They’ve Got Next: White Collar Fresh Face Alex Wyman

It’s not every day that a white-collar prosecutor tries a case involving death, but that’s what makes one particular case memorable for Alex Wyman.

During his stint as an assistant U.S. attorney, Wyman led the charge against a man who drove his ex-wife and two youngest, disabled children off a wharf at the Port of Los Angeles in 2015.

Thanks to Wyman’s efforts, Ali Elmezayen is locked up in a high-security prison while he tries to fight his way out of a whopping 212-year sentence.

Now a partner at Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles, Wyman, 34, reflects on the unusual case that stands out in his relatively young career so far.

The Los Angeles District Attorney initially declined to charge Elmezayen. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in L.A., where Wyman worked, charged him.

But not for murder. It was a fraud case—Wyman’s bread and butter.

Yet it was different from the typical fare, like securities or health-care or tax fraud. It was the “least conventional of the white-collar cases I worked on,” he said.

It technically wasn’t a murder case, but it sort of was. To prove fraud against the man who took out insurance policies on his family, Wyman and his co-counsel, David Ryan, had to show during the 2019 three-week trial in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California that the deaths weren’t accidental. Elmezayen’s ex-wife, Rabab Diab, survived, but the two children, Elhassan and Abdelkarim, died.

For Wyman, the most memorable part of the trial—one of the most memorable moments of his career—was questioning Elmezayen’s remaining son, Elhussein, who wasn’t in the vehicle. Nineteen years old at the time of trial, Elhussein testified about his father’s abuse of his mother who survived.

It was challenging to ask the son to recount those memories, Wyman said.

He called the maximum sentence imposed in March 2021 a “great result in the interests of justice.” He received the 2021 Director’s Award for Superior Performance, one of the highest honors for federal prosecutors.

Elmezayen has an appeal pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The state brought murder charges shortly before the federal trial.

Another thing that made the case unusual for the 2013 University of Virginia School of Law grad was working with different law enforcement officials. He usually partnered with FBI agents who specialized in corporate and securities fraud. In the Elmezayen case, Wyman worked with the FBI’s violent-crime agents, so he had to pore through records and work up the white-collar aspect.

Wyman also led several other noteworthy prosecutions during his five-year AUSA stint. That includes one for which he’ll be featured on CNBC’s “American Greed,” on the case of Antonio Mariot Wilson, who convinced actress Jenifer Lewis of the ABC show “Black-ish” and others to invest in bogus companies.

Wyman was always interested in white-collar work, which he also practiced before becoming a prosecutor. After clerking for District Court Judge Beverly Reid O’Connell in the Central District of California, he was at O’Melveny & Myers LLP for a year-and-a-half before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office in December 2016. He joined Latham in December 2021.

And while he speaks passionately of his time as a prosecutor, Wyman sounds just as enthusiastic about his private-practice work, even if he isn’t free to discuss it in detail. It’s a mix of criminal, civil, and investigative work, he said.

So far, the firm seems happy with his work.

“We’re thrilled to have him here,” said Latham partner Manny Abascal, who was also a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles.

“Alex really has it all,” Abascal said.

He pointed to Wyman’s “deep courtroom experience, criminal, investigative, and civil litigation chops and experience, both from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and at a prior firm, and an outstanding reputation in the legal community.”

“Everybody knows him and respects him already,” Abascal said of Wyman, “even though he’s very early in his career.”