Legal News

Prosecutors Resort to Wealth Porn in Dreier Case

By Nathan Koppel

We turn back to Marc Dreier, who yesterday filed a motion asking that he be sentenced to no more than 12 ½ years for running a Ponzi scheme.

Now we return to the government’s response, also filed yesterday, in which asks New York federal judge Jed Rakoff to sentence Dreier to 145 years, in line with the federal sentencing guidelines.

The most interesting thing about the government's filing was its inclusion of what we'll call, for a lack of a better term, wealth porn: glossy photos of Dreier's lavish lifestyle, including images of his yacht, beach front house in the Hamptons, and his $207,043.29 Aston Martin DB-9 convertible.

The photo montage can be sampled here, here, here, here and here. Our personal favorite is the image of the bedroom in his yacht, which features replete with wood and leather that appears mighty soft to the touch.

Obviously, the government is using the power of the image to try to claim Dreier was consumed by greed ─ a point Dreier virtually conceded in yesterday’s court filing ─ and deserving of no leniency in sentencing.

"Dreier committed this crime in order to elevate his stature to that of the rich and famous, thereby avoiding the ‘mediocrity’ of merely running his own law firm and earning ‘only’ hundreds of thousands per year," prosecutor argued in their brief.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 09, 2009 (boomark / email).