That old bromide about the devil you know doesn’t necessarily apply to prosecutorial hound dogs yapping at your heels: Sometimes the hunted would just as soon see a different hunter.
Such may be the case today with executives from Brocade – as well as Apple’s Steve Jobs – who have been caught up in the stock options backdating scandal.
Federal prosecutor Christopher Steskal, the man who set in motion all of this legal wrangling, has announced that he is leaving the San Francisco U.S. Attorney’s Office next month to join a (presumably lucrative) private practice.
Steskal has been busy with options prosecutions in recent weeks — Apple CEO Steve Jobs was interviewed by prosecutors and SEC lawyers earlier this week, according to people familiar with the case. But the offer from Fenwick was too enticing, Steskal said.
“I didn’t spread my resume around the Valley,” he said Friday, referring to Silicon Valley, saying that leaving a prosecutor’s post is never easy.
“You’re always going to be leaving cases on the table,” he said.
Whether the Brocade officials and/or Jobs find any relief in Steskal’s departure remains to be seen, but one expert told the New York Times that they should not expect the next set of hounds to be any less persistent:
William J. Portanova, a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor, said that he believed that the Brocade case would not suffer, no matter who is picked to succeed Mr. Steskal.
“The government has people stacked up ready to pick up the case and run with it,” he said.
Dogged people, no less.
