The United States Attorney's Office

The Criminal Division of the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York is responsible for the enforcement of federal criminal laws in our district. Approximately 100 Assistant United States Attorneys ("AUSAs") as well as support staff are assigned to the division and specifically to the following sections within the division: Business and Securities Fraud, Organized Crime and Racketeering, Civil Rights, Narcotics, Public Integrity, Violent Crimes and Terrorism, and General Crimes. The office also operates a Criminal Division in Long Island.

New AUSAs are assigned to the General Crimes Section, where they handle a wide variety of cases. These cases typically include the importation and distribution of narcotics, credit card fraud, bank robbery, Postal theft, violations of immigration laws, money laundering and currency violations, firearms offenses, tax fraud, counterfeiting, and child exploitation. New AUSAs are given significant responsibility in handling all phases of a criminal prosecution, from the initial investigation and arrest through trial, verdict, sentence and appeal. General Crimes AUSAs are closely supervised and trained both within the office and at the Department of Justice's National Advocacy Center located in Columbia, South Carolina.

The office remains at the forefront of advancing the national priorities of the Department of Justice, including the ongoing effort to combat terrorism. In 2005, for example, the office secured the conviction after trial of Sheikh Mohammed Al Moayad and his assistant, Mohammed Zayed, for providing material support to Al Qaeda and Hamas. In May 2006, prosecutors secured a guilty verdict against a defendant who plotted to bomb the New York City subway station located in Herald Square. A second defendant charged in that case pled guilty prior to trial.

This district's United States Attorney is one of seven in the nation privileged to sit on the President's Corporate Fraud Task Force, which was created in the wake of the Enron scandal to coordinate a national strategy to combat sophisticated accounting frauds in large companies. The office has dedicated substantial resources to the investigation of such frauds. These efforts have resulted in significant prosecutions involving major fraud at private and public companies located within the district, including Computer Associates International, Inc., Symbol Technologies, Inc. and Newsday, Inc. Additionally, the office has prosecuted both securities fraud and other business crimes resulting in the convictions of hundreds of defendants employed by corrupt stock brokerage firms. The office recently secured the convictions of more than a dozen defendants relating to massive internet and telephone fraud schemes that victimized tens of thousands of customers. These schemes generated losses exceeding $650,000,000 in what the Federal Trade Commission believes to be the largest consumer fraud in United States history.

The office continues to lead the government's assault on organized crime, convicting scores of high ranking members of both traditional and emerging criminal enterprises. Since 2003, the office has convicted the boss or acting boss of each of the five Cosa Nostra organized crime families that operate in the New York City area, including Bonanno family boss Joseph Massino, Colombo family acting boss Joel Cacace, Gambino family acting boss Peter Gotti, Genovese family boss Vincent "Chin" Gigante and Luchese family acting boss Louis Dadoine. These prosecutions have significantly advanced law enforcement's efforts to dismantle these longstanding criminal enterprises. Recently, a jury sitting in Brooklyn found two former New York City Police Detectives guilty of racketeering conspiracy, among other crimes, based in part on their association and collaboration with members and associates of the various Cosa Nostra families. The office also continues to employ federal racketeering statutes in prosecutions against emerging criminal groups, including Russian organized crime.

The office dedicates significant resources to the Justice Department's priority of dismantling local and national violent gangs which terrorize New York City and Long Island neighborhoods. The office has focused on both neighborhood-based gangs responsible for countless murders and other violent crimes perpetrated primarily in low-income areas within the district, as well as local affiliates of national and international gangs, including most prominently the MS-13, the Almighty Bloods Nation, the Latin Kings, the Crips and the Nétas. As of 2005, the office had secured the conviction of twenty-four MS-13 defendants, including two senior members convicted after trial on ten counts stemming from two drive-by shootings carried out in June 2003.

The office continues to prosecute major national and international drug organizations that import narcotics through John F. Kennedy International Airport and other transshipment points and distribute those narcotics in our district and elsewhere. The office has been responsible for convicting the leaders and members of Asian heroin trafficking organizations, Colombian and Mexican cocaine cartels, the world's largest marijuana suppliers, and the most significant leaders of the international network of ecstasy distributors.

The office's prosecution of public corruption and other traditional white collar criminal cases remains a priority. Recent prosecutions have resulted in the conviction of a member of the New York City Council for extortion arising out of a demand for a one million dollar bribe, the conviction of most of the City's plumbing inspectors for bribery and the prosecution of the developer of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's new headquarters in Manhattan for orchestrating a $10 million fraud in the construction of that project. Within the last year, the office successfully prosecuted the public officials responsible for the October 15, 2003 crash of the Staten Island Ferry Andrew J. Barberi, which killed eleven passengers and severely injured seventy others.

The office continues to make significant strides in prosecuting civil rights violations, recently focusing on both human trafficking and forced labor. The office has prosecuted several major trafficking rings, which employed force, fraud and coercion to ensnare young women in lives of prostitution. Historically, the office has been involved in the most prominent criminal civil rights cases in New York City, including the sexual assault of Abner Louima by members of the New York City Police Department's 70th Precinct in Brooklyn and the violent attack of Yankel Rosenbaum during the onset of the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn.

Fourteen AUSAs and support staff are assigned to the Eastern District's Long Island office, located in Central Islip. Assigned AUSAs are responsible for investigating and prosecuting the broad array of federal crimes that arise in suburban Nassau and Suffolk counties. In recent years, prosecutors from this office have been increasingly active in prosecuting violent gangs, securities and telemarketing fraud, public corruption, major narcotics traffickers, traditional organized crime and child pornography traffickers. Over the past two years alone, the Long Island Criminal Division has prosecuted more than 130 gang defendants.

Finally, the office also has successfully prosecuted significant cases in the area of environmental and computer crime, and insurance and health care fraud. Together with our office's Civil division, the Criminal Division has been at the forefront of using money laundering and forfeiture statutes to prosecute criminals for hiding and disguising their criminal profits and to deprive them of these ill-gotten gains. The office has succeeded in obtaining multi-million dollar forfeitures in cases involving health care fraud, securities fraud, HUD fraud and organized crime.