White was also in pursuit of fugitive financier Marc Rich when the man who appointed her in 1993, President Bill Clinton, pardoned Rich in the closing moments of his administration, a decision that reportedly left White furious. She was later appointed by then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate the Clinton pardons.
But criminal charges were not the only way she leveraged the reputation and authority of the prosecutor's office to effect change.
"I feel strongly as a philosophical matter that the way to go, most broadly, at white-collar crime is to look at what happens at major institutions," she said. "You have to look very closely at corporate culture. Sometimes it has meant changes in the company, whether in its compliance program, or the company has agreed to having an outsider on its board of directors or agreed to enhance its internal controls."
Terror Cases
Under her leadership, the U.S. Attorney's office also prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman for seditious conspiracy in connection with a plot to blow up New York City landmarks, and twice prosecuted Ramzi Yousef, first for his role in a plot to blow up U.S. airlines and then in connection to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
And it was White's office that indicted Osama bin Laden and successfully prosecuted four men in the 1998 al-Qaida-led bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Prosecutions are continuing to this day on a superseding indictment to the original indictment charging bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.
@|Christine Simmons can be reached at csimmons@alm.com. Mark Hamblett contributed to this report.
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