NYPost

BULLDOG PROSECUTOR TO BARE TEETH IN PARDONS PROBE Sunday,March 25,2001

By BRIAN BLOMQUIST

WASHINGTON - The prosecutor that Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White assigned to the Pardongate investigation is so fearsome in court his foes call him "mad dog."

"He is a very zealous, smart, committed, relatively tough guy," former prosecutor Martin Auerbach said of prober Elliott Jacobson.

"He will not be easily deterred," said Auerbach, who prosecuted Marc Rich in 1983 only to see the billionaire go on the lam for 18 years until he was pardoned by Bill Clinton.

Jacobson, 46, who works out of White Plains, is one of White's most experienced prosecutors. He is known for solving complex paper-trail cases, including:

* The tax-cheat case against Albert Pirro, husband of Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who was seen as a rising Republican star before her husband's conviction.

* The tax-fraud case that sent Manhattan hotel owner Leona Helmsley to jail.

* The obstruction-of-justice case against Texaco executives accused of destroying documents in a racial-discrimination lawsuit. They were ultimately acquitted.

* The Reagan-era Wedtech scandal in which Robert Wallach, pal of former Attorney General Ed Meese, was alleged to have taken kickbacks for steering government money to the Bronx-based defense firm. Wallach's conviction was overturned on appeal.

Lawyer Ed Hayes, who used to work in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office, said Jacobson told him he is the point person in White's Pardongate investigation.

Hayes is representing a Texas family that was allegedly swindled out of $235,000 by Roger Clinton's partners who promised a pardon that wasn't granted

Lawyers who know Jacobson, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, describe him as aggressive, bright and relentless.

Jacobson was so zealous in his prosecution of Michael Zinn, CEO of an upstate renewable-energy company, that Zinn wrote an entire book about his experience titled "Mad Dog Prosecutors and Other Hazards of American Business."

In the book, Zinn describes "the prosecutor, Elliott Jacobson, eyeing me darkly up and down out of the corner of his eye, mindfully avoiding any eye contact."

Zinn claims in his book that he pleaded guilty to an illegal political-contribution charge because Jacobson was bent on destroying him and his business by burying him in charges.

In his book, Zinn described how, on the day he reported to a southern New Jersey prison to serve his six-month sentence, Jacobson ordered U.S. marshals to remove him and take him through five different jails, including a maximum-security facility in Westchester County.

"It was a horror," Zinn told The Post in an interview.

Jacobson refused to comment on any aspect of his career. A spokesman for White also refused to comment

-- Anonymous, March 25, 2001