Legal News

Shining the Light on Ike Sorkin, Madoff?s Lawyer

By Ashby Jones

To “preserve a system that can protect the people who didn't do bad things, you have to represent people who did do bad things. That's the role we play."
– Ira Lee Sorkin, lawyer for Bernie Madoff

The above is the final quote in an NYT story out Wednesday about Ira Lee (”Ike”) Sorkin, the man entrusted with defending Bernie Madoff.

When glanced through a certain lens, the story is as much about the U.S. criminal justice system — and the people who work within it — as it is about a man and his client.

As the story makes clear, Sorkin seems to believe in the system. It’s what helps him weather comments about his decision to represent Madoff like this one: "As one Jew to another, I deeply regret that the Sorkin family did not perish in the Nazi death camps." According to the story, soon after he took on the case in December, Sorkin received one message so threatening that he said he had to refer it to the F.B.I.

Throughout his lengthy career, Sorkin has provoked strong feelings - among those who like him and those who do not. He received his first death threat in 1975 when he was prosecuting an “alcoholic stock swindler.” More recently, Sorkin has defended an assortment of unpopular clients, like Monzer al-Khazar, a Syrian convicted in November of supplying arms to undercover agents posing as anti-American terrorists.

He’s also, like a lot of criminal lawyers who believe deeply in the system, flipped back and forth between the prosecutor’s office and the defense bar.

The Times explores Sorkin’s ability to switch sides of the table in a nice vignette toward the end of the story. Sorkin had returned to the SEC in the early 1980s for a two-year stint as its New York regional administrator, where he fought just as fiercely to shut down penny stock frauds as he had to defend their perpetrators prior to arriving at the SEC. So what would he say to the investors who were swindled during the months that he, as defense counsel, stood in the regulators' way?

"That's a great question," he said. “If they can't figure out what to do, the problem isn't that I am a vigorous advocate for my client - the problem is that we need better people, more experienced people on the other side of the table."

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 11, 2009 (boomark / email).