Prerak Shah, who has been the acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of Texas since January, announced Wednesday that he is stepping down effective Oct. 1.
Under Shah and his predecessor, former U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox, NDTX prosecutors have significantly increased their focus on white-collar criminal matters, including securities and investor fraud, cryptocurrency fraud and corporate misconduct.
The Biden Administration hasn’t nominated any candidates for the four U.S. Attorney positions in Texas, but the U.S. Justice Department is expected to announce a new acting top prosecutor for North Texas in the next couple weeks.
Sources told The Texas Lawbook that there are multiple leading candidates for the top prosecutor positions in the NDTX and Southern District of Texas but that the White House has forwarded no names to the committee established by Texas Senator John Cornyn and Sen. Ted Cruz to review any potential judicial or top prosecutorial candidates.
Shah, who served as top deputy to Nealy Cox and took over the top spot when she resigned to become a partner at Kirkland & Ellis in Dallas, told The Lawbook Wednesday that he plans to take off a few weeks and then return to private practice.
A former chief counsel and chief of staff to Sen. Cruz, Shah declined to speculate if he wants to join a law firm or go in-house to a corporate legal department. Prior to his government service, he spent five years as an associate in the Dallas officer of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
“I have achieved what I wanted to achieve here,” Shah said. “This office, with the help of our federal and local [law enforcement] partners, did a massive crackdown on violence, especially focused on one neighborhood, Pleasant Grove.”
Shah said the NDTX long had a reputation for allowing the Eastern District of Texas to be the more aggressive jurisdiction in pursuing white-collar and business matters. But he said the new companies moving into the DFW area have made it a “target rich environment” for corporate fraud.
“This office used to be slow on corporate criminal cases, but not anymore,” he said. “There is enough of these matters to keep the Eastern District and Northern District busy. The goal is to hold the corporations and the individuals responsible for their misdeeds.”
Shah cited a handful of cases during his time at the NDTX U.S. Attorney’s Office, including extraditing a Serbian national charged with duping crypto investors out of $70 million, obtaining a five-year prison term for the founder of AriseCoin for securities fraud and obtaining a conviction against the man who went by the moniker “Dr. Bitcoin” for an illegal cash-to-crypto scheme.