Sep. 13, 2012
Benjamin B Wagner
See more on Benjamin B WagnerU.S. attorney's office, Eastern District of California Sacramento Litigation Specialty: criminal and civil
As a U.S. attorney, Wagner said he's focused now on investigating and prosecuting mortgage fraud.
"The Eastern District of California is one of the most hard-hit areas in the country in terms of foreclosures and fraud ... This fiscal year we will have indicted more mortgage fraud defendants than any other office in the country," he said.
Wagner said he couldn't comment specifically on laws passed in California this summer to require banks to provide more leniency to homeowners to prevent foreclosure.
"Our primary purpose ... is ferreting out prosecutable fraud," he said.
Earlier in his career, Wagner spent roughly 5 ½ years at Cahill, Gordon & Reindel LLP in New York before leaving in 1992 to move to California for family reasons. He said he'd been uninterested in prosecution in law school but decided to look into working at the U.S Attorney's Office because of friends who enjoyed their work there "and because I was drawn to the public service aspect of it."
"I was [in] private practice, my friends told me about their work, and it sounded pretty exciting," he said.
He joined as an assistant U.S. attorney, taking "a whopping pay cut."
"I thought I'd do it for a few years, see what it was like," he said.
Twenty years later, Wagner still hasn't left, and by 2009 he'd risen to the top of the office with an appointment by President Barack Obama.
He said he finds the work exhilarating and rewarding. In his time, he's prosecuted domestic terrorists and gained convictions against fraudsters and scammers.
"As an assistant attorney, I was particularly proud of my prosecution of a series of abortion clinic bombers," Wagner said. "I also really took pride in some of the fairly sophisticated fraud schemes I prosecuted ... The last really major trial that I had before becoming a U.S. attorney was a prosecution of some attorneys who were engaged in an asylum fraud scheme."
The six-week case stemmed from a sting operation in which an undercover agent posed as an immigrant and gathered evidence that the attorneys were fabricating back stories for clients in order to falsely present them as immigrants escaping from persecution abroad.
"[We] found the same stories recycled over and over again," Wagner said.
Wagner is married with three kids, including one in college. His main pastime is soccer.
"No, I don't golf - I'm a Democrat," he joked.
- PAUL JONES
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