| Melvyn I. Weiss | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 1, 1935 Bronx, New York |
| Occupation | Attorney |
Melvyn I. Weiss (born August 1, 1935) was an American attorney who co-founded the well-known plaintiff class action law firm Milberg Weiss.
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Mr. Weiss received a BBA in accounting from Baruch College of the City University of New York in 1957 and a JD Degree from the New York University School of Law in 1959. After getting married in 1959, Mel Weiss moved to Queens and became a member of the North Shore Democratic Club and the Bay Terrace Community Alliance,[1] where he successfully acted as campaign manager for several reform democrats in northeast Queens.
In 1960 he served in the army reserves, and after a six month active duty, joined a Wall Street law firm. In 1961, Mr. Weiss was also appointed by Mayor John Lindsay as the chairman of the NYC Sidewalk Café Study Committee, which succeeded in expanding the number of sidewalk cafés in New York from a handful to several hundred and changed the landscape of the city to what it is today.
In 1962, he was recalled during the Berlin Crisis and served for another year of active duty. After three years with another New York law firm where he practiced litigation, he co-founded the Milberg Weiss firm, which ultimately had offices throughout the country and practiced complex securities, anti-trust and consumer fraud actions predominantly representing plaintiffs in class-actions against major corporations.[2] Thereafter he handled, as a lead counsel, some of the largest complex actions in the country, such as the Washington Public Power Supply System, a municipal bond default case, which was then the largest ever in the country; the Michael Milken- Drexel Burnham case, dealing with the collapse of numerous companies, including savings and loans, as a result of the sale of junk bonds; Weiss’ efforts, along with the US government, led to a joint recovery of over 2 billion dollars. In addition, he was a lead counsel in numerous other major life insurance marketing fraud cases, such as the Tyco securities fraud case.
At one point Weiss dominated the market in securities class-action suits, in which investors who suffer losses typically claim that executives had misled them about a company's financial condition.[3]
On March 20, 2008, Melvyn Weiss announced through his attorney that he would plead guilty to making illegal client kickbacks in exchange for an 18- to 33-month prison sentence and fines and restitution of $10 million.[4]
Prior to his sentencing for what he admitted was “wrongful conduct,” and for which he was “profoundly sorry,” supporters had flooded the Federal court with over 275 letters detailing Weiss' philanthropic history, including $6.25 billion in settlements he helped win for Holocaust victims. Both the Federal judge hearing the case and U.S. Attorney called the support for Weiss “unprecedented.”
Weiss was sentenced to 30 months of incarceration on Monday June 2, 2008, where he served half of his sentence at the minimum security Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, West Virginia, with the remainder served under home confinement.[5]
Weiss is now on probation, and in 2010 he formed MIW Consulting, LCC, in Boca Raton, FL, to be available as a mediator or arbitrator in complex disputes.
Mr. Weiss has lectured extensively internationally. He was granted an honorary professorship at the University of Buenos Aires, and asked to serve on the board of the Salzburg Seminar Foundation in Austria, where he also served as a member of the faculty.
Mr. Weiss was a Commissioner of the Nassau County Charter Revision Commission, in Long Island, NY, after the county charter was declared unconstitutional. He also previously served on the boards of the Israel Policy Forum, NYU Law School, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the World Council of the American Jewish Congress, and the American Constitution Society.
He served as Vice Chairman of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, which acts as a think tank to aid the middle class, and as International Chair of the Hatikva Project, which built a memorial park on site of the Israeli Embassy attack in Buenos Aires.
He and his wife established a Public Interest Foundation at NYU Law School [6] to assist graduating students to accept public interest jobs and to pay off their student loans.