Gwendolyn Stamper (on detail)

Gwendolyn Stamper left the FCPA Unit in March 2021 to serve on detail as chief of staff to the then acting criminal division chief Nicholas McQuaid.

She joined the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit in the US Department of Justice’s criminal division fraud section as a trial attorney in 2018. Previously, she served for nearly five years as a trial attorney in the public integrity section, also in the criminal division.

Stamper was immediately assigned to the prosecution of Matthias Krull, former vice chairman at Swiss bank Julius Baer’s Panama division, who pleaded guilty on 22 August to his role in a scheme to launder $1.2 billion from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Krull was charged alongside others whom the DOJ described as “professional money launderers”.

While with the public integrity section, Stamper prosecuted two highly publicised domestic bribery cases involving Arkansas officials and a local senator in Puerto Rico.

The Arkansas case involved a former deputy director of the Arkansas Department of Human Services, Steven Jones, who accepted bribes from owners of mental health companies in exchange for department of health insider information. After pleading guilty to conspiracy, wire fraud and bribery charges, Jones was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2016.

Stamper also prosecuted former Puerto Rico lawmaker Hector Martinez Maldonado in a four-week trial that led to his bribery conviction in 2017.

According to evidence presented at trial, Juan Bravo Fernandez, the former president of one of the largest private security companies in Puerto Rico, paid for Martinez to travel to Las Vegas to watch a championship boxing match between Winky Wright and Felix “Tito” Trinidad, a legendary Puerto Rican boxer. In exchange, Martinez supported a bill that helped Bravo’s business. Martinez together with Bravo was sentenced in 2018 to four years in prison.

Additionally, Stamper served as one of two DOJ attorneys on the Supreme Court case of Shaw v United States, which ruled in 2016 that individuals who commit fraud against a customer of a bank are also committing fraud against the bank.   

Stamper clerked for the US District Court of the Virgin Islands and the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. She earned her law degree from the University of Michigan law school.