William Stuckwisch
While he was at the Justice Department, officials relied on former assistant chief William Stuckwisch for some of the most delicate and complicated matters handled by the criminal division.
In February 2009, when the department's high profile corruption case against then-Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was falling apart, DOJ leadership selected Stuckwisch to handle post-trial litigation and assist in a review of the discovery decisions made by the public integrity section prosecution team.
Stevens, at the time the Senate's longest-serving Republican, was convicted in October 2008 of omitting thousands of dollars in home renovations and other gifts from his Senate financial disclosure forms. He lost re-election in November 2008 and died in 2010. The case, which US District Judge Emmet Sullivan dismissed in 2009 following a DOJ review that found prosecutors had failed to share critical evidence with the defence, was a major embarrassment for the department.
Stuckwisch, along with Patrick Stokes, who became a deputy chief of the fraud section, also led the investigation of the Bonny Island deals in Nigeria. The prosecution of the decade-long scheme by a four-company consortium to bribe Nigerian officials for construction contracts to build liquefied natural gas facilities on Bonny Island, Nigeria. It resulted in the largest combined settlements of any Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case — over US$1.7 billion in penalties and profit disgorgements. The consortium is equally owned by oil industry giants KBR Inc (a unit of Halliburton), French engineering firm Technip, Italian energy firm ENI and its former Dutch subsidiary Snamprogetti Netherlands, and Japanese engineering company JGC Corporation.
KBR pleaded guilty in 2009, Technip and Snamprogetti Netherlands settled their cases in 2010, as did JGC.
In January 2012, the Marubeni Corporation of Japan agreed to pay US$54.6 million and enter into a deferred prosecution agreement to settle allegations it had acted as an agent of the TKSJ consortium in the Nigerian bribery. One of the three co-conspirators charged in the bribery scheme, London solicitor Jeffrey Tesler, agreed in March 2011 to cooperate fully with prosecutors in exchange for leniency. Tesler agreed to forfeit almost US$150 million in unlawful proceeds and was sentenced to two years in prison in February 2012. Tesler's cooperation helped lead to the last resolution in the case, the DPA with Marubeni.
Albert Jackson Stanley, former CEO of KBR, and Wojciech Chodan, a former KBR sales manager, also cooperated with the DOJ. Stanley was sentenced to 30 months in prison in February 2012, while Chodan was given a year of unsupervised probation in the UK.
Stuckwisch also headed an investigation into possible FCPA violations by French engineering giant Alstom. The company eventually pleaded guilty in 2014 to violating the FCPA and agreed to pay US$772 million as part of a the settlement - a record criminal foreign bribery fine. Stuckwisch is a former law student of Alstom's lawyer on the case, Bob Luskin who is now at Paul Hastings.
Before joining the Justice Department, Stuckwisch worked in private practice at O'Melveny & Myers in Washington, DC, and clerked for US Appeals Judge Emmett Ripley Cox of the Eleventh Circuit.
Stuckwisch received his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, and he graduated from the university's law school in 1995. Stuckwisch came to the fraud section in 2004, and eventually moved on to a management role in the criminal division, serving as senior counsel to the then-Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.
In March 2010, Stuckwisch returned to the fraud section as an acting assistant chief of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act team. He became the permanent assistant chief in September 2010. Stuckwisch worked under deputy chief Chuck Duross, who headed the FCPA team.
Stuckwisch is also known to be extremely exacting and, according to attorneys who've negotiated with him, can at times be hard to read. He also doesn't court publicity. He once declined a request from Just Anti-Corruption to take his photograph at a conference where he was speaking.
Stuckwisch became a partner at Kirkland & Ellis in 2012.