Ann Woolner

March 17, 2009 | Daily Report Online

However satisfying the click of handcuffs snapping onto Bernard Madoff's wrists and the knowledge that he'll never again be free, his guilty plea marked only a beginning. The thousands of investors who lost billions of dollars to his Ponzi scheme got only part of what they wanted at Thursday's plea hearing in federal court in Manhattan.

By Ann Woolner

4 minute read

September 25, 2003 | Daily Report Online

By Ann Woolner

6 minute read

January 16, 2007 | Daily Report Online

AH, THE AMERICAN DREAM. Get educated, work hard, succeed at your job and you will be rewarded. Or, be fired, and you could get $210 million. Home Depot Inc. bad boy Robert Nardelli became the latest personification of the irrationality of corporate overcompensation while being pushed out of those big orange doors. It's the sort of story that undermines the American sense of fair play.

By Ann Woolner

4 minute read

March 27, 2007 | Daily Report Online

IN THE ANNALS of executive crime, arrogance makes a frequent appearance. The captains of commerce who end up in the dock usually possess an exaggerated sense of entitlement. Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow had it, and so did Martha Stewart and Dennis Kozlowski. For arrogance, it's hard to match Lord Conrad Black, who built Hollinger International Inc.

By Ann Woolner

5 minute read

September 03, 2010 | Daily Report Online

If someone stole your shiny new car, you wouldn't wait until the 86th time you saw someone driving it around town to call the police. In filing his patent infringement lawsuit against 11 e-commerce companies and Internet giants, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen staked an ownership claim to functions he says his shop developed a decade ago.

By Ann Woolner

4 minute read

July 09, 2010 | Daily Report Online

Once their secrets are revealed, some lawyers leave no doubt that they crossed the line and left it far, far behind. Take Scott Rothstein, who will be spending the next 50 years in a federal prison for running a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme out of his law office in South Florida. An outraged judge pitched the book his way last month, giving Rothstein a decade longer behind bars than the prosecution recommended.

By Ann Woolner

5 minute read

August 17, 2010 | Daily Report Online

When famed Texas trial lawyer John O'Quinn skidded off a Houston parkway in a speeding SUV and slammed into a tree last October, he left behind a mixed legacy. He had won billions of dollars for clients but incurred rebukes from bar groups for ethical misconduct. Ex-clients and employees said he had cheated them, but he also handed over massive contributions to multiple good causes.

By Ann Woolner

5 minute read

May 19, 2008 | Daily Report Online

For Chief Justice John Roberts, it's Hewlett-Packard. Stephen Breyer has Colgate-Palmolive, Bank of America, IBM, Nestle. Samuel Alito: Bristol-Myers Squibb and Exxon Mobil. Those companies are among 33 that went to the U.S. Supreme Court in hopes of killing a lawsuit against them. Victims of South Africa's brutal apartheid era are suing American companies they say aided racist repression there.

By Ann Woolner

5 minute read

December 02, 2004 | Daily Report Online

Ann WoolnerEstelle Griswold's office in New Haven, Conn., had been open a week and a half when police came to arrest her one November day. At 61 this blueblood was a flagrant criminal. Until the cops shut her down, she was unabashedly violating the state's obscenity law. Her crime had nothing to do with peep shows or pornography but with helping people get contraceptives.

By Ann Woolner

6 minute read

June 15, 2005 | Daily Report Online

by Ann WoolnerPity the plight of the juror in Richard M. Scrushy's criminal trial. After enduring four months of testimony, much of it of the mind-numbing sort, the juror plops down in the jury room and comes face to face with a 37-page verdict form more perplexing than any college aptitude test. It's the form the jury will use to declare whether Scrushy broke the law while running HealthSouth Corp.

By Ann Woolner

5 minute read