Quattrone Asks Court to Seal Letters

Frank Quattrone, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week, asked an appeals court Monday to seal letters from family and friends seeking leniency for the former investment banker, saying they contain undisclosed personal details about the health of his wife and teenage daughter.

Quattrone, who was convicted of obstructing justice, filed an emergency request with the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. He also criticized U.S. District Judge Richard Owen, who presided over the trial, for discussing the illnesses of his wife and daughter in open court.

News accounts previously disclosed the court discussion of the daughter’s eating disorder, but Quattrone said “private information” in some of the letters hasn’t been reported and should remain confidential.

Owen was guilty of a “stunning display of judicial callousness and insensitivity,” lawyers for Quattrone said in court papers filed in New York. The judge publicly released the letters on Thursday, the day after he sentenced the former chief technology banker for Credit Suisse First Boston.

Defense lawyers assailed Owen previously, calling his rulings at Quattrone’s first trial last year, “lopsided.” That ended in a hung jury in October. Quattrone, 48, was convicted in May after a retrial before the same judge. His lawyers say they’ll attack many of Owen’s rulings in an appeal and will ask the 2nd Circuit to allow Quattrone to remain free until the case is resolved.

Owen ordered Quattrone to surrender to prison authorities by late October.

“The need for urgent relief from this court is clear,” Quattrone’s appellate lawyer, Mark Pomerantz, wrote in a brief. “Once this information is copied and removed from the court’s control, as inevitably it will be in this high-profile case, the opportunity to avoid disclosure is forever lost.”

Quattrone was convicted of obstructing probes into how CSFB allocated shares in initial public stock offerings in the late 1990s. His sentence was longer than the 10 to 16 months prescribed by federal guidelines because, Owen said, the banker lied in his testimony at trial.

The letters, made public by Owen over defense objections, show Quattrone’s influence in Silicon Valley during the 1990s technology boom. At Morgan Stanley and later CSFB, he helped take more than 100 companies public, including Cisco Systems Inc., Intuit Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. He earned $165 million from 1998 to 2000.