Louis F O'Neill

Louis F. O'Neill is an attorney admitted to practice in the state and federal courts of New York State and the United States Supreme Court. He was educated at the Harvard Law School from which he graduated with honors. His undergraduate major was Slavic Languages and Literatures. He completed this degree along with an M.A. in Russian and Eastern European Studies, at Stanford University.

Immediately after completing law school, Lou O'Neill worked for the Harvard Institute of International Development on its Legal Reform Project in Moscow, Russia. After that, he went into private practice at the law firm of White & Case. He received the Legal Aid Society's 2000 Pro Bono Award for his work on criminal appeals for the poor in New York.

Following two years as General Counsel and Chief of Business Development for The Falconwood Corporation, Louis F. O'Neill joined the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, where he worked in the Special Prosecutions Bureau. There, as an ADA, he investigated and prosecuted a number of high-profile organized crime, fraud, and white collar cases.

After 9/11, O'Neill helped handle a case at the New York County DA's Office involving the arrest of more than one hundred people for stealing money from New York's Municipal Credit Union (MCU) in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center. In all, 118 people were sought for making withdrawals and purchases far beyond the balances of their MCU accounts. They were able to do this because of MCU's decision to keep their ATMs available to customers even after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers caused MCU to lose its link with the rest of the New York Cash Exchange which keeps track of balances from bank to bank. All who were prosecuted had taken more than $5,000 from the bank in the weeks following the attacks.

O'Neill also participated in prosecuting the Frank Carone crew and their front-man, Michael J. Sherman, using New York State's organized crime statute. This followed a three-and-a-half-year investigation that revealed that Carone and two of his companies were responsible for the theft of $27.7 million from distressed businesses that were either being liquidated in bankruptcy or otherwise restructured. Carone employed a series of techniques to underreport auction sales and keep the difference. Louis F. O'Neill efforts on the prosecution of this ring led to its leaders' imprisonment and millions of dollars of forfeited ill-gotten gains.