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Published: Thursday July 9, 2009 MYT 8:02:00 AM

Lawyer, facing possible 145 years in jail, blames envy for huge fraud


NEW YORK: A prominent lawyer who prosecutors say should spend 145 years behind bars for a giant fraud says envy of more successful colleagues and clients fueled a mid-life ambitious crusade to build prestige and wealth by stealing hundreds of millions of dollars.

"I lost my perspective and my moral grounding, and, really, in a sense, I just lost my mind," 59-year-old Marc Dreier told U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in an unusually blunt letter made public Wednesday.

Rakoff is scheduled to sentence the one-time high flying lawyer on Monday after he admitted losing more than US$400 million by bilking hedge funds with bogus claims of investments safely placed with clients he had once represented.

Dreier said in his letter that he started his firm, Dreier LLP, in 1996 when he became envious that "colleagues of mine and certainly clients of mine were doing much better financially and seemingly enjoying more status."

He said, "By my mid-forties I felt crushed by a sense of underachievement."

Dreier's December arrest forced the closure of his firm with 250 attorneys and a roster of clients that included celebrities, including retired football star Michael Strahan and former News Corp. publishing executive Judith Regan.

Prosecutors urged the judge to sentence the Harvard and Yale-trained attorney to 145 years in prison while Dreier's defense lawyer, Gerald Shargel, said between 10 and 12 1/2 years in prison was a fair punishment.

"Dreier could have pursued a rewarding and productive life as a lawyer, serving clients and the law, with compensation in the top few percent of the general population," prosecutors said.

"Instead, Dreier decided to seek vast personal riches and prestige through a life of fraud and through dishonor to his profession," they wrote.

In his letter dated Tuesday and filed with the court Wednesday, Dreier said he suffers "every day from the shame and self-loathing and regret with which I will always have to live."

He said his crimes were inexcusable. "I expect and deserve a significant prison sentence," he wrote.

He said he asked his lawyers to file his letter in the public record "in the hope that it may do some good as a warning to others not to follow in my path."

He said he has lost all his friends, his law firm, his law license and all he ever owned, along with causing unimaginable suffering to his family, including his 19-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter.

"I will always be remembered as a thief," Dreier wrote.

"I have lost my past and my future. I have lost everything a man can lose. And now I will lose my freedom as well, and rightly so."

Prosecutors noted that Rakoff has already said Dreier should be "ranked with those who have committed some of the most egregious frauds in history."

Last week, disgraced money manager Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison after admitting he carried on a Ponzi scheme for at least two decades that cost thousands of investors tens of billions of dollars.

Dreier, who remains under house arrest, carried out his fraud over a seven-year period by distributing phony client and accounting firm documents to his customers and by impersonating clients in person and on the phone and recruiting others to join his charades, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say Dreier lost more than $400 million as he fraudulently obtained as much as $740 million through deceit.

They said he committed the fraud "simply to satisfy his own greed and vanity" and they noted his accumulation of numerous expensive assets.

Those assets included millions of dollars in artwork, beachfront homes on both coasts and an $18.5 million yacht.

A court-appointed receiver said Dreier had little cash left when he was arrested in early December.

Dreier said in his letter that he started stealing in 2002 when he felt overwhelmed by debts, a disappointing career and a failed marriage.

"As I sit here today, I can't remember or imagine why I didn't stop myself," he wrote.

"It all seems so obviously deplorable now. I recall only that I was desperate for some measure of the success that I felt had eluded me."

He added: "I lost myself to my ambition and sacrificed everything else."

Shargel said a sentence should be rational and proportionate.

"As colossal frauds capture national headlines, sentences for white collar offenders must not become disproportionately long," he said.

He said Dreier seeks "the opportunity to still have some meaningful life beyond incarceration." - AP


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