Agustin D. Orozco

LOS ANGELES - As a partner at Crowell & Moring LLP and a member of the firm's government contracts and white-collar regulatory enforcement practice groups, Agustin D. Orozco finds plenty of opportunities to bring his previous experience at the U.S. Attorney's Office to bear.

"I would say my main areas of focus, now as a white collar lawyer and when I was at the U.S. Attorney's Office, were corruption, procurement fraud and white-collar crimes in general," the Los Angeles attorney said in an interview.

Orozco has spent years of his career helping to bring fraudsters to justice, including disbarred attorney Matthew C. Elstein. The Redondo Beach lawyer was found guilty of taking on clients only to neglect their cases and pocket the fees.

"He would bill the clients and tell them they would need to send fees to the law firm's trust account when in actuality, he was just giving them the banking information for his personal checking account. So he was lying to them about the work that he was doing, and then he was siphoning off funds for this fake work," Orozco recalled of the case.

Leading an investigative team of FBI agents, Orozco pored over thousands of pages of emails and financial records over multiple years, determining $359,000 of losses for Elstein's clients and eventually leading to his guilty plea in October 2021.

In another fraud-related case, Orozco helped prosecute a defendant who ran a lease-swapping scheme. Geoffrey Hull was found to have convinced victims to turn over their car leases to him, promising to find buyers who could take them over.

Instead of doing that, however, Hull leased the cars out for cash through various middlemen.

"A number of these individuals, by the time they hired a private investigator or we caught on in order to help them find the car, would find some cars in other parts of the country. Sometimes they were in really bad shape, so we really went into a lot of lawsuits for a lot of individuals. I think we calculated the total loss amount to be about $1.5 million dollars," Orozco said.

Through the hard work of Orozco and a team of investigators, Hull was brought to justice, pleading guilty in January 2022.

Not all of Orozco's cases have been centered around fraud charges, however. In what he describes as an important case in his career, the attorney participated in retrial proceedings for a police officer who had been acquitted of covering up the beating of a handcuffed suspect.

"Facing long odds, we took the trial on," he said. "We put on what we thought was a very efficient, very compelling case in order to secure an important conviction for the community, to let them know that there were people out there who are interested in ensuring that law enforcement officers who engage in corruption were going to be held accountable."

Following Orozco's case, a jury convicted the policeman after just an hour of deliberations.

"I love that I can wake up and say that we pursue justice every day," Orozco said. "There's always an interesting constitutional issue in my line of work. There's always someone who is asking the justice system to make them whole or asking the justice system to bring to light the facts."

"I really enjoy investigating these issues. I love litigating these issues and, most of all, I love vindicating rights for work," he continued.