A “serious crime” conviction drew an interim suspension pending final discipline from the New York Appellate Division f or the First Judicial Department

On February 3, 2021, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, respondent was convicted, upon his plea of guilty, of committing an act of bribery or extortion in connection with the bankruptcy laws in violation of 18 USC § 152(6).

Respondent’s conviction arose from his efforts to pressure a global investment bank (Investment Bank) to refrain from bidding to purchase Series B shares of a company, MyTheresa, from unsecured creditors of Neiman Marcus Group Ltd, LLC (Neiman Marcus) in connection with its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding so that Marble Ridge Capital LP (Marble Ridge), a firm managed by respondent, could obtain the MyTheresa Series B shares at a lower price. As part of his efforts, respondent threatened to use his position on the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors in Neiman Marcus’s bankruptcy proceeding to ensure that the Investment Bank’s bid would be rejected. He also threatened to withhold Marble Ridge’s future business from the Investment Bank.

Institutional Investor reported on the criminal case.

On July 31, Daniel Kamensky composed a six-word Bloomberg chat message that ruined his life. 

What drove him to do so — and then pushed him to make the string of decisions, each more reckless than the last, that exponentially compounded his troubles over the next few hours — remains a mystery. But one thing is now clear: Those decisions, made between 3:20 and 8:08 p.m. on a single late-summer day, amounted to four criminal fraud charges and the apparent end of a brilliant Wall Street career.

This was not how Dan Kamensky’s story was supposed to turn out. The son of a corporate lawyer who had founded his own firm outside Chicago, Kamensky graduated with bachelor’s and law degrees from Georgetown. He started his career as a bankruptcy attorney at a white-shoe law firm before becoming a major player on the distressed-debt team at Lehman Brothers. He then jumped to Paulson & Co., once one of the most prominent hedge funds in the industry. In 2016, Kamensky founded his own distressed-debt hedge fund firm, Marble Ridge Capital, and grew assets from $17 million on day one to $1 billion at the peak. His wedding made The New York Times, and he lived a life of suburban comfort on Long Island with his wife and daughter. In the hard-knuckle world of bankruptcy and restructurings, he minted a reputation as a talented, aggressive negotiator who sometimes rubbed people the wrong way but was ultimately fair. 

That changed at 6:00 a.m. on September 3, when federal agents stormed into his Roslyn home and arrested Kamensky on four counts of criminal fraud: securities fraud, wire fraud, extortion and bribery, and obstruction of justice. The U.S. Department of Justice accused him of abusing his fiduciary duty as a member of the unsecured creditors’ committee serving in the bankruptcy proceedings of upscale department store chain Neiman Marcus.