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Sharon Levin to Leave U.S. Attorney’s Office for WilmerHale, Joining Other Ex-Prosecutors

Sharon Cohen Levin is joining WilmerHale as a partner after serving 29 years as a prosecutor, mainly in the forfeiture unit of the United States attorney's office in Manhattan.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

Over the last 24 years, Sharon Cohen Levin built a multibillion-dollar operation — not as a trader or banker, but as a prosecutor.

As head of the asset forfeiture unit at the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, Ms. Levin helped induce corporate giants like JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas and others to pay some $15 billion in penalties. With the unit returning cash to crime victims — and recovering such stolen artifacts as a Mongolian Tyrannosaurus skeleton — Richard B. Zabel, the deputy United States attorney in Manhattan, nicknamed her the “Babe Ruth of forfeiture.”

But now, as the Babe did nearly a century ago, Ms. Levin is switching teams.

On Monday, the law firm WilmerHale is expected to announce that it has hired Ms. Levin as a partner in New York, ending a 29-year prosecutorial tenure, 24 of which she spent in the forfeiture unit.

Ms. Levin had become such a fixture in the Manhattan office — and until now had resisted the allure of the revolving door — that some colleagues just assumed she would never leave.

“It’s been an incredible 24 years, but there comes a time to move on and give others a chance,” Ms. Levin, 54, said in an interview. Noting that “I’ve actually never worked at a firm,” she added: “For other people, that time probably comes a lot earlier.”

For the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, which under Preet Bharara has become synonymous with headline-grabbing Wall Street prosecutions, Ms. Levin is leaving at a moment of transition. As the economy gathers steam and the demand for white-collar lawyers grows, the office has lost a number of prosecutors to private firms, a cycle playing out across the Justice Department.

The revolving door often opens onto WilmerHale, so much so that Rolling Stone once mocked it as “S.E.C. West” (a reference to the location of its Washington office in relation to the agency’s headquarters there).

Ms. Levin will join WilmerHale soon after Anjan Sahni, who had led Mr. Bharara’s Wall Street task force, became a partner at the white-shoe firm. She will also reunite with Boyd M. Johnson III, Mr. Bharara’s former deputy, who is a co-chairman of WilmerHale’s investigations and criminal group.

Ms. Levin said she was drawn to WilmerHale partly because of its emphasis on government service. Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director, is a partner. So is William R. McLucas, the onetime S.E.C. enforcement chief.

Ms. Levin, who will join next month as a member of Mr. Johnson’s group and the financial institutions practice, is expected to advise banks on money laundering and other issues that have drawn regulatory scrutiny.

“Financial crime risk is the buzzword at banks today, and she’s been thinking about that long before these issues were in the headlines,” Mr. Johnson said.

Ms. Levin, who began at the Justice Department’s civil division in Washington, joined the forfeiture unit in Manhattan in 1991. She has led the unit since 1996, serving under six United States attorneys during that period.

“It’s hard to think of another person who has had such an important impact over so many years in so many S.D.N.Y. cases,” said Lorin L. Reisner, a Paul, Weiss partner who previously supervised Ms. Levin in the United States attorney’s Manhattan office.

With about 25 employees, Ms. Levin’s asset forfeiture operation at the United States attorney’s office is the largest of its kind. It’s also the most lucrative. In 2014 alone, the unit recovered about $7 billion in illegal proceeds — the most ever recovered by a single office.

Mr. Bharara is fond of remarking that “taxpayers have gotten a great return on their investment” in his office.

Much of that $7 billion stemmed from BNP, the French bank that prosecutors accused of doing business with Iran. JPMorgan handed over $1.7 billion for failing to thwart the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme.

Still, such efforts have drawn critics, including judges and defense lawyers, who complain that prosecutors seize property without proof of criminal wrongdoing.

The Justice Department counters that it has reined in the most aggressive efforts, and prosecutors typically earmark the money for crime victims. When victims are not identifiable, proceeds often pay for law enforcement initiatives like undercover operations.

For stolen property — such as the Mongolian dinosaur bones or the “Portrait of Wally,” an oil painting that Nazis stole from a Jewish woman in 1939 — the office either returns the items or arranges for victim compensation.

Ms. Levin, who was raised outside Chicago with two brothers — Steven M. Cohen, who became a prominent lawyer in his own right, and Rich Cohen, a best-selling author — said the art case was her favorite.

“I had bigger cases that involved more complex issues, but ‘Portrait of Wally’ was special,” Ms. Levin recalled. It “enabled me to use today’s forfeiture laws to correct a historical injustice.”

Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Prosecutor Who Brought in Huge Fines Under U.S. Attorney Joins a Big Law Firm. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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