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NYTimes said:November 4, 2011, 7:37 am Investment Banking | Legal/Regulatory
Corzine Is Said to Hire Criminal Lawyer
By PETER LATTMAN
Jon S. Corzine has hired Andrew J. Levander, a leading white-collar criminal defense lawyer, according to three people briefed on the matter, as the former New Jersey governor deals with fallout from the collapse of MF Global, the brokerage firm he has run since last year. Mr. Corzine resigned from MF Global on Friday morning and will not seek $12 million severance payments.
Federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission, are investigating the $630 million in missing customer money at MF Global.
Mr. Levander could not be reached as he is out of the country, according to his assistant. He did not return an e-mail seeking comment. Daniel O’Donnell, the chief executive of Mr. Levander’s law firm, Dechert, declined to comment.
In Mr. Levander, the chairman of Dechert, Mr. Corzine has retained a New York lawyer who is no stranger to defending prominent Wall Street executives. He represented John Thain, the former chief executive at Merrill Lynch, in a government inquiry related his role in Merrill’s sale to Bank of America. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager who invested with Bernard L. Madoff, hired Mr. Levander to defend him against a New York attorney general’s lawsuit connected to the Madoff case.
Corzine, former NJ Governor hiring a criminal attorney at such an early stage may mean he's preparing for what invariably will be criminal charges or at least is expecting criminal charges to evolve out of the current investigation. The article goes on to say that Corzine has also hired another lawyer firm to work on the Chapter 11 filing of MF Global. That Corzine ran NJ into the ground and now has run MF Global into the ground is no coincidence.