Weld did convict a substantial number of lower-echelon administration members as he “climbed the ladder,” by turning city employees against higher-ups. But the top prize, the mayor himself, ultimately eluded prosecution. The highest figure indicted, Theodore Anzalone, was slated by Weld’s team to testify against White after being convicted. But Anzalone beat his charges and the plan was abandoned. (Harvey Silverglate was co-counsel for Anzalone during those trials.) White retired from politics rather than run for re-election in 1983, a decision many credit to Weld’s investigation.
A more creative and successful effort was Weld’s prosecution of the Bank of New England for violating money-laundering laws. His office won the case in 1986, showing that some individual bank tellers were not reporting customers who broke up large transfers into increments of less than $10,000 — the Treasury Department’s cutoff point to trigger a bank’s mandatory reporting of cash transactions.
The conviction was startling to many, given that none of the bank’s governing executives had been shown to have any idea that violations were occurring at the local-branch operational level, or had any intention of violating the law. Weld thus engineered a “stretch” of the then-current state of the law, expanding the reach of criminal liability to the corporation.
That precedent could now be used against Decker as a corporation, regardless of executive knowledge, if federal prosecutors choose to act as zealously as Weld did back then. Fortunately for Weld, it is not equally true that the chief executive officer can be tagged with the knowledge or actions of those lower down on the pecking order — unless, of course, prosecutors exert sufficiently coercive pressure on the lower-echelon folks — in the phrase made famous by Alan Dershowitz, to teach them not only to sing but also to compose. In other words, will the prosecutors looking into Weld’s role be as aggressive in pursuing him as he was in pursuing targets in his days as a prosecutor?
Weld may be a Republican and a former prosecutor, but he made some powerful and influential enemies during his days as a top Justice Department official in the last years of the Reagan administration. And some of those enemies may not be averse to seeing Weld land in political and legal hot water.
During his almost two years as assistant US attorney general who oversaw all federal criminal investigations, Weld was regularly called upon to advise his boss, Attorney General Edwin Meese, on how to deal with special prosecutors looking into not only the constitutional and legal problems that arose from the Iran-Contra scandals, but also allegations that Meese himself had acted in ethically questionable ways in a number of personal financial matters.
Meese, prior to his cabinet appointment, served as counselor to President Ronald Reagan. During his seven and a half years in the Reagan administration, Meese was the focus of much controversy, ranging from his acceptance of interest-free loans to his alleged influence on the Army’s selection of a politically connected defense contractor. It’s easy to forget that the Reagan administration in general was beset by a series of scandals, especially during Weld’s tenure.
