Obama picks Mary Jo White, former acting Brooklyn U.S. Attorney, to head SEC
Updated at 4:20 p.m.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Thursday nominated Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney who built a reputation prosecuting white-collar criminals, terrorists and mobsters, to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. The agency has a lead role in implementing changes on Wall Street.
White led the prosecution of mobster John Gotti when she was acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn in 1992. Gotti died in prison in 2002.
She spent nearly a decade as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, handling an array of white-collar crimes and complex securities and financial fraud cases and winning convictions in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.