Published: Monday, 20 Jul 2009 | 11:38 AM ET

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A call had come in: an anonymous voice, a foreign accent, a secret to be revealed. The caller said he knew how to find certain valuable assets belonging to Marc S. Dreier, a New York lawyer who had been arrested for defrauding investors of $700 million. Much of the money was still missing.

AP Marc S. Dreier

The lawyer taking the call, Mark F. Pomerantz, listened with interest. He had been appointed by a federal judge in Manhattan to try to locate and recover Mr. Dreier’s assets — homes, artwork, cars and whatever else could be tracked down — so they could be liquidated to repay the victims of his crimes.

Some of it was old-fashioned detective work: reviewing hundreds of bank statements to see if Mr. Dreier had secreted money overseas or made large purchases that could be identified. But it also involved reconstructing the pieces of Mr. Dreier’s disjointed life, from homes in the Hamptons to luxury cars in New York City and Santa Monica, Calif.

This particular caller was being purposefully vague about what he knew. He would not even reveal what assets he was aware of, unless arrangements could be made for a “modest finder’s fee,” as Mr. Pomerantz recalled the conversation.

“I said, ‘Well, where are you calling from?’ He can’t tell me,” Mr. Pomerantz said. “I said, ‘Well, what is the nature of the assets you’re calling about?’ He said he can’t tell me. I said, ‘Well, how are we going to make progress here?’ ”

The man finally suggested that he knew about “a singular asset” of enormous value, and Mr. Pomerantz said he began to understand.

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“I asked him whether this asset was floating,” Mr. Pomerantz said, and when the man replied affirmatively, Mr. Pomerantz said, “Oh, well, you’re calling about the yacht.”

He did not need the caller’s help — the yacht had already been found. The call was just one of many that Mr. Pomerantz fielded during the few months he served as the court-appointed receiver in the case of Mr. Dreier, a Harvard Law graduate who built a large Park Avenue firm, expanding his office and reputation into California and elsewhere.

It turned out that Mr. Dreier’s wealth was based on the sale of phony promissory notes and stealing from clients. His investors lost millions, his firms collapsed, and criminal, civil and bankruptcy proceedings ensued.

Last week, Mr. Dreier, 59, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to forfeit $746 million and pay $388 million in restitution to victims. But for any of that money to be paid back, it first had to be found. That job fell to Mr. Pomerantz.

Mr. Pomerantz, 58, who once ran the criminal division of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and is now a partner at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, pulled together a small team of lawyers after his appointment on Dec. 10.

But as they began their task, they confronted an unexpected challenge: Mr. Dreier had been the firm’s sole owner — its “emperor,” as Mr. Pomerantz put it — and the only one who knew the operation was a sham.

So in addition to tracking down hard-to-find assets, Mr. Pomerantz and his team found themselves running Mr. Dreier’s collapsing law firm, even acting as a kind of human resources department: determining how to get health insurance to an employee whose wife was about to give birth, and what to tell another employee who lived paycheck to paycheck.

As Mr. Pomerantz’s team moved in, it discovered that there was not enough money to make the next payroll, and hundreds of Mr. Dreier’s lawyers and other employees would be losing their jobs, all as the holiday season arrived. “They thought they were working for a real law firm and an honest guy,” Mr. Pomerantz said, “and it turns out it’s a house of cards and they’re working for a thief.”

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By coincidence, Mr. Pomerantz had a personal perspective of the devastation Mr. Dreier had caused: One of the firm’s young lawyers was his own niece. “I saw her in tears,” Mr. Pomerantz said. “It gave me a very vivid understanding of the level of human misery.”

And in Mr. Dreier’s office in Manhattan, Sandra Sheldon, a lawyer with Paul, Weiss, found unopened mail from law students applying for jobs — clearly sent before Mr. Dreier’s arrest became public.

“It was kind of like, ‘Whoa, you dodged a bullet,’ ” she remembers thinking.

Some assets were easy to locate: Mr. Dreier had a $39 million art collection, with works by artists like Warhol and Rothko. Paintings hung in his Park Avenue office and his Upper East Side apartment. Fearing that a disaffected employee or angry creditor might walk in and remove a painting, Mr. Pomerantz and his team had the art stored safely.

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