White collar criminals and biz media management

Angela Valdez of The New Republic writes Thursday about how some Wall Street executives are prepping themselves for potential indictments and may use the business media to argue their case.

Valdez writes, “The next task, also beginning at the very first whiff of a subpoena, is media management. In a highly publicized investigation, there’s no such thing as an un-tainted jury pool. Prosecutors are masters at pumping up indignation, using tricks like perp walks and press leaks; Rudy Giuliani usually gets credit for starting the drama in the 1980s, with mid-day arrests on the trading floor and handcuffed brokers duck-walked up the courthouse steps. Recent federal appellate court decisions validating the legality of most perp walks have only made the spectacles more popular.

“When smeared in the press, the defendant must respond. ”No comment’ is no longer an option,’ says Stephanie Martz, director of the White Collar Crime Project at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Crisis consultant Jim McCarthy, for example, takes a close-combat approach to dealing with the press. When Eliot Spitzer began investigating New York Stock Exchange director Kenneth Langone for advocating a cushy compensation package for the exchange’s chairman, McCarthy thought the press sacrificed accuracy in their rush to get the story. He fought for and won corrections in The New York Times and the New Yorker. ‘By consistently confronting every error, distortion, bias, and so on, you send a strong public signal that you will scrutinize and police all coverage of the client,’ McCarthy says.

Read more here.