NEW YORK — U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who presides over one of the largest and busiest offices of prosecutors in the nation in Manhattan, issued what amounts to a casting call for whistleblowers Wednesday in a bid to discover non-violent crimes his office doesn’t yet know about.
The prosecutor whose Southern District of New York staff in the last year won convictions in high-profile cases against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and a gynecologist who prosecutors said had sexually abused a “staggering number of victims,” launched what was labeled as the “SDNY Whistleblower Pilot Program.”
In the last 15 years, the office has successfully prosecuted numerous terrorists, mobsters, sex abusers and white-collar criminals, including Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, who admitted fleecing thousands of investors out of roughly $20 billion over several decades, and Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of sex trafficking in a case stemming from financier Jeffrey’s Epstein’s decadeslong sex abuse of teenage girls.
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Williams said he was hopeful that a whistleblower might alert the office to “the next Madoff case” before the full harm had been done and at a time when prosecutors had not heard of it and it wasn’t known publicly. In return, he said, the whistleblower could earn a non-prosecution deal even if the individual had a minor role in the crime.
He said he hoped the program would “help us bring more misconduct to light and better protect the communities we serve.”
“This...
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