Mr. Puvalowski has been leading important legal matters — both in government and in private practice — for more than two decades. He joined Petrillo Klein & Boxer after serving at senior levels of three government agencies and a successful tenure as a partner at an international law firm.
Mr. Puvalowski led the enforcement function at the New York State Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”), New York’s banking and insurance regulator. He led NYDFS’s Consumer Protection and Financial Enforcement Division, overseeing more than 200 employees consisting of enforcement attorneys, consumer examiners, criminal investigators, and consumer advocacy personnel. Over his tenure, he supervised — and in many cases personally negotiated the resolution of — dozens of enforcement actions resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties. Those actions implicated a broad range of regulatory violations (including BSA/AML compliance, OFAC sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting, cybersecurity, insurance fraud, and fair lending, among many others) and involved entities across the entire spectrum of financial services companies (including large foreign banks, state-chartered banks, cryptocurrency and fintech firms, money services businesses, and insurance companies).
During the financial crisis, Mr. Puvalowski served as the Deputy Special Inspector General at the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“SIGTARP”), the oversight body created within the United States Department of the Treasury to oversee the $700 billion bailout program. Joining SIGTARP at its inception, Mr. Puvalowski helped build it into a sophisticated law enforcement and audit agency with more than 100 employees and a $50 million budget. As the Special Inspector General’s principal deputy and primary advisor, he represented SIGTARP with other federal agencies, Congress, and the financial industry and helped lead SIGTARP’s most important oversight inquiries and critical reporting functions.
Prior to SIGTARP, Mr. Puvalowski was a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (“SDNY”) where he prosecuted a broad range of criminal matters, with a particular emphasis in complex money laundering and asset forfeiture cases. He tried ten cases to verdict, argued numerous cases in the Court of Appeals, and twice won the Attorney General’s John Marshall Award, one of the Department of Justice’s highest honors. Mr. Puvalowski served in several leadership roles at the SDNY, including Co-Chief of the International Narcotics Trafficking Unit, regional coordinator of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, and Deputy Chief of the Appeals Unit.
In his previous tenure in private practice, as a partner at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP, Mr. Puvalowski had a successful white-collar defense and complex civil litigation practice and served as the co-team leader of that firm’s Global White-Collar Defense and Corporate Investigations Team. He led substantial criminal and regulatory engagements involving allegations of OFAC sanctions violations, securities fraud, wire fraud, and mortgage fraud, among other areas. He also had a successful trial practice, leading the trial team that secured an acquittal of Abacus Federal Savings Bank after a four-month jury trial in a mortgage fraud case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney; the trial team that secured an acquittal pursuant to Rule 29 of DCM Erectors, Inc., the steel construction company that built the new World Trade Center, in a wire fraud case brought by the SDNY: and the trial team that won a $1.7 million jury verdict on behalf of the iconic hip-hop band Beastie Boys after a two-week trial in Manhattan federal court in connection with a copyright and unfair competition suit.
Mr. Puvalowski served as a law clerk to Hon. Loretta A. Preska of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1994-1995.
Education:
Fordham University School of Law, J.D. 1994, cum laude, Order of the Coif
University of Michigan, 1990, A.B. 1990, Political Science Concentration
Admissions:
New York
New Jersey
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York
U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
