From Anonymity to Scourge of Wall Street
By PETER LATTMAN and BEN PROTESS, NYT
The architect of a recent legal crackdown on Wall Street’s dubious mortgage practices was not the attorney general, a United States attorney or a rising star in the Justice Department. Instead, it was Leon W. Weidman, an unassuming 69-year-old career prosecutor, toiling away in anonymity 3,000 miles from Washington.
For much of his 43 years as a government lawyer, Mr. Weidman led a small group of federal prosecutors in Los Angeles. In the 1990s and 2000s, he and his team brought nearly 200 civil fraud lawsuits against two-bit mortgage crooks and small-business cheats, using an obscure federal law created in the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis a quarter century ago.
Now the work of Mr. Weidman, a onetime engineer who earned his law degree at night, has leapt to a bigger stage: the government’s campaign to punish Wall Street for the financial crisis.
His pioneering use of the law — the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, or Firrea — underpinned the Justice Department’s tentative $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase. The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, has deployed the statute most often, filing civil fraud actions against Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon and Bank of America, among others. A jury found Bank of America liable in that case last week.
(More here.)
The architect of a recent legal crackdown on Wall Street’s dubious mortgage practices was not the attorney general, a United States attorney or a rising star in the Justice Department. Instead, it was Leon W. Weidman, an unassuming 69-year-old career prosecutor, toiling away in anonymity 3,000 miles from Washington.
For much of his 43 years as a government lawyer, Mr. Weidman led a small group of federal prosecutors in Los Angeles. In the 1990s and 2000s, he and his team brought nearly 200 civil fraud lawsuits against two-bit mortgage crooks and small-business cheats, using an obscure federal law created in the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis a quarter century ago.
Now the work of Mr. Weidman, a onetime engineer who earned his law degree at night, has leapt to a bigger stage: the government’s campaign to punish Wall Street for the financial crisis.
His pioneering use of the law — the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, or Firrea — underpinned the Justice Department’s tentative $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase. The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, has deployed the statute most often, filing civil fraud actions against Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon and Bank of America, among others. A jury found Bank of America liable in that case last week.
(More here.)
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