Rod Rosenstein, Maryland’s top federal prosecutor, announced Monday that he’s creating a new team of number crunchers to crack down on money laundering and to track the assets of bad guys.
Rosenstein has asked veteran prosecutors Stefan Cassella, Richard Kay and Christen Sproule to lead the new task force. Cassella, the new chief of the section, and Kay work out of the Baltimore office; Sproule works out of Greenbelt.
The team will focus on asset forfeiture and money laundering from civil and criminal cases. Rosenstein told The Examiner that he hoped the team would help him “take the profit out of crime and to help repay the victims.”
The collapse of the housing market taught prosecutors that “there’s a lot of fraud out there,” Rosenstein said. The new team will focus not just on tracking down dirty money, but in converting the goods in criminal enterprises — from cars to computers — to cash for victims of crime in Maryland, he said.
“We’ve seen in our mortgage fraud cases that there’s a lot of victims out there, and we’d like to find ways to help them,” he said. “It’s a rare opportunity to have somebody with the kind of expertise and renown of Stef Cassella come on board.”
Cassella worked in the Justice Department’s money laundering section from 1994 until 2007. He has helped write many of the nation’s asset forfeiture laws. He literally wrote the book on the topic: “Asset Forfeiture Law in the United States” is a staple of law school classrooms. He started his career as a deputy prosecutor in the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office.
Kay has been Rosenstein’s anti-money laundering man in Baltimore for 19 years. Sproule is new to the prosecution, having joined the office in January after a brief stint in private practice.
