New York
Investigator Anthony Accetta makes a living detecting corporate fraud.
For him, the tough question isn’t whether there’s fraud, or even who is committing fraud. It’s how much about this fraud do you really want to know?
Accetta, 61, was first assistant attorney general in Colorado in the ’70s and now runs a financial investigations and corporate governance consulting firm with offices in New York, London and Denver.
He says investment bankers hire him to find the truth about the companies they finance. But often, when he dutifully roots out the truth, they ask him to temper his reports.
“They say: ‘My God, what are you doing? You’ve got to change this report. You can’t say this. … You’ve to got to put it another way. … You’ve got to soften it because if you say this, it’s going to kill my deal.”‘
Anyone who has hired this tough-talking New Yorker to whitewash a deal has simply hired the wrong guy.
“I had the general counsel of a major investment bank look at me and say, ‘If we want to kill a deal, we know who to call.”‘
I met with Accetta this month at the Intercontinental hotel in mid-town Manhattan, not far from where he lives. He moved to New York in the 1990s to root out fraud on multimillion-dollar building projects.
“I once worked for a guy who was responsible for billions of dollars of construction projects for New York state,” Accetta said. “What he told me was, ‘You gotta go along to get along.’ … I told him I don’t want to get along. Do I still have him as a client? No. And that’s a price I am willing to pay.”
From giant construction projects, Accetta went on to consult in many of the headline-grabbing business stories of our time – from convicted Credit Suisse analyst Frank Quattrone to Merrill Lynch’s involvement in Enron. He says he has never pulled a punch.
Next week, Accetta is moving back to Denver because his business is shifting toward small and mid-sized companies that want common-sense advice on how to do things right.
He says large corporations seem obsessed with the technical requirements of the anti-fraud measure known as the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act. And that effort is largely headed by in-house professionals and giant accounting firms.
“Accounting firms are running the world, charging untold millions to provide a patina of respectability,” Accetta said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the accounting firms that caused 90 percent of the problems anyway.”
Accetta grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an Italian kid on the streets with lucrative opportunities for a life of crime. He was athletic, took up boxing and fought in the ring at the Boys Club of New York. He boasts taking on 18-year-olds when he was only 12.
“I never took a beating in the ring, and I never took a beating in the street,” he said. “I was a tough guy.”
The Boys Club changed his life with a scholarship to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. Ultimately, Accetta earned a law degree from Vanderbilt University School of Law in Tennessee and became a prosecutor.
“I would have been a professional boxer if I hadn’t gotten a scholarship and gone to a prep school. I know people. I was 20 before I was 10. I was very fortunate that I was plucked out of one environment and put into another.”
Accetta has come a long way. Married twice before, he took Nancy Butler of Denver as his bride in 1997. She is the daughter of Owen Bradford Butler, the former chairman of Procter & Gamble who died in 1998, and Erna Butler, a force among Colorado philanthropists.
Having lived through highs and lows, Accetta said he believes that most people in business strive to be honest.
“The average investment banking guy … if he were running a marathon, he wouldn’t dream of cutting a corner. He’d want it to be an honest time. But when he has to get a deal done that he’s been working on for six months, he’ll cut every corner in the world.”
Those responsible for large amounts of money need to be checked, just like teenagers running a cash register.
That’s what keeps Accetta in business.
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-820-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
