If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had written a white-collar crime series, it probably would have resembled the resume of a prominent lawyer and partner at the White Plains office of the firm Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker LLP.
And in place of the famous crime-fighting Brit, Sherlock Holmes, would be Thomas R. Manisero, who prefers a tennis hobby to Holmes”™ violin, and who articulates with a clear and patent Brooklyn accent rather than biting English snark.
“I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes,” Manisero said when he described how he went from being a forensic science major at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to earning a criminal justice degree that would take him to law school. And now, a lot of his job is forensics ”” “It”™s financial forensics,” he said.
A 32-year tenure with Wilson Elser ”” which started within a year of graduating from St. John”™s University School of Law in 1982 ”” has exposed Manisero to impersonators, forged letterheads and audit statements, fake companies, federal wiretapping and millions of mismanaged dollars. What began as a commercial litigation career covering business disputes quickly expanded to accountants and auditors when they faced the likes of Ponzi schemers and celebrities whose net worth, or lack thereof sometimes, finds the public eye more easily than most.
- Thomas R. Manisero of the law firm Wilson Elser in his White Plains office. Photo by Colleen Wilson
“I was working with a lot of financial cases,” Manisero said. “I started having an understanding of financial statements, what it was that accountants do, what auditors do ”¦ and it progressed to a point that I was representing accounting firms when they were being sued for malpractice.”
Manisero, who grew up a military brat and at 58 still has a trim, broad-shouldered figure, doesn”™t scare easily. He talks about his dealings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. attorney”™s office with a humble nonchalance. He is unfazed but elaborate when describing a “whole rash of fraud where these Chinese companies didn”™t exist” or subpoenas issued by the SEC to auditors he represents.
But the litigator recounted the “all-time best” Ponzi scheme of his career as being both “bizarre” and “kind of scary.”
The career case
The fraud, orchestrated by Marc S. Dreier, who headed the now-defunct law firm Dreier LLP, began to unfold when Manisero got a call in the fall of 2008 from a client, the accounting firm Berdon LLP. The client told Manisero that a hedge fund contacted Berdon about an “irregular” audit report on its letterhead that was included in an investor package to sell promissory notes. But Berdon had never audited the hedge fund.
“So they send the package through to me,” Manisero recalled, and he found that the opinion was written incorrectly, the report was signed incorrectly and the letterhead was outdated. In the package, Manisero found a letter that referenced Dreier.
“So I called him up,” Manisero said, and explained to Dreier that he had concerns about a fraudulent audit report and was looking for more information before reporting it to law enforcement. “And he gave me some B.S. story, which I told him, ”˜That doesn”™t make a lot of sense.”™”
Over the next few weeks, Dreier called Manisero back sporadically and tried to talk him out of reporting the package, saying it was a one-time, small mistake, Manisero said.
What Dreier did not know, Manisero said, was that federal agents were listening to and recording their phone conversations.
Eventually more information started coming to light, and a co-conspirator came into the picture. Kosta Kovachev, who gave up his broker”™s license in 2002 around the time he was named in a different multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, helped Dreier fool investors who pumped money into his plan.
“I”™m like, ”˜Who am I playing with here?”™” Manisero recalled thinking. “It was a little scary.”
And then on Dec. 2, 2008, Dreier was arrested in Toronto, where he was caught impersonating a lawyer from the Ontario Teachers”™ Pension Plan while trying to sell promissory notes to another hedge fund. He was rearrested for selling bogus notes shortly after he returned to New York.
Dreier pleaded guilty in 2009 for masterminding a plan that included selling $700 million in fake promissory notes and ultimately creating $380 million in losses. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Kovachev pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy and was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.
(About a week after Dreier”™s first arrest, Bernard L. Madoff was arrested and dominated the news cycle for his $50 billion Ponzi scheme, which he also pleaded guilty to in 2009.)
Switching roles
More recently, Manisero has found himself representing individuals on the other side of the accusations.
He is one of many lawyers representing the financial management company Anchin, Block & Anchin LLP, and its former principal, Evan H. Snapper, after they were sued in 2013 by novelist Patricia Cornwell, her wife and her company.
Cornwell had granted Snapper power of attorney over her finances and assets, power that she said was exploited and poorly managed, costing her tens of millions of dollars. The lawsuit claimed negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract. And after a 26-day trial, Cornwell won her case and was awarded $50.9 million.
But almost a year ago this month, a federal judge in Boston granted a retrial and threw out some of the claims originally filed against Anchin and Snapper.
Manisero said he could not elaborate the specifics of the case because it is ongoing, but said, “That was a tough verdict” ”” referring to the 2013 ruling ”” “and we believe that it was deservedly set aside.”
Against the odds
Manisero is about as unflappable as they come when he candidly chronicles high-profile cases and the celebrities he has dealt with during litigation. But while he shrugs off the spotlight, there is a twinkling desire in the Bay Ridge-rooted lawyer to tackle the toughest cases.
“In the public eye, it”™s celebrity versus accountant; accountant loses,” he said. “The presumption always goes against them.”
He then added: “It”™s a difficult type of case to manage and you”™ve got to manage not only the client”™s expectation, but you have to manage the media. And that”™s what makes them sort of challenging. Makes them fun, but makes them difficult.”
This article has been updated to clarify that the federal agents who investigated the Marc S. Dreier case were with the U.S. attorney’s office and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The agents were misidentified in a quote in a previous version of this story. The quote has been removed and paraphrased to reflect this.
Ms. Wilson, as a trained journalist, should have checked her facts or done some of her own research; perhaps reading the indictments of Dreier or Kovachev, or even as little as watching one of the TV shows about the case. Not to take anything away from Mr. Manisero, who was in fact, the first one to actually throw a flag on the bogus financials that had been passed over by so many other professionals in their due diligence exams, but if he was actually quoted as saying “the FBI” was with him listening in on the calls with Dreier, he has a terrible memory. The FBI had absolutely no involvement in the investigation, recordings, arrests and indictments of Dreier and 2 conspirators (not 1) hired by Dreier. The whole investigation was handled solely by federal agents from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY – in their Securities Fraud Unit. The FBI was not utilized for this case at all by the Chief of that unit at the time, now the Hon. Raymond Lohier, of the Second Circuit Appellate Court. Mr. Manisaro cried foul, and to his credit, let the USAO handle every facet of the investigation from there. He is a good man.