|
| Affiliation | Democratic |
|
| Name | Ferdinand Pecora |
| Address |
New York, New York , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
January 06, 1882
|
| Died | December 07, 1971
(89 years)
|
| Contributor | nystate63 |
| Last Modifed | Craverguy
Jan 29, 2009 06:45pm |
| Tags |
Italian -
|
| Info | Ferdinand J. Pecora (January 6, 1882 – December 7, 1971) was an American lawyer and judge who became famous in the 1930s as Chief Counsel to the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency during its investigation of Wall Street banking and stock brokerage practices.
Ferdinand Pecora was born in Nicosia, Sicily, the son of Louis Pecora and Rosa Messina who emigrated to the United States and New York City with his parents. He earned a law degree from New York Law School and eventually worked as an assistant district attorney in New York City, during which time he helped shut down more than 100 bucket shops.
Originally a Progressive Republican, Ferdinand Pecora was appointed Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking and Currency in the last months of the Herbert Hoover presidency by its outgoing Republican chairman, Peter Norbeck, and then continued under Democratic chairman Duncan Fletcher, following the 1932 election that swept Franklin D. Roosevelt into the U.S. presidency and gave the Democratic Party control of the Senate.
The Senate committee hearings that Pecora led probed the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that launched a major reform of the American financial system. Pecora, aided by John T. Flynn, an Irish-American journalist, and Max Lowenthal, a Jewish lawyer, personally undertook many of the interrogations during the hearings, including such high-profile Wall Street personalities as Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, George Whitney a partner in J.P. Morgan & Co. and investment bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Otto H. Kahn, Albert H. Wiggin of Chase National Bank, and Charles E. Mitchell of National City Bank. Because of Pecora's high-profile work, the hearings soon acquired the popular name the Pecora Commission, and Time magazine featured Pecora on the cover of its June 12, 1933 issue.
Pecora's investigation unearthed evidence of irregular practices in the financial markets that benefited the rich at the expense of ordinary investors, including exposure of Morgan’s “preferred list” by which the bank’s influential friends, including Calvin Coolidge, the former president, and Owen J. Roberts, a justice of Supreme Court of the United States, participated in stock offerings at steeply discounted rates. He also revealed that National City sold off bad loans to Latin American countries by packing them into securities and selling them to unsuspecting investors, Wiggin had shorted Chase shares during the crash, profiting from falling prices and Mitchell and top officers at National City had helped themselves to $2.4 million in interest-free loans from the bank’s coffers.
Spurred by these revelations, the United States Congress enacted the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. With the United States in the grips of the Great Depression, Pecora's investigations highlighted the contrast between the lives of millions of Americans in abject poverty and the high-rolling lives of such financiers as J.P. Morgan, Jr.; under Pecora's insistent questioning, Morgan and many of his partners admitted that they had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932; they explained their failure to pay taxes by reference to their losses in the stock market's decline, but this explanation won them no sympathy.
After Pecora closed his investigations, on July 2, 1934, President Roosevelt appointed Ferdinand Pecora a Commissioner of the newly formed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In 1939 Pecora wrote a book about the Senate investigations titled Wall Street Under Oath: The Story of Our Modern Money Changers. On January 21, 1935, Pecora resigned from the SEC and became a judge of the New York State Supreme Court, a position he held until 1950, when he ran unsuccessfully against Vincent R. Impellitteri for Mayor of New York City. Returning to the practice of law, Pecora represented such major clients as Warner Bros. Pictures Distributing Corporation et al. as respondents before the United States Supreme Court in the 1954 case, "Theatre Enterprises v. Paramount, 346 U.S. 537.
Ferdinand Pecora died in 1971.
|
 | BOOKS |
 |
|
| Title |
Purchase |
Contributor |
|
| Start Date |
End Date |
Type |
Title |
Contributor |
|
| INFORMATION LINKS |
|
|
|
