, and Hilton Hotels, and all these household names. It had interesting people. Danielle Chiesi, one of his co-defendants, who pled guilty, was a very colorful character who said a lot of off-color things. Raj Rajaratnam himself was a larger-than-life figure. So all that added up to a lot of media attention and a lot of attention from the US Attorney himself. I don’t mean this as a criticism in any way—that’s what the highest levels in the office are going to pay attention to. It’s a statement case. It’s a case where the office says, “You’re not going to get away with X.” And so the office is issuing press releases: it’s part of the mission. If you publicize your cases, people hear about them, they know they can’t do that thing.
The Marc Dreier case got a lot of attention, too. Lawyers focused on that case because he was a lawyer. He did some totally bizarre things, and it was a lot of money. Now, I think the attention on the Marc Dreier case got overwhelmed by the attention on the Bernie Madoff case. Marc Dreier was arrested five days before Bernie Madoff, and both of those cases came about because of the financial crisis: they were really connected to the financial crisis because when all the money dried up, the Ponzi schemes got exposed. They couldn’t find new investors to pay off the old investors when the money disappeared.
Cosslett: As Warren Buffet said, “When the tide goes out, you learn who’s been swimming naked,” right?
Streeter: That’s exactly what Ponzi schemes are. That’s what Bernie Madoff is. If the financial crisis doesn’t happen and the economy keeps going gangbusters, Bernie Madoff probably dies and no one ever knows. And Marc Dreier’s the same way. It was also a Ponzi scheme case. It was a big deal in the legal community. He got a lot of attention because he did some very strange things. There was a 60 Minutes episode about Mark Dreier and that case also had colorful characters and interesting facts. The Marc Dreier case was incredibly fun to work on because the facts were so interesting. He pled guilty. There were a lot of interesting proceedings along the way, but it wasn’t a trial. Great facts and great fun going up against Gerry Shargel, a very prominent trial lawyer in town. The US Attorney was focused on that case as well.
The Duane Reade case was, of all my cases, the hardest one in terms of the complexity of the facts, trying to take boring facts and bring them to life for the jury. The US Attorney was aware of it and focused on it when he needed to be, but it didn’t have the same level of media attention. It didn’t have the same level of impact. It was an accounting fraud case—and accounting fraud cases, at that time, weren’t the crime of the day. The defendant didn’t, like WorldCom or Enron, destroy a whole company, ruin tens of thousands of people’s pensions, and put all kinds of people out of work. The company goes on. There are Duane Reades on every corner.
And it wasn’t as important a case in the grand scheme of things, as those cases were. But it was the hardest case that I tried because the facts were really complicated, and it was very hard trying to explain it to a jury. I remember trying that case, and my strategy there was to keep on retelling the story a different way because you never would get it the first time—I didn’t get it the first time I went through the story. It was more like the third time through that you have those “Aha!” lightbulb-going-off moments. And I can remember during the trial when our last witness was testifying, looking at some of the jurors and thinking, “They’re finally getting it.”
Cosslett: There can’t be a worse feeling than being a litigator looking at the jury, thinking, “I’ve just lost them.” Accounting fraud is interesting to lawyers and accountants, but sometimes a juror is thinking, “I need to go home and feed the cat.” It’s not compelling.
Streeter: It happens, and you feel awful, and you try to adjust. You try to back up. In the Duane Reade case I felt finally, the third time through the story, that they were getting it: I put on a witness, they got a little of it, put on another witness, they got a little. You figure out excuses to retell the story and then tell it again in your closing argument. That one was hard, though, because that one was dry, complicated, and not nearly as momentous as some of these other stories.
Cosslett: In your time in the US Attorney’s Office, there was a succession of five different US Attorneys in the Southern District. This meant you had a new boss about every two years. Did your job change as each new US Attorney came in with their personal vision of what they wanted to accomplish for the office and themselves?
Streeter: Only in ways at the margin. The office is able to accomplish what it does because it’s such a great institution and it has really talented people, and you’re imbued with the tradition of the place from the day you walk in the door. You have responsibilities to do the right thing, to be a public servant, and always to pursue the ends of justice. While the kinds of cases that we do didn’t change much, it’s true that the emphasis of different US Attorneys was different at different times, depending on what was happening.
So, for instance, I was there on September 11. Not surprisingly, the emphasis became investigating terrorism. Just after that, the US Attorney was a person named James Comey, who had been more of an organized crime and terrorism prosecutor, and so that was his emphasis. We still did white-collar case s, but that was the emphasis. His successor was a guy by the name of Dave Kelly, who also had that same background. He focused on the same thing. Then, as you know, the immediacy of that declined and we went back to doing more financial fraud cases, but everybody was still doing the same kinds of cases, so the core of what the office was doing remained the same during the eleven years I was there.
The ways in which it makes a difference who the US Attorney was is at the margins. So more terrorism cases under one US Attorney than another, more insider-trading cases under Preet Bharara because that got a lot of momentum and he realized that was an area that he could really focus on and make an impact. I don’t know that he decided before he came in that he was going to go after insider trading. I think he got there, it was happening, he realized he could really make a mark in that area, so he pushed it. And he did a good job of publicizing it and also making it a place where he put resources. So, maybe emphasis changes a little bit, but not as much as you think.
In terms of the message to you as a prosecutor, the message remains the same: we’re here to do the right thing. Whether it’s a Republican appointee or a Democratic appointee , it was the same.
In my time there, as I became more and more senior, I had more of a relationship with the US Attorney. Every US Attorney tries to focus on what everybody’s doing. They try to focus on the minor drug case that you’re doing your second year there and they certainly come around and congratulate you and watch you in the courtroom. But that’s a far cry from the Raj Rajaratnam case, where the US Attorney Bharara was in the courtroom many days during the trial, giving us his thoughts. We were supervised directly by the highest levels of the office, including the US Attorney, the Deputy US Attorney, and the Chief of the Criminal Division. We had regular meetings with them to talk about, “What are we doing? What’s our plan? What order are we going to put the witnesses on? What evidence are we going to present? What’s going to be our opening statement?” The highest levels of the office were directly involved in those things. It was in the newspapers every day, and the US Attorney wanted to know what’s happening on a regular basis.
Cosslett: Speaking of the current US Attorney in the Southern District, Preet Bharara , I understand he is rumored to be the successor to Eric Holder. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Streeter: I only have heard the rumors myself. I really like him. I think he’s a really capable guy. We’re all ambitious, but he seems to be a very ambitious guy, so I’d be surprised if this is his last stop. I don’t have any insight into that other than that it seems realistic. He has a high profile. He’s done a good job with the things he’s done. Often people do the Attorney General job for four years and move on. If Obama gets reelected, he may be looking for a new Attorney General. And Preet is a guy who’s distinguished himself, so maybe he will get the job.
Cosslett: You joined Dechert six weeks ago as a partner in their white-collar and securities litigation practice. What motivated you to leave the US Attorney’s Office after eleven-and-a-half years?
Streeter: Part of it was what I said in the beginning about how the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York is a young person’s place. The US Attorney himself is only a year older than me, I think. Also, the biggest single thing for me is I had done everything that I set out to do. I really lived my dream. When I was sitting in the courtroom during the Raj Rajaratnam trial and Lloyd Blankfein is on the stand testifying about Warren Buffett’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs on September 23 in the middle of the depths of the financial crisis, I had to pinch myself. “These are our facts. These are our facts for the trial. This is what I dreamed of doing: trying a complicated white-collar case in the media spotlight on incredibly interesting facts. And I got to do it, and so where am I going to go from here? It’s not going to get any better than this.”
I had tried a complicated accounting-fraud case. I had done a high-profile Ponzi scheme case. I had had an incredible time, so I had done everything that I had set out to do. I tried three cases in my last three years, two of which were two months long. I did a huge hearing about the wiretaps in the Raj case. I did a hearing about the sentencing in the Duane Reade case. I tried the partner in that Ernst & Young case involving insider trading. I worked incredibly hard. It was three years where I had worked around the clock, and I just couldn’t keep on going at that pace.
I’m sure I’m going to work very hard in private practice, and I’ll have periods where I’ll work like that, but I just couldn’t keep going at that pace. My wife would have divorced me. And so it was the combination of having done everything I wanted to do, feeling like I couldn’t do any better than what I’d done there and having worked so hard. And I had liked private practice at Arnold & Porter. A lot of people don’t like private practice. I liked it. I had gotten to do great stuff, so I wasn’t upset about the prospect of turning the page and starting a new chapter in my life, trying something else. I’ve been at Dechert for six weeks. It’s been great so far. I like the people. I find the cases I’m working on interesting. It’s a little bit different role now.
Cosslett: You’ve spent over eleven years doing prosecution work and from one day to the next, you’re going to turn around and do defense work. That must be a huge mental adjustment, just in terms of approaching your clients.
Streeter: Well, for some people I think it’s more than others. In the US Attorney’s Office and in the defense bar, we talk about “true believers.” They’re people who either are just true-believer prosecutors , and that’s all they can do, or they’re true-believer defense lawyers, and that’s all they can do. But I was always a “shades of gray” guy. Even when I was a prosecutor, I understood the defense perspective, and I think defense lawyers liked me for that because I wasn’t too much of a true believer as a prosecutor. I always got that the world was complicated and life was complicated.
Cosslett: You didn’t see yourself on the white horse with the banner for truth and justice ?
Streeter: No, I definitely felt like truth and justice were the objective, but I didn’t have any misconception that the world wasn’t a complicated place. I was able to see the shades of gray. And I think when you’re a defense lawyer you’ve got to be able to manage the shades of gray. And so far it hasn’t been that hard a transition. I’m not yet representing a defendant who’s charged in a case, and that will present new challenges. But, as a prosecutor, I understood the defense perspective, and I think it made me a better prosecutor in front of the judge, in front of the jury.
If you’re taking into account the other side’s perspective, you’re going to be more credible. I think it will also make it easier for me to make the transition. It won’t be as big a move. If you go from being a true-believer prosecutor to a true-believer defense lawyer, that’s a big leap. If you’re in the shades of gray and you just move a little to the other side of the shades of gray, it’s a little easier. Look, it remains to be seen, but so far it hasn’t been a glass of cold water in the face. It’s been manageable.
Cosslett: Lastly, do you have any advice that you might give to undergraduates and law school students about being a lawyer for the government? Not everyone can go work for the Southern District. What about other governmental roles ?
Streeter: I wanted to get any good job in government that I could find, either a local prosecutor’s office or at the Justice Department in Washington, DC, or working at the Securities and Exchange Commission, or anything. There are a lot of reasons to do it. First, you get a lot more responsibility. I tried thirteen cases as a relatively young man, got to try some incredibly high-profile cases against lawyers who were fifteen to twenty years senior to me and much more experienced than me. You don’t get to do that in the private sector. You get to do that in the public sector. You get to run your own cases and do your own thing. It’s one of the greatest things about the US Attorney’s Office: I was supervised, but I was essentially my own boss.
Another reason to do it is that your job is just more interesting. The third reason to do it is the public service component. I don’t know where my career is going to take me from here, and I’m sure I’ll do a significant amount of pro bono work here in the future, but I always thought it was important to have a part of my career be public service. And so I think if a young lawyer has that desire, that’s a way to make your job all about public service. If you’re working for the government, your objective is to serve the public. And you’ve got to make sure you don’t lose sight of that when you’re in the job.
I would have worked for the government somewhere, somehow. If I didn’t get into the Southern District, I would have gone to another US Attorney’s Office. And if I didn’t get into another US Attorney’s Office, I would have gone to the Justice Department in Washington, DC or the Securities and Exchange Commission. I was doing it unless I just couldn’t find what I wanted.
Cosslett: What’s going to continue to motivate you as a litigator?
Streeter: I do want to continue to try cases. It’s exhilarating and you feel like “Wow! I’m a real lawyer!” when you’re in there trying a case. But also, I found, even in the short period of time that I’ve been here at Dechert, that it’s interesting to give people advice and to have them take your advice, to be on the phone with a client and say, “Here’s what I think you should do and here’s why,” and they appreciate that and do what you suggested. So, I hope to do some trial work and build up my practice. This is a great place and there are a lot of people here who are very busy. So I’m planning to strike a balance between doing some of the work that’s already here and going out, getting my own clients and making my own way.
Cosslett: I think you’ll do okay.
Streeter: I hope you’re right.
1 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
2 Drug Enforcement Administration
3 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército del Pueblo; in English, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army
4 Securities and Exchange Commission