Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., today announced the formation of the Office’s first Corporate Crime and Antitrust Task Force. The major new initiative will focus on complex investigations targeting fraud and misconduct by corporations and corporate executives, including antitrust violations, health care and other consumer fraud to hold organizations fully accountable for corporate criminality, deter industry-wide misconduct, and catalyze systemic reform.

“One of my top priorities since taking office is protecting everyday New Yorkers by prosecuting those who take advantage of them through wage theft, tenant harassment, and other targeted crimes. But at the Manhattan D.A.’s Office, we recognize that corporate entities often inflict equal or greater harm than individuals. We do not stop, therefore, at an individual landlord or employer – our goal is systemic accountability. Our Task Force will doggedly pursue the big picture: the high-level actors, corporations, and structures that enable and profit from crime at the expense of New Yorkers,” said Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg.

The Task Force, which will take a deep dive into the systems and structures that serve as breeding ground for crime, is being led by Matthew Bogdanos, a 40-year veteran and one of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s most experienced lawyers. He has litigated and overseen teams focused on both violent and complex white-collar crimes. The team will be staffed with approximately five Assistant D.A.s and will be supported by two investigative analysts. As a whole, the team has deep white-collar experience, including prosecution and defense of a broad array of crimes, including financial services fraud, securities fraud, and antitrust matters. The task force will draw upon the broad resources of the office, including career investigators, forensic accountants, and the Office’s Financial Intelligence Unit, which does FinCEN analysis.

Systemic and Corporate Accountability

Building on the Office’s history of large-scale, white-collar investigative work and its long-standing commitment to systemic accountability, the Task Force will enhance and expand the Office’s existing practice of looking “upstream” to identify the structures and entities that enable and profit from crime.

Recent examples of the Office’s approach to tackling systemic issues under D.A. Bragg:

• The Office prosecutes crimes involving ghost guns, including acts of violence and ghost gun manufacturing and trafficking operations. To address this issue upstream, the Office helped secure first-in-the-nation safety standards for 3D-printers sold in New York and increased criminal penalties through partnership with Governor Kathy Hochul and the Legislature. The Office has also called on 3D-printer manufacturers and technology companies to adopt safeguards to prevent the production and distribution of these weapons, which has resulted in successful collaborations, including new firearms-content policies and the removal of digital files.
• The Office regularly prosecutes crimes involving cryptocurrency, including sham websites falsely promising crypto recovery services, dark-web drug trafficking, and overseas terrorism financing. To address the problem systemically, the Office introduced the “CRYPTO” Act, or “Cryptocurrency Regulation Yields Protections, Trust, and Oversight” Act with Senator Myrie to make operating a virtual currency business in New York State without a license a crime. 
• In addition to prosecuting recidivist shoplifters, the Office conducts proactive investigations into large-scale “fencing” operations which sell tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen merchandise. The Office recently secured the conviction of a brother and sister who possessed more than $50,000 worth of stolen goods from Macy’s.
• The Office also seizes websites that act as conduits of crime, interrupting criminal operations even when an arrest cannot or has not yet been made. In September, the Office seized 12 domain names of websites that were illegally disseminating and selling non-consensual, AI-generated celebrity “deepfake” videos. The Office has also seized domains from online vendors of stolen credit card information, and the domain of a false cryptocurrency recovery website that was used to steal from customers seeking assistance. Similarly, we focus on preventing and disrupting scammers’ online frauds targeting immigrants. This year, we called on Meta to address scammers posing as a pro bono legal organization on Facebook and WhatsApp, and Meta started to remove the imposter accounts.

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