By Dan Slater
Associate charged: Hedge-fund billionaires aren’t the only ones getting ensnared by the government’s massive insider-trading probe. On Tuesday, the National Law Journal reports, the SEC filed civil charges against Todd Leslie Treadway, a former associate at Dewey LeBoeuf. The agency alleges that Treadway made $27,000 by buying shares in two companies -- both firm clients -- after he reviewed confidential merger agreements. Treadway is not the first lawyer charged with misusing internal information about deals. Two associates at Ropes & Gray, Arthur Cutillo and Brien Santarlas, pleaded guilty after being charged in 2009 with passing along tips about deals the firm was working on.
Syphilis settlement: Lawyers for a group of Guatemalans have issued an ultimatum to the Obama administration: Pay up or we sue. The settlement demand, issued via letter on Tuesday, stems from revelations last year that U.S. scientists who were studying penicillin in the 1940s deliberately infected about 700 Guatemalans with syphilis, reports the Charlotte Observer. The Guatemalans’ lawyers, Andres Alonso and Terrence Collingsworth, told the Obama administration that it has until Friday to respond. The threatened suit seeks damages for “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”
Starr’s lawyer may plead: One week after money-manager Ken Starr was sentenced to 7-1/2 years in prison for bilking his famous clients, one of Starr’s lawyer-accomplices is expected to plead guilty to money-laundering in connection with Starr’s $33 million Ponzi scheme, the New York Law Journal reports. The lawyer, former Winston & Strawn partner Jonathan Bristol, has reached a plea agreement with prosecutors, an assistant U.S. attorney told Southern District Judge Deborah A. Batts on Tuesday. Judge Batts set a May 2 deadline for a possible plea.
Next up at Gitmo: The next defendant expected to appear before a military tribunal is the most infamous inmate at Guantanamo Bay’s military prison: Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the alleged mastermind behind the 2000 bombing of the U.S. Cole that killed 17 sailors. But the case is far from a slam-dunk, the L.A. Times reports. Nashiri has alleged that he was tortured at Gitmo; in 2009, Congress prohibited prosecutors from introducing “statements obtained by torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading statements.”
The centenarian lawyer: Davis Polk’s most senior lawyer, Hazard Gillespie, died on Tuesday, the AmLaw Daily reported. He was 100. As a summer associate in 1934, Gillespie worked on Erie v. Thompkins, which set a major precedent in the area of diversity jurisdiction. He later represented movie stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Other than a stint as a federal prosecutor during the Eisenhower administration, Gillespie spent his entire career at Davis Polk, commuting by train every day until he was well into his 90s.
Dead men walking? A bill to repeal Illinois’ death penalty is unclear about what happens to those already on death row. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn says he intends to sign the bill, reports the Chicago Sun-Times, but he hasn’t said what he’ll do with the 15 men currently on Illinois’ death row. “I’d hope he’d probably commute those sentences,” said the bill’s chief sponsor, State Rep. Karen Yarbrough. “What else is he going to do? But that’s his call.”
Prosecution packs a punch: The prosecutors in the Raj Rajaratnam trial, which began on Tuesday, are no strangers to insider-trading cases, the Wall Street Journal reports. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jonathan Streeter and Reed Brodsky won convictions in the major three insider-trading cases that have gone to trial in recent years. Streeter, who in 2009 won the conviction of an Ernst & Young lawyer who tipped a broker on pending takeovers, is on tap to deliver the opening statement.