True Crime: NY Prosecutor Jackie Kasulis Takes on Mafia, Pharma Bro

So, after a full day of deliberations and no questions or requests—not a word—from the jury room, Assistant United States Attorney Jackie Kasulis feared the worst.

Until that moment, it didn’t seem possible for Kasulis’s anxiety to grow. She had just finished six weeks of the highest-pressure trial of her career. The BBC dubbed defendant Martin Shkreli, a brash pharmaceutical company CEO, as “the most hated man in America” after he raised the price of an anti-AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750 a pill. The national media called him “Pharma Bro” for his smirks and confident denunciations of the trial in Brooklyn, New York, including dismissals of Kasulis and her colleagues as “the JV team.” 

Shkreli’s lawyer was Benjamin Brafman, profiled in The New Yorker as “The Last of the Big-Time Defense Attorneys” and whose past clients included Michael Jackson and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund.

Moments after Kasulis made an argument or conducted an examination of a witness, the media would dissect it in tweets. The platoons of reporters covering the trial required an overflow room in the courthouse—complete with giant video screen—and Shkreli fed the circus by once walking into the press crowd and venting about the trial.

The federal case against Shkreli, though, had nothing to do with the drug price hike. He was charged with securities fraud and wire fraud from what amounted to a Ponzi scheme with two hedge funds he founded and the pharmaceutical company he owned—a distinction largely lost on the public.

Now the jury was deciding his guilt or innocence, and after two days of deliberations, the jurors’ only communication was to ask for an explanation of fraudulent intent—a fundamental element of the case. Kasulis’s stomach twisted. Oh, God, she thought, what if the jury members don’t understand the case? 

She and fellow prosecutor Alixandra Smith, both from the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Shkreli’s defense lawyers, had to remain within a few minutes of the courthouse during jury deliberations so that they could return quickly for the verdict. Kasulis and Smith tried to focus on other work and took breaks walking the Brooklyn promenade, a sidewalk trail along the East River that looks across to the Manhattan skyline.

After five days of deliberations, the jury sent word: They had reached a verdict. 

Lawyers, court staff, reporters and gawkers all raced back to the courthouse. A journalist, told there was a verdict, blurted an expletive and darted out to call an editor. The judge raised her voice and called for calm in the courtroom, trying to control the pandemonium.  

The jury soon returned, and Kasulis sat at the government’s table in the courtroom with her colleagues. She once gave the final arguments in a triple murder case against a dangerous Gambino crime family associate while five months pregnant with twins and a day before a doctor ordered her on bedrest. Shkreli’s case, however, was the most intense, highest-profile moment in her life. It was the culmination of months of preparation and weeks of courtroom strategy and agility.

And, now, she was trying to contain her fear that, on her watch, the most hated man in America was about to walk.

The judge silently read the slip of paper with the verdict and handed it back to her deputy, who returned it to the jury foreperson. 

“How do you find the defendant on the first count?” the judge asked.

Kasulis began a mantra in her head, an incantation of reassurance that she could find another job, that life would remain good despite this calamity: “I have two beautiful children and a husband who loves me. I have two beautiful children and a husband who loves me…”

Into the Tech Bubble

A month after Davidson College’s commencement in 1998, newly minted graduate Jackie Kasulis (Jackie Rasulo, then) loaded up her red Jeep with duffle bags and a few comforts of home. Her mom, Maria Rasulo, climbed into the passenger seat for a cross-country drive from her hometown of Bradenton, Florida, to Los Angeles. Kasulis’s career was starting on the same sort of curious, exploratory path as her academics.

The daughter of an endocrinologist, Kasulis enrolled at Davidson with an eye toward medical school. Though born on Long Island, she was a Floridian from age 5 and learned of Davidson from a family friend. She attended Manatee High School, in Bradenton, Florida, a football powerhouse that produced star University of Nebraska quarterback Tommie Frazier. Leo Spooner, one of Kasulis’s classmates and now in-house counsel at Dolby Laboratories, in San Francisco, rarely saw her at social events but did “if I managed to get myself into one of the advanced or AP classes.” She graduated at the top of her class, a likely ticket to the Ivy League, but with a painful shyness—a sense of reserve, a “hyperfocus” on academics, Spooner says, and “great glasses.”

To Kasulis’s parents, Davidson’s palpable sense of community seemed a better fit. And they were right.

She started stepping forward at Davidson. She developed an array of friendships, served as social chair of her eating house and landed roles in college stage productions. She found mentors among the professors who also pushed her to challenge herself. By her junior year, she had built up the gumption to try a semester in India, the first real overseas trip of her life.

Her first days in the country were jarring. Poverty and overcrowding on a scale she had never seen firsthand pounded her senses. The dramatic shift in culture had her contemplating going home. Instead, she hung in and immersed herself in the community and what she describes as “the mashup of thousands of years of history.”

The semester abroad proved a life-altering confidence boost. She had ventured well beyond her comforts and usual interests. The combination of her campus experience and immersion in India helped her navigate new cultures, languages and beliefs.

“It set me on a trajectory in life that wasn’t about being afraid,” she says. “It was about being up for the challenge.” 

Med school had slipped from view, replaced by the humanities. Once back on campus, she switched to a history major and scrambled to get in the required courses before graduation. She contemplated graduate school but was in no rush, so she checked out some of the campus interviews through the career center.

Leigh Rawdon, a 1995 alumna, was director of operations for Infonxx, a startup lifted by the tech bubble that aimed to replace cell phone companies’ 411 service and make money doing it. The company needed to hire, so Rawdon suggested replication—try recruiting at Davidson. She had success there. Graduates usually came with a strong work ethic, lack of pretentiousness and a full tank of integrity.

Rawdon checked in with the Center for Career Development, lined up interview space and booked a room at the Carnegie Guest House. Kasulis stopped in for one of the interviews, and Rawdon saw presence and determination—the essential ingredients for a high-pressure environment. Kasulis was hired. 

The transcontinental Jeep ride followed several weeks later. She arrived in Los Angeles on Saturday, moved into an apartment on Sunday and started the job on Monday.

“I thought, ‘I lived in India for four months,’” Kasulis says. “‘I can handle Los Angeles.’”

She was running a 300-person call center, which soon involved crawling around underneath banks of computer servers and diagnosing and fixing wiring with zero training.

Rawdon, now co-founder and CEO of the Tea Collection children’s clothing line, confessed that the Infonxx enterprise sounds preposterous today.

“It was such an incredible, exhausting, terrifying career experience,” Rawdon says. “They threw me in the pool, and we figured stuff out. We threw [Kasulis] in the pool, and she figured things out.”

The two years of swimming included navigating occasional legal issues in the telecom world. When Kasulis’s then-boyfriend was applying to business schools, he raised the idea of law school for her, based on both her demonstrated aptitude and their occasional debates. She applied, got into NYU and Columbia and enrolled at the latter, paying her own way with loans.

Transactional law looked like the path but, once again, it was time to explore. She enjoyed criminal law class and indulged in procedural shows like “Law and Order”—caricatures, but prosecution looked intriguing nonetheless.

After a summer at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa, she was hooked.

“Every day is different,” Kasulis said, “and you feel like you are doing something important for your community, something that matters and affects people’s lives.”

Her time on the stage at Davidson came into play, as she quickly felt comfortable presenting arguments in a courtroom.