What Dewey Know About Zachary Warren, Defendant No. 4 In The Criminal Case?
What do we know about this handsome and highly accomplished young lawyer? He's extremely bright and he's legal-world aristocracy, for starters.
The first controversy is that Zach Warren has been charged at all. He was so much younger, less powerful, and less high-profile than the other three defendants, as noted by Am Law Daily:
When the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged four defendants [earlier this month] with a combined 106 counts of criminal fraud, theft and conspiracy for allegedly concocting a scheme that put Dewey & LeBoeuf on the path to bankruptcy, three of the accused — the firm’s former chairman, Steven Davis; its former executive director, Stephen DiCarmine; and its former chief financial offer, Joel Sanders — were familiar figures to observers, and victims, of the Dewey debacle.
The fourth man named in the case was a stranger to even longtime Dewey insiders….
Most former Dewey partners and employees contacted this week said [Zachary Warren] left little to no impression on them. Former Dewey partner Sean Gorman, now with Ahmad, Zavitsanos, Anaipakos, Alavi & Mensing in Houston, said Friday that he had never heard of Warren until the indictments were unsealed. “He’s a man of mystery,” Gorman says. “He must have been in the bowels of the bureaucracy.”
One of Warren’s lawyers, Steven Hyman of McLaughlin & Stern, echoed the theme of his client’s juniority in a statement to Am Law Daily: “Zach Warren is a young man with an impeccable background and character, with a bright future ahead of him. Dewey and LeBoeuf was his first job after college. He did nothing wrong. That he is charged in this case is a travesty.”
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So what has Warren been charged with? As of now, the case against him is not yet perfectly clear. In the main indictment, the 106-count behemoth leveling charges against Davis, DiCarmine, Sanders, and Warren, Zach Warren is charged with participating in a “scheme to defraud” (count one) and conspiracy (count 106). But he doesn’t make many appearances in the charging document.
Here are the juiciest parts. Part one:
And part two:
These don’t sound like great emails for Zach Warren, but they’re not completely conclusive either; we need more context. For someone whose job involved collecting from clients, “Let’s get paid!” isn’t incriminating; it’s a rallying cry. Cf. Peter Kalis of K&L Gates (“Get us paid by tomorrow.”).
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Zachary Warren was not charged in the Securities and Exchange complaint related to Dewey — which makes sense, since the SEC charges focus on alleged fraud related to a 2010 bond offering by Dewey, which took place well after Warren left the firm. But he was charged in a separate indictment with six counts of falsifying business records; you can read that indictment here. It’s short on particulars; all we know is that the alleged falsification took place around December 2008 and January 2009.
Now, on to the second controversy, concerning the manner in which law enforcement reportedly dealt with Zachary Warren. It’s laid out in this very interesting New York Times piece by James Stewart (which we previously mentioned in Morning Docket). You should read the full article, but here’s an excerpt:
According to several criminal defense lawyers I spoke to this week, Mr. Warren became caught up in an increasingly common prosecutorial tactic. Mr. Warren may have been naïve, but he thought he was being questioned as part of a civil Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. He thought he might be a witness, and thus did not need a lawyer. Only too late did it dawn on him that he might be a target of a criminal investigation. The defense lawyers said prosecutors were increasingly using so-called parallel investigations to insert criminal investigators into what their targets thought were civil proceedings….
For Mr. Warren, the first inkling of potential trouble came early last year, when he received a call from prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Mr. Warren answered questions and provided what he interpreted as background information, according to accounts he subsequently gave to his friends. The exchange seemed cordial, and he heard nothing more.
In late October, an S.E.C. lawyer investigating the bond offering contacted him. Mr. Warren had had nothing to do with it and, because he had not been subpoenaed, was under no obligation to testify. But he wanted to be helpful and cooperative, and he agreed to take time off from work in Memphis and travel to Washington to provide what he continued to think was just background information in a civil investigation.
Then, in a subsequent call, an S.E.C. lawyer told him that a lawyer from the district attorney’s office would be sitting in. Did Mr. Warren mind?
This is what upsets [Thomas J.] Curran, the defense lawyer. “It puts people in a very difficult position,” he said. “You want to cooperate, you agree to a meeting, then, whoa, the district attorney is in there. They say, ‘You don’t have a problem with that, do you?’ What can you say? Many times, they don’t even tell you ahead of time a criminal investigator will be there.”
Perhaps by now he should have realized that this was anything but a friendly interview.
Indeed. After all, Zachary Warren was a Georgetown-trained lawyer, the son of a judge and a law professor, and a federal law clerk, with an offer to work post-clerkship at Williams & Connolly, one of the nation’s top criminal defense firms.
Anyway, here’s what happened next, according to Jim Stewart:
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Mr. Warren arrived at the S.E.C. offices on Nov. 15. After the S.E.C. lawyer asked some introductory questions, Mr. [Peirce[ Moser, the assistant district attorney, took over. An F.B.I. agent was also present, and other prosecutors were listening from New York.
By all accounts, the interview was a disaster for Mr. Warren. He had trouble remembering details from his time at the firm, which prosecutors interpreted as evasion or, worse, lying. They showed him emails and documents, most of which he did not recall. He was not prepared for the hostile tone and became defensive. Prosecutors thought that Mr. Warren was arrogant, even that he was “playing them” by trying to ferret out what they knew, rather than offering to help the investigation.
At one point, it occurred to Mr. Warren that he might be a target, and he asked Mr. Moser if that was the case. The prosecutor did not answer directly, but said, “This is a serious matter.”
Mr. Warren asked, “Should I hire an attorney? Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you.” The prosecutor said he couldn’t advise people whether they should have lawyers.
It should be noted, of course, that Jim Stewart’s article, apparently based on what Zach Warren has told his friends, has been challenged in various quarters (more controversy). From the article itself:
A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney, Erin Duggan Kramer, countered, “The facts here are incorrect.” She added, “The claim that an attorney with a federal clerkship could have any misunderstanding of what it means to speak with and agree to meet with the D.A.’s office is preposterous.”
…. (Others with knowledge of the interview insist that [Warren] was told point-blank to hire a lawyer and that he was in jeopardy, a courtesy not extended to many potential defendants.)
We did some poking around on our own and heard similar pushback on Warren’s version of events. One individual familiar with the investigation told us that Zachary Warren went into the interview knowing full-well that the Manhattan DA’s office was playing a major role in the investigation — partly because Warren had, prior to the interview, spoken by phone with a representative of the DA’s office. In other words, it was not the case that Warren went into what he thought was an SEC civil interview that somehow got gate-crashed by criminal prosecutors from the DA’s office.
This source wondered: did Zachary Warren not bring a lawyer to the fateful interview out of arrogance? Did he perhaps think that he could outsmart the government lawyers, that he could handle them on his own, without the aid of counsel?
I fall somewhere in between the extremes of “naive youngster ambushed by the DA’s office” and “arrogant lawyer full of hubris.” Here’s my theory as to why Zachary Warren didn’t bring a lawyer with him to the interview: he didn’t see himself as one of “those people,” i.e., a potential criminal defendant.
As a brilliant, handsome, well-to-do white male, the son of a judge and a law professor, a graduate of Stanford and Georgetown, Zach Warren has led a charmed life. He has probably never been in trouble with the law, as reflected in his admission to the bars of California and D.C., plus his two federal clerkships. Someone as outstanding and upstanding as Zach Warren probably never considered the possibility that law enforcement might be after him. So he naively tried to be “helpful,” because being helpful to authority has always worked well for him in the past — instead of lawyering up and shutting up, which in hindsight might have been a smarter strategy.
But that’s just my theory, based only on what I’ve read in the news. I’ve never met Zachary Warren, and I have no firsthand knowledge about him. If you have information you’d like to share about Zach Warren, please email us or text us (646-820-8477). Thanks.
P.S. One other lingering question I have: Was Zach Warren given the opportunity to cooperate with the investigation into Davis, DiCarmine, and Sanders? As you can see from Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance’s press release, seven lower-level Dewey officials have already pleaded guilty to crimes related to the scheme — and are presumably working with law enforcement. Did Warren get indicted after refusing to accept a deal, or did the DA’s office indict him in the hopes that the leverage of an indictment might induce cooperation?
UPDATE (3/21/2014, 2:30 p.m.): Read more about Zach Warren, including answers to some of the questions raised above, in this post, What Else Dewey Know About Zachary Warren?
A Dragnet at Dewey & LeBoeuf Snares a Minnow [New York Times]
Searching for Zachary Warren, the Other Dewey Defendant [Am Law Daily]
Honors Georgetown law grad, 29, retains 6th Circuit clerkship despite being charged in Dewey case
[ABA Journal]
In Dewey’s Wreckage, Indictments [New Yorker]
DA Vance: Chairman, CFO and Executive Director of Dewey & LeBoeuf Indicted on Grand Larceny and Fraud Charges [Manhattan DA’s Office]
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