SEC Head in L.A. to Join Law Firm

Valerie Caproni, director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s regional office in Los Angeles, said Thursday that she is leaving the regulatory agency to join a New York law firm.

Caproni, 45, who came to the SEC in September 1998 to run the L.A. office, will leave at the end of July to join corporate-law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, where she will specialize in securities law and white-collar crime.

No successor has been named.

Caproni said she was eager to return to New York, where she worked for 18 years. Caproni was previously chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is a native of Georgia.

Caproni said the SEC job has been “incredibly challenging,” but “when all is said and done, I really miss New York.”

Among several high-profile cases during her SEC tenure, the Western regional office cracked last year’s Emulex Corp. stock-fraud case, in which a former junior college student admitted issuing a fake news release that sent the stock tumbling.

The El Segundo man said he arranged the fake news release to recoup money that he had lost in a wrong-way bet on Emulex shares.