P.G.L.

PGL is my first cousin.

He is my mother’s brother’s third child and only son.

PGL may have wished he was I in some ways when we were very young but I assure you, I have been in awe of P and all of what makes him P for as long as I can remember.

You see P, as were his more distant forbears and parents and as his siblings are, is just about as smart as a human being could possibly be.

Even smarter than that perhaps.

With a quick and sharp wit and an excellent sense of humor.

Self-effacing to beat the band. So much so that you might think he was kidding.

P’s not kidding. He’s a killer. A hired gun. For the government. All legal.

Cousin P is the director of the Regional Office of the Securities and Exchange Commission in a major city where he oversees operations — enforcement and examinations — and a staff of 150 in the area and in the surrounding states.

No better man for the job.

Bringing his criminal-law experience and vast understanding of that in particular — and everything in general — to the SEC’s civil oversight of more than $8 trillion combined of hedge funds, mutual funds and brokerages throughout the region fits like a hand in a glove — and not O.J.’s.

Precisely what SEC head honcho MJW was thinking when she selected P, an assistant U.S. attorney with nearly a quarter-century worth of notches in his belt, most recently pursuing white-collar crime.

The appointment was heartily endorsed by the city’s presiding U.S. attorney C.O. with whom P worked for sixteen years.

Says she, “he’s a great trial attorney,” adding that bringing him into the SEC fold indicates that the agency will be “more aggressive and inquisitive about matters that come before them. I think P will direct his staff that way.”

If bringing more cases to trial as opposed to seeking settlements with Wall Street firms and small-town brokers — in which those accused oftentimes are not required to admit guilt — represents a new SEC directive, then cousin P should be champing at the bit.

In the U.S. attorney’s office he prosecuted cases such as Centennial Technologies Inc., one of the hottest stocks in 1996, after evidence was uncovered that founder and CEO Emanuel Pinez inflated sales and earnings to pump in a few more slices/dollars (credit to the Three Stooges, circa 1949) to the share price.

Pinez was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $150 million in restitution for stock fraud on May 18, 2000.

(An estimated 20,000 investors lost between $150 million to $376 million).

Though this was the highest of high-profile cases, there were several others in which P won or helped to win convictions.

(See Amogear Inc.; and CitySide Tickets Inc.).

As he keenly noted, to prove financial fraud typically involved is “a complicated, nuanced story. And yet at the heart of it, there are real questions of right and wrong, good and evil. Bringing that to bear in a way that 12 ordinary people can understand it clearly is both important and challenging.”

Cousin P is all about the white hat and the black hat in addition to being a sage interpreter of the law.

Pursuing every lead because “you always take the call,” is his mantra but his ability to separate the strong cases from the weak is unparallelled and critical in a world ruled by optimum time management.

John Falvey Jr., a partner at GP in P’s hub and a former assistant U.S. attorney who led the Centennial prosecution concedes that P “[will] be willing to push a case to trial if he needs to,” adding that “…he’s a very cool customer. But he can be a ferociously hard worker. And he can be tough.”

Words well-spoken.

At 62 years of age — cousin P is not yet 60 — I can safely say that I have crossed paths with three geniuses in my time.

One is a composer and lyricist of musicals.

Another is a writer.

And the third is P.

Somehow throwing and hitting a baseball or shooting a basketball never seemed more meaningless to me.

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in March 2017.]