The message Nicole Argentieri delivered last week as the Justice Department announced its historic punishment against crypto exchange Binance was boilerplate prosecutor-speak: Break the law and you will face consequences.
It’s a warning she honed, and acted on, for years as she forged a reputation as a formidable assistant US attorney in Brooklyn. Much of that time was spent building cases against mobsters, yet a moment that stood out to one defense attorney was when Argentieri sought to stop a pattern of rapes by federal correctional officers.
Deirdre von Dornum represented the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center inmate whose 2016 tip sparked the investigation, but who didn’t want to cooperate or have her identity revealed to agents and prosecutors. Argentieri was undeterred; she launched an investigation to unmask the woman and forced her to testify before a grand jury.
Von Dornum called it a “high-wire strategy” more aggressive than most prosecutors would attempt. In the end, Argentieri won the victim over by keeping her anonymous and moving her to a safer facility, her lawyer recalled. Three guards were ultimately convicted.
“Her zeal in figuring out who she was, was matched by her commitment to protecting her,” said von Dornum, who is chief of the Brooklyn federal defenders’ office. “It is characteristic of who she is as a lawyer.”
Argentieri now sits several levels higher in the Justice Department as the acting assistant attorney general of the criminal division. Among other things, she’s the public face of an office supervising high-profile cases ranging from the prosecution of Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) to bribery allegations against chemicals manufacturer
The post can be a stepping stone—FBI Directors
But nobody appears to be in line to take over and an election-year confirmation seems unlikely amid Republican attacks on the integrity of the Justice Department. That puts Argentieri, even as an interim appointment, in an unusual if not precarious position: Restore or improve public confidence in apolitical, unbiased criminal investigations and prosecutions. And the challenge comes as former President
Argentieri declined to comment for this article.
In interviews with Bloomberg Law, more than 30 of her former colleagues, opposing counsels, friends, and others who know her described the path that carried her from New York to one of the higher posts in Washington. Some cited the in-the-trenches, organized-crime prosecutor’s mindset Argentieri has brought to the job, coaching line attorneys as they’re building complex cases.
She’s also cognizant of the challenges, including the need to change perceptions that the division falls short on corporate crime, particularly going after C-suite executives who tolerate or enable it.
“What we need to be able to do is get our investigations into those individuals going as soon as possible,” Argentieri told corporate compliance professionals at an Oct. 30 conference. “That’s what really all of these policies are driving at.”
That made the Binance prosecution all the more relevant. The criminal division ran point on the investigation into the world’s largest crypto exchange, which ended with guilty pleas by Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao to charges that the exchange allowed criminals and terrorists to launder money and make transactions.
At the news conference releasing the details, US Attorney General
“By every possible measure, these are some of the most significant penalties the department has ever imposed on a financial institution,” Argentieri said as Treasury Secretary
Targeted for a Hit
Argentieri was raised in a close-knit Italian family in blue-collar Staten Island. The daughter of a schoolteacher and a nurse, she learned her work ethic accompanying her grandfather to work at the candy store he owned.
With degrees from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and after five years working white-collar defense as a Skadden Arps associate, Argentieri joined the US attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York in 2007.
Supervisors quickly identified her no-nonsense attitude and plainspoken appeal to juries as ideal for tackling New York’s elaborate La Cosa Nostra portfolio, said John Buretta, who supervised her as chief of the office’s organized crime section. Although it wasn’t a specialty she sought out, Argentieri pored over the rich history of the city’s five crime families, and came to love how each case built into the next.
Her mother and aunt became gallery fixtures at her trials. One of the first had her seeking justice for a murder on their home turf: a Staten Island jeweler killed in a botched robbery by a crew of Genovese crime family associates.
Argentieri was pregnant with her first child when she delivered closing arguments against Anthony Pica, whom she cast as the mastermind of the scheme. She reminded the jury what Pica said when the arresting FBI agents drove him off to a Brooklyn jail.
“The defendant looked outside the window and whispered a very telling admission: ‘Good-bye, Staten Island, I won’t be seeing you for a few years,’” Argentieri said, according to a transcript of the 2010 trial. “Are these the statements of an innocent man? No.”
Pica got 30 years in prison.
In the ensuing years, Argentieri successfully used her background and a knack for being relatable to gain credibility with mob cooperators, said former colleagues and opposing lawyers.
“Victim witnesses—people who are frightened of organized crime but might’ve been from Staten Island or Brooklyn or Queens—understood that Nicole got them,” said James Gatta, a former federal prosecutor who rose through the ranks with her. “That’s one of her real superpowers.”
She wasn’t unstoppable, however.
In 2015, Argentieri’s highest-profile trial ended with the stunning acquittal of Bonanno crime family capo Vincent Asaro on charges that included a 1969 murder of a suspected informant and the 1978 heist of $5.8 million from Lufthansa, a crime immortalized in the film “Goodfellas.”
Upon hearing Asaro’s not-guilty verdict, Argentieri approached the opposing attorney, gave her a hug, and suggested they still go out for a drink.
“She’s a professional,” said Elizabeth Macedonio, Asaro’s attorney.
Then Argentieri went back to work, following new evidence that brought her once again to Asaro. She set about corroborating a cooperator’s tip that Asaro in 2012 ordered a car torched as revenge against the civilian driver who’d cut him off.
After he was indicted again, awaiting trial in jail, the aging mobster allegedly tried arranging a hit on one of the prosecutors, according to a court filing. The target wasn’t publicly identified, but the New York tabloids reported it was Argentieri—an assertion confirmed to Bloomberg Law by a source with knowledge of the case.
Asaro later pleaded guilty to the arson. At his sentencing, Argentieri focused on his lifetime of transgressions, even citing the 1969 murder that a jury determined months earlier she had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
“That is a murder that everyone knows that he committed. We proved it at trial through recordings, witnesses, and expert testimony,” she told US District Judge Allyne Ross. “This defendant has never been held accountable for his history.”
The judge agreed. She sentenced Asaro to eight years in prison, concluding that he was in fact responsible for the Lufthansa heist and the killing—on top of the arson.
“Nicole would never struggle with her mission as a prosecutor,” said Lindsay Gerdes, who prosecuted both Asaro cases alongside Argentieri. “The Asaro verdict was not the result that we had expected, but she moved past that, and she thought about how can we make the next case stronger.”
In other organized crime investigations, Argentieri’s willingness to battle defense lawyers—and even counterparts from other law enforcement agencies—became a hallmark.
“This was pre-#MeToo movement,” said Jim Miskiewicz, who used to prosecute such cases with Argentieri. “There were a lot of Neanderthals out there, and Nicole could go toe-to-toe with anybody.”
Her courtroom adversaries haven’t always appreciated her energy. Several lawyers who represented mob bosses and associates refused to speak publicly about Argentieri, making it clear they still harbored resentment over how they felt she’d cross the line in her advocacy. What allies viewed as passion, others saw as going to extreme lengths to get her desired result.
‘Velvet Glove’
In 2018, Argentieri became a partner at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers. She focused on internal investigations for financial institutions and other corporate clients.
Kenneth Polite, a close friend who started the same day as her as a Skadden associate, recruited her back to government last year. As the Biden administration’s first Senate-confirmed criminal division chief, Polite needed a chief of staff whose advice he could implicitly trust, he said.
Her reputation for mediating thorny disputes—which she did as a supervisor in Brooklyn—also made her a natural for the job. That can include determinations on whether to charge or close a case, and intervening in turf battles between the DC-based criminal division personnel and the thousands of prosecutors scattered across the 94 US attorneys’ districts. Within a few months of her arrival last year, he made Argentieri his top deputy.
“She’s an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove,” said Polite, invoking an analogy he’d heard used to describe former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Polite stepped down in August to return to private practice. He noted his two-year tenure was typical for the position, and that the demands of a “hard-charging job,” the opportunity to lead a prominent white-collar practice at Sidley Austin, and the confidence he and top DOJ officials had in Argentieri all contributed to his exit.
As Argentieri manages a team of about 1,100 employees, including more than 600 attorneys, she’s taken a hands-on approach that disregards the notion she’s limited in an acting capacity. She hasn’t been afraid to wade deep into individual case decisions, especially those involving sensitive and challenging issues, said a senior DOJ official granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters.
Argentieri is also known to routinely call up trial attorneys to brief her on tricky cases, occasionally offering advice.
She’s become more visible in the mission of convincing a skeptical corporate community to voluntarily self-report wrongdoing, and has met with overseas counterparts to improve information-sharing when investigating multinationals.
The array of potential crimes under her watch is immense within a sprawling criminal division mandate.
A newly formed crypto unit seized nearly $9 million worth of Tether tokens traced to an organized network that allegedly stole millions through romance scams, the Justice Department said last week. And a team targeting Russian oligarchs’ luxury items moved in October to force a Russian billionaire to forfeit his $300 million superyacht, which the US government confiscated last year.
Election-year politics are also likely to brighten the spotlight on the office, as GOP candidates assail a Democratic administration they say is soft on crime, and with unproven yet still lingering accusations about voting fraud.
Argentieri’s already waded into both. She oversees the section that runs a task force investigating threats to election workers, and this week, she announced that the criminal division was adding more resources to support law enforcement in Memphis as it sought to curb rising violent crime.
She lacks jurisdiction over the special counsel’s offices, which have handled the most politically charged of all DOJ investigations of late—indictments of Trump and Hunter Biden.
But Argentieri’s staff—some of whom are supporting the prosecutions of Trump and thousands of Capitol building invaders on Jan. 6—are still under fire, fueled by Republican politicians pouncing on the DOJ for what they call partisan-motivated investigations. And her ties to Special Counsel Jack Smith go back to Brooklyn, where he was part of the US attorney’s office leadership committee that first hired her, according to two colleagues.
Other alums of New York’s Eastern District say she’ll withstand the political pressure of the moment just fine.
“She has substantial boots-on-the-ground experience in working the types of cases that she now supervises,” said Elizabeth Geddes, who worked closely with Argentieri in Brooklyn. “That buys her accountability” both inside and outside the Justice Department.
Still, when tangling with other government agencies, her clout may be limited without the White House and Senate imprimatur. Argentieri’s chances of getting nominated for the permanent position or otherwise staying for the long term are difficult to handicap. Her husband and children live in northern New Jersey.
The Binance pleas marked the most notable corporate prosecution unveiled since Argentieri took the division’s top post. That the attorney general deferred to her to discuss the case at last week’s news conference suggested the depth of her involvement.
The looming agreement was clearly on Argentieri’s mind when she answered a question last month from Polite, who was moderating her compliance conference session.
When he asked about the department’s recent focus on the intersection of national security and white-collar cases, she gave a shout-out to the “little mighty unit” of 12 bank integrity prosecutors who it later would become clear were critical in building the Binance probe.
“Stay tuned, our work here isn’t done,” Argentieri said then. “Our message is really simple: If you want to access the US financial system, you really have to play by our rules.”
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