'Varsity Blues' college fraud prosecutor joins Quinn Emanuel
Adds details on office locations in paragraph 2
By Nate Raymond
Oct 14 (Reuters) -He A federal prosecutor in Boston who oversaw the "Operation Varsity Blues" probe into the U.S. college admissions scandal and secured the conviction of a Kremlin-linked businessman who was part of August's prisoner swap between Russia and the West has joined the law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.
Stephen Frank, who had been the chief of the securities, financial and cyber fraud unit of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts, joined Quinn Emanuel as a partner based in Boston and New York on Monday, where he expects to focus on white collar crime, investigations and litigation.
The 1,000-attorney litigation-oriented firm has been growing in Boston in recent years. It has 40-plus lawyers in Boston, including former Acting U.S. Attorney William Weinreb, who joined its ranks in 2018 as a white-collar defense attorney.
A former Wall Street Journal and CNBC financial news reporter, Frank has spent the last 16 years working as a federal prosecutor first in Brooklyn and later Boston.
There, he pursued cases against business executives and others that at times tested the reach of federal bribery and fraud laws. Frank said the office's goal was to show "there was no reason Boston needed to be a backwater in terms of prosecuting white collar crimes."
"We felt that the investigators and prosecutors in this district were as good as any in the country and there was no reason we couldn't be as ambitious about bringing cases that would have an impact as any other district," Frank said.
Most famous of those investigations was the Varsity Blues probe, in which more than 50 executives, celebrities, coaches and others pleaded guilty to engaging in a vast scheme in which wealthy parents sought to secure spots for their children at selective universities through fraud, bribery and cheating.
Frank oversaw the probe as chief of the unit and personally handled the sentencing last year of the fraud's mastermind, William "Rick" Singer, a college admissions consultant who was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in prison.
Frank also led the trial teams that secured convictions in the first two trials to result from the probe, one involving two parents, private equity executive John Wilson and former casino executive Gamal Aziz, and the other involving a former University of Southern California water polo coach, Jovan Vavic.
Those convictions were in the parents' case largely overturned on appeal and in the coach's case set aside by the trial court judge, though a federal appeals court last week appeared open to potentially reversing the ruling in Vavic's case.
Frank was also the lead prosecutor in the case of Vladislav Klyushin, a Russian businessman who was sentenced last year to nine years in prison for participating in a $93 million insider-trading scheme involving hacking secret earnings information about multiple companies.
Klyushin was subsequently included in August in the massive prisoner swap between Russia and the West of 24 prisoners.
Other matters Frank prosecuted include the case of a former State Street executive convicted of overcharging bank customers; a bribery case involving former employees of the proxy solicitation firm Georgeson; and a real estate developer convicted of insider trading.
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