“Serving as a federal prosecutor has been the honor of a lifetime,” Pease, 53, of Brooklyn, New York, said in a statement Wednesday. He will be replaced by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Carolyn Poe, the statement said. Kearney succeeded him as head of the Brooklyn office, known as the East District of New York.
He was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021 and will leave his post before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.
During Pease’s tenure, his office brought and won many major cases. In August, former U.S. Rep. Jorge Santos pleaded guilty to misusing campaign funds. In October, Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s former top public security official, was sentenced to more than 38 years in prison for secretly providing protection for El Chapo and the Sinaloa drug cartel. Hip-hop star Kelly was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2022 for sex trafficking.
The Brooklyn office has also won major foreign bribery cases: In 2022, former Goldman Sachs Group banker Roger Ng was convicted for participating in the robbery of Malaysian fund 1MDB; in August, former Mozambique Finance Minister Manuel Chang was convicted of participating in a $2 billion fraud In February, former Vitol oil trader Javier Aguilar was convicted after a jury found that he masterminded an elaborate scheme to bribe Mexican and Ecuadorian officials.
The office also imposed financial penalties on companies under the peace deal. In March, European oil trader Gunvor Group Ltd. agreed to pay more than $660 million to settle U.S. and Swiss charges that it bribed Ecuadorian government officials. The penalty is one of the most severe ever imposed on a commodities trading company. In October, RTX agreed to pay at least $300 million to resolve a U.S. criminal investigation into illegal arms exports. In 2023, UBS agreed to pay $1.44 billion to settle criminal and civil lawsuits to end a long-running case over U.S. mortgage-backed securities and resolve one of the bank’s biggest outstanding legal issues in its acquisition of Credit Suisse. The head of Adani Group was indicted by the peace office in November on charges of defrauding U.S. investors by concealing a bribery scheme to win Indian government contracts. Adani said last month he was “reaffirming our absolute commitment to world-class regulatory compliance” through the legal process.
Pease served as a federal prosecutor in the Brooklyn office from 2000 to 2002 and served for a time as an acting law professor at New York University School of Law before returning to Cleary Gottlieb in 2003 to specialize in white collar Criminal defense. In 2007, he became the first African-American male elected as a partner at the firm.