Richard Marmaro

The largest contracting case ever brought by the U.S. Department of Justice sought $10 billion from a Kuwaiti food vendor accused of overcharging the U.S. military. After Marmaro was finished with it, Public Warehousing Co. KSC paid a mere $551 in restitution after pleading guilty to misdemeanor theft of government funds.

“We were very happy to write that check for $551,” Marmaro said. “It was basically a surrender by the government.”

The head of Skadden’s West Coast Securities Exchange Commission enforcement and white-collar defense practice, Marmaro believes there’s no secret to extraordinary outcomes beyond tremendous pretrial preparation and deep knowledge of the law, and Public Warehousing Co.’s case exemplified that. The case centered on a misinterpreted contract and “extraordinary overreach by the government that we had to painstakingly point out.”

“The way we secured the outcome is by litigating the case very aggressively for about seven years and persuading the government that if they took the case to trial they would probably lose,” Marmaro said. United States v. The Public Warehousing Company K.S.C. et al., CR09-00490 (N.D. Ga., filed Nov. 9, 2009).

Marmaro ranks the dismantling of that case among the top three wins in his near 40-year career. The others are the high-profile dismissal of the criminal stock options backdating case against Broadcom Ltd. executive William Ruehle in U.S. District Court in 2009, and a jury’s acquittal of Columbia Savings & Loan executive Thomas Spiegel on a 55-count fraud-related indictment in 1994.

He’s currently devoted to the retrial of optics executive James Mazzo, who’s charged with tender offer fraud and for an alleged insider stock trading scheme with retired Major League Baseball player Doug DeCinces. Jurors convicted DeCinces in May, but they hung on Mazzo’s counts. Now DeCinces is set to testify against Mazzo, which has pushed the trial back to January. United States v. DeCinces et al., 8:12-cr-00269 (C.D. Cal., filed Nov. 28, 2012).

Marmaro spent four years with the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles before opening a firm with his roommate from George Washington University, Bert H. Deixler, now of Kendall Brill & Kelly LLP. The firm grew to eventually merge with Proskauer Rose LLP. His devotion high-stakes white-collar litigation brought him to Skadden in 2005.

“This is a large firm that has enormous resources to fully staff and litigate highly complex cases, which is what I do,” Marmaro said.

— Meghann M. Cuniff