(Bloomberg) -- Breon Peace, who began his career as a prosecutor under the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn two decades ago, is now running the office, one of the busiest in the nation.
Appointed by President Joe Biden and sworn in Friday, Peace becomes the third Black lawyer to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, which comprises Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, as well as Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island. He has been employed on and and off since 1996 by the law firm Cleary Gottlieb, where he specialized in white-collar criminal defense.
In his new job he will oversee the prosecution of Colony Capital founder and Donald Trump ally Thomas J. Barrack Jr., who has pleaded not guilty to charges that he acted as an unregistered agent of the United Arab Emirates. Among the office's storied prosecutions was a crackdown on corruption in the international soccer governing body FIFA and a conviction won at trial against Martin Shkreli, who's serving a seven-year sentence for securities fraud committed while running two hedge funds.
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Peace, who was a prosecutor in the office from 2000 to 2002, did a stint as an acting professor of law at New York University School of Law before returning to Cleary in 2003. In 2007, he became the first African-American man elected partner at the firm.
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