- Ferdinand Pecora
Ferdinand J. Pecora (
January 6 ,1882 –December 7 ,1971 ) was an Americanlawyer andjudge who became famous in the 1930s as Chief Counsel to theUnited States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency during its investigation of Wall Street banking and stock brokerage practices.Ferdinand Pecora was born in Nicosia,
Sicily , the son of Louis Pecora and Rosa Messina who emigrated to the United States andNew York City with his parents. He earned alaw degree from theNew York Law School and eventually worked as an assistantdistrict attorney .Originally a Progressive Republican, Ferdinand Pecora was appointed Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking and Currency by its outgoing Republican chairman, Peter Norbeck, and then continued under Democratic chairman Duncan Fletcher, following the 1932 election that swept
Franklin D. Roosevelt into the U.S. presidency and gave the Democratic Party control of the Senate.Ferdinand Pecora, led Senate hearings, known as the
Pecora Commission into the causes of theWall Street Crash of 1929 that launched a major reform of the American financial system. Pecora personally undertook many of the interrogations during the hearings, including high profileWall Street personalities such asRichard Whitney , president of theNew York Stock Exchange andinvestment bank ersThomas W. Lamont , Otto H. Kahn,Albert H. Wiggin , andCharles E. Mitchell . Pecora's high-profile work led to the hearings being called thePecora Commission and it put him on the June 12, 1933 cover ofTime magazine . Pecora's investigation produced evidence of irregular practices in the financial markets that benefitted the rich at the expense of ordinary investors which led theUnited States Congress to pass theSecurities Act of 1933 and theSecurities Exchange Act of 1934 . With the United States in the grips of theGreat Depression and millions of Americans living in abject poverty, Pecora received massive press coverage when his questioning ofJ.P. Morgan, Jr. , the most prominent banker of them all, revealed that Morgan and many of his multi-millionaire partners hadn't paid any income tax in 1931 and 1932.When the Commission wrapped up its work, on July 2, 1934 President Roosevelt appointed Ferdinand Pecora a Commissioner of the newly formed
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In 1939 he wrote a book published bySimon & Schuster, Inc. about the Senate investigations titled "Wall Street Under Oath: The Story of Our Modern Money Changers". On January 21, 1935, Ferdinand Pecora resigned from the SEC following which he was appointed a judge ofNew York State Supreme Court , a position he held serving until 1950 when he ran unsuccessfully againstVincent R. Impellitteri for Mayor of New York City. Returning to the practice of law, Pecora represented major clients such as Warner Bros. Pictures Distributing Corporation et al. as respondents before theUnited States Supreme Court in the 1954 case, "Theatre Enterprises v. Paramount, 346 U.S. 537.Ferdinand Pecora died in 1971.
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