A former prosecutor in Manhattan who charged John McAfee with cryptocurrency fraud has joined Cahill Gordon & Reindel, where he hopes to build a crypto defense practice.
Sam Enzer joins Cahill after eight years in the Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor at U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, SDNY, where he conducted numerous jury trials in significant criminal cases.
Enzer is one of the leading cryptocurrency enforcement practitioners to come out of government service in recent years, and brings extensive experience in complex white collar matters involving parallel internal investigations, criminal and regulatory investigations and enforcement proceedings, and related civil litigation. He led hundreds of grand jury investigations and prosecutions in a wide range of criminal cases, including several groundbreaking cryptocurrency-related prosecutions.
One most notable case was against John McAfee.
The case prosecutors brought in March alleging McAfee and an associate used Twitter to engage in a cryptocurrency pump-and-dump scheme. However, the case came to an abrupt ending with McAfee’s June 2021 death in Spanish custody while awaiting extradition.
Enzer said it was “cutting edge” and marked the first time that touting an initial coin offering without disclosing compensation was charged as a crime. McAfee’s alleged co-conspirator has pleaded not guilty to the charges and faces parallel civil lawsuits by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Enzer joining of Cahill’s premier Securities Litigation, and White Collar Defense practice group, which is ranked by Chambers USA as an elite top-tier practice in New York, and also by Global Investigations Review as among the world’s leading law firms focusing on corporate and cross-border investigations.
Enzer graduated Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was a senior editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
