Southern District of New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street

In the firm's first partner hire in three years, prominent white-collar defense boutique Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello is adding an attorney who spent the last 11 years in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.

Telemachus “Tim” Kasulis, 42, who was most recently co-chief of the office's Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force, will join Morvillo Abramowitz as a partner, effective January 2019.

As a supervisor of the task force, Kasulis oversaw a team of about 20 senior prosecutors. He previously served as co-chief of the Southern District's General Crimes Unit, where he trained and supervised dozens of new prosecutors.

In the last few years, Kasulis supervised the insider trading trial of professional gambler William “Billy” Walters, charged in a $40 million insider trading scheme; the trial of two pharmaceutical company executives, Gary Tanner and Andrew Davenport, for honest services fraud; the insider trading charges against Rep. Chris Collins; and the trial of two hedge fund portfolio managers, Theodore Huber and Robert Olan, and a political intelligence analyst, David Blaszczak, in an insider trading scheme involving nonpublic Medicare information.

Kasulis also supervised the 2016 charges against three men for hacking major New York law firms. (All three defendants, including one whose extradition request was denied by foreign officials, remain at large.)

Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney's Office in 2007, Kasulis was a law clerk to Judge Joseph McLaughlin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and previously practiced at Davis Polk & Wardwell.

In an interview, Kasulis said while he “loved working for the government,” he wanted to go back to the private sector and have clients. He said he is leaving the office now because “I feel that I've sort of run my course.”

“I've been there a long time, I've been lucky enough to do everything I wanted to do” at the office, including lead sections and train new prosecutors, he said.

Kasulis said he spoke with other boutiques and larger firms in his law firm search. “I felt, in the end, a boutique gave me the greater opportunity to help individuals who are in trouble as well as corporate entities, which the larger firms tend to do,” he said.

He was attracted to the Morvillo firm, in particular, he said, because of its other former prosecutors and because it has a “real white-collar criminal defense practice, they're unafraid to try difficult cases for clients.” He added, “Morvillo is one of the firms that we always see in our investigations.”

While he was co-chief of a unit that is often adversarial to the boutique on investigations and litigation, Kasulis said he doesn't envision a great number of cases that he would be precluded from taking on at Morvillo, and any potential conflicts will “rapidly diminish the longer I am away from the government.” At the time he left, Kasulis oversaw about 20 pending post-arrest cases in court, not including investigations and grand jury matters, he said.

Damian Williams replaced Kasulis, who left the office Oct. 19, as co-chief of the Southern District securities task force, alongside co-chief Jason Cowley.

Kasulis is Morvillo Abramowitz's first partner hire since Brian Jacobs joined from the Southern District U.S. Attorney's Office in 2015, said Elkan Abramowitz, firm co-founder. Abramowitz said the 40-attorney firm plans to announce another former prosecutor hire by the end of this year, declining to give more details.

Abramowitz said the boutique knew of Kasulis from his casework, praising him for his unique trial experience and his executive positions managing others and in policy roles. “Tim puts it all together,” he said.

“We're always on the hunt for talented young people. The idea is to keep the firm going with younger people,” he said. “Many of the boutiques that fall off by the wayside are those that don't do this.”

Meanwhile, Abramowitz said he and other founding partners have no plans for retirement, nor are they considering any mergers. “Periodically we get asked, for sure,” he said about mergers, but adding, “The people who come here are not interested in that or they would go somewhere else. We think our structure has an appeal to a certain kind of person and we're not going to give that up.”