Brooklyn native John Balestriere tries cases and argues appeals. He has handled street crime, white collar crime, organized crime, fraud, business tort, class action, civil rights, qui tam, defamation, and a variety of other matters across the country.  Mr. Balestriere is a graduate of Monsignor Farrell High School, Columbia College, and the Yale Law School.

Mr. Balestriere represents individual and company clients in criminal and regulatory matters and all stages of complex civil litigation, including depositions, trials, and appeals in federal and state courts. He also represents clients in intense negotiations and arbitrations, and directs internal investigations into alleged misconduct at companies, institutions, and government entities.

Mr. Balestriere has seven years of law enforcement experience in both Eliot Spitzer's State Attorney General's Office and Robert Morgenthau's Manhattan District Attorney's Office. He first worked for Mr. Morgenthau after college as an analyst in the Rackets Bureau, assisting attorneys in investigations into judicial and political corruption, Cosa Nostra organized crime groups, major narcotics distribution gangs, and identity theft. After law school, Mr. Balestriere served in that same office as an Assistant District Attorney in the Trial Division, trying a significant number of cases to juries, and handling cases from the lowest level misdemeanors to the highest level felonies. While there he also specialized in Domestic Violence and Sex Crimes prosecution, and conducted investigations into bribery of government officials, organized employee theft schemes, and credit card fraud.

Mr. Balestriere was recruited from the District Attorney's Office to work in a newly created investigative unit in the New York State Attorney General's Office. There, he directed teams of former police detective investigators, financial auditors, and investigative analysts into long term investigations of organized crime, insurance fraud, human trafficking, and large identity theft rings. Such investigations led to the arrest and indictment of dozens of individuals, including entire gangs who, working with doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, perpetrated large auto insurance fraud schemes throughout the New York City area. Mr. Balestriere also devised a unit-wide intelligence system that allowed varied investigators and attorneys to pool their resources and more intelligently conduct investigations into a variety of frauds.

After work as a criminal prosecutor and investigator, Mr. Balestriere joined a small class action firm where he prosecuted securities, antitrust, and consumer fraud cases against the largest banks and public companies in the world.

Mr. Balestriere has been quoted in media in the United States and abroad, from The New York Times, to CBS Morning News, to the Birmingham Post-Herald, to ABC News, to RAI television, the official broadcasting channel of the Italian government. He has commented on a range of topics including ongoing criminal trials, pending civil actions, recently passed legislation, major fraud investigations, and the emerging use of the class action device in foreign countries.

Mr. Balestriere is admitted to practice law in New York State, as well as to the bars of the United States Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the United States Court of International Trade, and the Southern and Eastern District Courts of New York.