Securities Judge Sees ‘No Shades of Gray’
People who know U.S. District Judge Milton Pollack say he may owe some of his longevity on the bench to the fact that he is seldom afflicted by doubts.
In dismissing the class-action lawsuits of investors who claimed they were defrauded by Merrill Lynch & Co., the 96-year-old jurist verbally flayed the plaintiffs this week for taking “unjustifiable risks” and then expecting the courts to provide them with “cost-free speculators’ insurance.”
It was a tongue-lashing typical of the blunt-spoken judge, who has presided over several high-profile securities cases in his Manhattan courtroom since President Johnson appointed him in 1967.
“When he believes he’s right, there are no shades of gray,” said Brian O’Neill, a Santa Monica-based securities lawyer who observed Pollack during the massive civil litigation surrounding the 1990 collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert and the felony conviction of Drexel’s former junk-bond king, Michael Milken.
Lawyers for Milken and Drexel once tried to oust Pollack from presiding over a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit against their clients, arguing that Drexel had helped finance a buyout of a company owned by the judge’s wife. Pollack refused to budge and an appeals court upheld him.
He later shepherded a $1.3-billion global settlement of the Drexel-Milken litigation and was widely praised for the efficiency with which he handled it.
A Brooklyn native, Pollack began practicing securities law two weeks before the stock-market crash of 1929. He became one of the city’s most successful securities plaintiffs lawyers, winning a then-enormous $4.5-million verdict against General Motors Corp. in 1942.
Yet as his rulings this week indicate, Pollack as a judge often has been skeptical of plaintiffs’ claims. Last year, he dismissed similar suits against Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and its star analyst, Mary Meeker.
Manhattan trial lawyer Stanley S. Arkin, who has known Pollack for 40 years, said in an interview Wednesday that the judge has “a powerful analytic quality -- he gets right to the pith.”
Pollack rules his courtroom completely and can be hard on unprepared lawyers, those who know him say.
Detractors say he can be a bully and a know-it-all, but they concede that his grasp of securities law is formidable.
Despite his age, the judge “has not lost a lot off the fastball and is perfectly able to throw it at your head,” said a lawyer who asked not to be identified.
New York securities lawyer Marvin Pickholz recalled an incident during the complex litigation involving 1980s arbitrageur Ivan Boesky. An attorney representing another defendant kept insisting that he wanted to proceed quickly with a separate trial for his client.
Finally, Pollack called the lawyer’s bluff.
“Take out your calendar and let’s pick a date in the next 30 days,” Pollack told the lawyer. Pickholz said, “Suddenly the guy didn’t want to go to trial so fast.”
Although he is best-known for securities law, Pollack has been involved in many notable cases over the years that didn’t concern investments. As a private lawyer in 1957, he successfully defended actress Joan Crawford from noise complaints by neighbors in her Manhattan apartment building.
In 1980, he upheld an arbitration award requiring ABC-TV to pay $193,000 in legal costs to Muhammad Ali. Ali had been sued for libel by a referee whom the boxer had disparaged in an interview with ABC announcer Howard Cosell.
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Milton Pollack
Age: 96
Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Education: Bachelor of arts, Columbia University, 1927; doctorate in law, Columbia, 1929
Career highlights
1967-present: Judge for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Became senior judge in 1983.
1945-1967: Head of his own New York law firm
1938-1944: Partner, Unger & Pollack, New York
1929-1938: Associate, Gilman & Unger, New York
Source: Who’s Who in America
Los Angeles Times
