Marc Dreier

His father, Sidney Dreier (1915-2006) was a war refugee from Poland, owned a chain of movie theaters.

His mother, Mildred Dreier (née Krisoff; 1920-2019), was originally from Brooklyn where she was born to Lithuanian and Russian Jewish immigrant parents.

Dreier presided over the Lawrence High School student council, and graduated "most likely to succeed".

Marc Stuart Dreier (born May 12, 1950) is an American former lawyer who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 2009 for committing investment fraud using a Ponzi scheme.

He is scheduled to be released from FCI Sandstone on June 30, 2025.

He began his career as a "shining star" in the late 1970s at Rosenman & Colin, Freund, Lewis & Cohen, then a 90-lawyer litigation firm, and was well regarded.

"He was a very smart, hard-working guy....Funny, personable – part of the social mix", but what most distinguished him was his ability to think on his feet.

"He's very quick. Very smart."

He graduated from Yale University in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts and earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1975.

He had been admitted on May 5, 1976.

Marc Dreier grew up on the south shore of Long Island in an affluent area known as the Five Towns.

In the early 1980s, Dreier was named a partner at Rosenman.

In 1987, he married a Rosenman associate named Elisa Peters.

In 1989, he joined the New York office of Fulbright & Jaworski.

Dreier would become co-head of litigation in New York, but when Dreier left Fulbright in March 1995, there were only ten New York litigators.

He then worked for Duker & Barrett for less than two years.

Its founding partner, William Duker, would later plead guilty to four counts of fraud called "one of the most serious cases of legal fraud" ever prosecuted.

In 1996, he teamed with a Florida lawyer named Neil Baritz, who had a small corporate and securities practice, to found a firm called Dreier & Baritz.

Though he was able to found the firm, a precursor to Dreier LLP, he struggled to distinguish his practice.

From 1999 to 2002, Dreier, Baritz, & Federman was formed with offices in New York and Boca Raton with most associates in Oklahoma.

Dreier ran the new firm's already leased Park Avenue office.

He favored plaintiff class-action lawsuits, which brought in large revenue.

Federman had problems with Dreier's spending, managerial style, and secrecy, which culminated in a lawsuit.

Dreier, pushing to impress, acquired expensive trappings, buying a house in Westhampton.

He bought first a place in Quogue, then the house next door.

He purchased the $18 million 121 ft yacht Seascape, which included a crew of 10 and a Jacuzzi, and docked it in New York City and St. Martin.

Dreier owned a waterfront home in the Hamptons, a Manhattan triplex, and a penthouse on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, California, which he leased out.

He drove a Mercedes 500 in New York and an Aston Martin in California.

He was a member of the Harmonie Club and maintained a high profile at charity events.

He and his wife separated in 2000, around the time that Dreier broke with a partner and started his own firm.

His wife filed for divorce in January 2002.

Dreier has since stated that only he was to blame, saying, "I wasn’t attentive enough to my family."

In 2006, Dreier founded his own firm with offices in five cities, promising lavish compensation.

The headquarters at 499 Park Avenue had $30 million to $40 million worth of art, including works by Picasso and a Warhol depiction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Dreier operated like a corporation and not like a partnership.

Civil charges, filed in December 2008 by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, are pending.

After Dreier was suspended from the New York Bar on December 23, 2008, the New York Supreme Court formally disbarred him on October 8, 2009, effective nunc pro tunc to May 11, 2009.

On May 11, 2009, he pleaded guilty in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to eight charges of fraud, which included one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, one count of money laundering, one count of securities fraud, and five counts of wire fraud in a scheme to sell more than $950 million in fictitious promissory notes.

The 2011 documentary Unraveled states that "Drier stole over $740 million from 4 clients, 4 individuals, and 13 hedge funds".

He is the sole equity partner of the dissolved law firm Dreier, LLP.