US Attorney Damian Williams, who oversees Manhattan, has issued a call for whistleblowers to come forward to reveal non-violent criminal activities in his district.
Mr Williams’ office has previously prosecuted the case against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficking case, and a gynecologist who prosecutors said had sexually abused a “staggering” number of women, according to WRAL.
His new initiative, called the “Southern District of New York Whistleblower Pilot Program” aims to root out non-violent crimes before they can cause extensive harm to victims.
Mr Williams said he hopes the program will help the officer prevent “the next Madoff case” by alerting prosecutors to misconduct and illegal activity before it causes widespread harm.
He said that whistleblowers would be eligible to enter non-prosecution deals even if they had minor involvement in the crimes they were reporting.
Mr Williams hopes the program will “help us bring more misconduct to light and better protect the communities we serve.”
“This program, this new policy, the idea behind it is we’re trying to figure out what we don’t know,” he told reporters.
He said he was sure that plenty of individuals with knowledge of illegal activity were out there, and wanted them to know they had an option to report without making themselves targets of prosecution.
“There are plenty of people, I imagine, out there who have some exposure who are laboring under the anxiety that they’ve done something wrong and they don’t want to live in fear, who, if they hear about it, we hope they end up giving us a call,” he said. “There’s a path for them.”
He advised anyone with knowledge or involvement in such activities to “call us before we call you”.
