A PEMGroup employee with some of Pang's Vegas winnings
It’s stories like this that made us start Law Shucks.
Meet Danny Pang.
Mr. Pang’s résumé depicts a glittering success story: a Taiwanese immigrant who earned an M.B.A., worked on Wall Street and now heads a $4 billion investment fund. He also became a partner in another fund firm with business luminaries such as Frank Carlucci, the former defense secretary and ex-Carlyle Group chairman, and former Lockheed Martin Chief Executive Norman Augustine.
Those stories abound, though. What makes Danny WSJ front page material? Why are we so excited? Read on.
Obviously, there must be a seedy side to the story.
Mr. Pang’s past and his business may not be quite as they appear. The university from which he says he has an M.B.A. and another degree says it has no record of either. , where Mr. Pang’s bio says he was a senior vice president and senior high-tech merger adviser, says it can find no record it ever employed him.Morgan Stanley
No, to get us excited, you’ve got to steal big. And being interesting and creative about it helps.
Even Pang’s alleged theft of $3 million in cash from his employer, trips to Vegas where he “made it rain” on the flight back, and getting elected chairman of the student body at a university he wasn’t enrolled in, would be interesting but not quite enough. Not even the domestic violence that led to suspicion that he murdered his wife, a former stripper who may or may not have had connections to Taiwanese organized crime.
Does it get any better than this?
Not without a BigLaw connection.
A lawyer for PEMGroup, Charles Schmerler of Fulbright & Jaworski, proposed on March 17 that PEMGroup would pay Mr. Aboubakare at least $500,000 to settle the dispute. The letter states that the $500,000 payment would be triggered by evidence the Journal had dropped plans for an article. The lawyer drafted a letter for Mr. Aboubakare to send the Journal. In it, he was to say that his statements to the Journal and to Mr. Minkow were false and that he had made them partly because stress “affected my judgment and mental well-being.”
Ding ding ding!
The whole story is a mess, so we’ll just focus on the salacious details. Fulbright’s involvement is complicated and weird – Aboubakare filed a counterclaim that Pang defrauded investors in part due to the firm’s double billing.
Schmerler (Yale BA ’81, BU JD ’84) is a litigator based in Fulbright’s New York office. As The American Lawyer points out, there’s no reason to believe he knew his client was using the firm to perpetrate the fraud.
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