News
School of Management to host speakers
on white collar crime, ethics
U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul Jr. and Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins will speak at the School of Management on white collar crime and ethics in accounting, respectively.
Hochul will speak at 9 a.m. and Watkins will speak at 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 11 in the Center for Tomorrow, North Campus.
The visits are being sponsored by the Helen and Oscar Sufrin Lectureship in Accounting, which brings distinguished business professionals to the School of Management to speak about accounting issues.
As the United States Attorney for the Western District of New York, Hochul is responsible for overseeing the prosecution of any federal criminal case brought within the 17 counties of Western New York. He joined the Department of Justice in 1987 as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. While in Washington, he prosecuted an extensive array of criminal cases and later specialized in the prosecution of first-degree and gang-related murder cases.
After joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of New York in 1991, Hochul prosecuted numerous cases involving notorious violent and white collar criminals, racketeering and other complex schemes, and multiple cases targeting violent street gangs and emerging international organized crime groups. He became chief of the Office’s Anti-Terrorism Unit following 9/11 and chief of the National Security Division in 2006. While in these positions, he served as lead prosecutor in several high-profile international terrorism cases, including the successful prosecution of the group known as the Lackawanna Six.
Watkins is the former Enron Corp. vice president and whistleblower who alerted then-CEO Ken Lay in 2001 to accounting irregularities within the company, warning him that Enron “might implode in a wave of accounting scandals.” She testified before committees from the U.S. House and Senate investigating Enron’s demise. TIME magazine named Watkins, along with Coleen Rowley of the FBI and Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, as their 2002 Persons of the Year for being “people who did right just by doing their jobs rightly.” Barbara Walters included her as one of the 10 Most Fascinating People of 2002.
She has received the Court TV Scales of Justice Award, the National Academy of Management’s Distinguished Executive Award and the Rolfe Award for Educating the Public about Business and Finance. She is co-author, with Mimi Swartz, of “Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron.”
Anyone wishing to attend the free lectures should make a reservation by Oct. 4 by contacting Janet Kiefer at kiefer@buffalo.edu or at 645-3290.
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