Ferdinand Pecora
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Ferdinand J. Pecora (January 6, 1882 – December 7, 1971) was an American lawyer and judge who became famous in the 1930s as Chief Counsel to the United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency during its investigation of Wall Street banking and stock brokerage practices.
Ferdinand Pecora was born in Nicosia, Sicily, the son of Louis Pecora and Rosa Messina who emigrated to the United States and New York City with his parents. He earned a law degree from the New York Law School and eventually worked as an assistant district attorney.
Originally a Progressive Republican, Ferdinand Pecora was appointed Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking and Currency by its outgoing Republican chairman, Peter Norbeck, and then continued under Democratic chairman Duncan Fletcher, following the 1932 election that swept Franklin D. Roosevelt into the U.S. presidency and gave the Democratic Party control of the Senate.
Ferdinand Pecora, led Senate hearings, known as the Pecora Commission into the causes of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that launched a major reform of the American financial system. Pecora personally undertook many of the interrogations during the hearings, including high profile Wall Street personalities such as Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange and investment bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Otto H. Kahn, Albert H. Wiggin, and Charles E. Mitchell. Pecora's high-profile work led to the hearings being called the Pecora Commission and it put him on the June 12, 1933 cover of Time magazine. Pecora's investigation produced evidence of irregular practices in the financial markets that benefitted the rich at the expense of ordinary investors which led the United States Congress to pass the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. With the United States in the grips of the Great Depression and millions of Americans living in abject poverty, Pecora received massive press coverage when his questioning of J.P. Morgan, Jr., the most prominent banker of them all, revealed that Morgan and many of his multi-millionaire partners hadn't paid any income tax in 1931 and 1932.
When the Commission wrapped up its work, on July 2, 1934 President Roosevelt appointed Ferdinand Pecora a Commissioner of the newly formed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In 1939 he wrote a book published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. about the Senate investigations titled Wall Street Under Oath: The Story of Our Modern Money Changers. On January 21, 1935, Ferdinand Pecora resigned from the SEC following which he was appointed a judge of New York State Supreme Court, a position he held serving until 1950 when he ran unsuccessfully against Vincent R. Impellitteri for Mayor of New York City. Returning to the practice of law, Pecora represented major clients such as Warner Bros. Pictures Distributing Corporation et al. as respondents before the United States Supreme Court in the 1954 case, "Theatre Enterprises v. Paramount, 346 U.S. 537.
Ferdinand Pecora died in 1971.
