Top Madoff players hire lawyers with ties to SEC, Justice department

Key players at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities Inc. have hired some of the best-connected lawyers in the business.

Madoff’s attorney is Ira Sorkin, who once headed the New York office of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and who also worked as a federal prosecutor in New York.

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Sorkin’s specialty at Dickstein Shapiro LLC is white collar criminal defense and SEC enforcement actions. He also speaks on topics such as “Coordinating a Response to Allegations of Financial Fraud,” according to his page on the firm’s website.

Frank DiPascali, Madoff’s chief financial officer, is represented by Marc Mukasey, the leader in the white collar criminal defense practice of Bracewell and Giuliani and stepson of U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

While DiPascali has not been charged, he has been described as a key figure in the separate staff that worked closely with Bernard Madoff on the 17th floor of the firm’s office at the Third Avenue building known as the Lipstick Tower. That operation, which is believed to have orchestrated Madoff’s alleged $50-billion Ponzi scheme, had its own computer systems, and did not process its trades through the Madoff firm.

The junior Mukasey has declined to say whether DiPascali is a target of investigators. But he, too, brings considerable strengths as a defense attorney: He worked for eight years as an assistant federal prosecutor; before that, he was a staff attorney for the SEC prosecuting securities fraud, according to his staff bio.

The elder Mukasey recused himself from the case yesterday, citing conflicts of interest because of his son’s role. In addition, Michael Mukasey is a 1959 graduate of the Ramaz School, a modern Orthodox Jewish school in New York that invested as much as $6 million in a fund that was a Madoff client, said Kenny Rochlin, Ramaz’s director of institutional advancement.

Madoff’s sons, Andrew and Mark, who first reported their father after he purportedly confessed to defrauding investors, have retained Martin Flumenbaum, senior partner in the litigation department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

Flumenbaum is considered one of the nation’s top litigators, representing Hollinger International and American International Group Inc., among other deep-pocketed clients.

He is also a former assistant federal prosecutor who led the successful tax prosecution of Sun Myung Moon in 1982, according to the biography posted on his firm’s site.

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