Dreier Seeking 12½-year Sentence for Fraud Scheme; Prosecutors Want Life
Updated: Marc Dreier, who pleaded guilty in May to eight felony charges related to his bilking of investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars in a scheme involving fake promissory notes, submitted a memo today asking for a sentence of no more than 12½ years in prison. However, the prosecution says they’re asking for 145 years.
Dreier’s sentencing is set for 5 p.m. Monday, the National Law Journal reports. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan R. Streeter puts Dreier’s fraud total at $740 million, the amount of money that went through Dreier’s accounts or through escrow counts over which Dreier had control at his firm, the National Law Journal reported.
Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog got a hold of a memo (PDF provided by Law Blog) from Gerald Schargel, Dreier’s lawyer. Schargel sets the amount of Dreier’s fraud at $400 million, and said that the sentence enhancement brought on by the high price tag on his fraud is unfair. He also noted Dreier’s cooperation with authorities.
“As colossal frauds capture national headlines, sentences for white-collar offenders must not become disproportionately long,” Schargel wrote. In his memo, he adjusts the one sentencing enhancement dictated by the amount of the fraud and arrives as a sentence of 121 to 151 months as a range with a “rational basis.”
Exhibits (PDF provided by Law Blog) to the memo included a four-page letter to U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff from Dreier himself.
In the letter, he said after starting his law firm in 1996, he realized he “had planned poorly … for the expenses,” and was deeply in debt by 2001. He wrote that he began stealing after his 2002 divorce.
“At the beginning, I spent most of the money on growing the law firm. … But as time went on, I was more and more self-indulgent. … Obviously, other men suffer through divorce and ‘midlife crisis’ and manage not to steal. And other people grow their business without resorting to crime.”
He also expressed remorse: “During the time I was committing my fraud, I tried to convince myself that I was hurting only ‘institutions’ and not ‘individuals’ (as if that were less contemptible, because I was borrowing almost entirely from hedge funds. I knew of course then and I know now that this was all nonsense—my fraud devastated ‘real people’ in a very real way.”
Updated at 3 p.m. to include National Law Journal coverage.
