Diane Brown

Diane Brown went from being a corporate lawyer at Centel and Citibank to being an organized crime prosecutor in the New York District Attorney’s Office, to being a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court. Despite the photo to the left, she has a sense of humor, but won’t let either employees or management evade reality. She hates posturing and nonsequiturs, and has two multi-million dollar discrimination verdicts to her credit. Of them, she notes, "The cases should never have gotten to that point. Dumb – very dumb – on everyone’s part. By the time the cases were resolved in court, everyone said this is no way to live your life."

Diane MacArthur Brown has been in–house counsel for large corporations, assistant district attorney for many years in Manhattan, deputy attorney general in Colorado, and accomplished trial attorney in a nationally known employment law firm – in which she helped win a $10.3 million jury verdict. She graduated from the Detroit College of Law in 1977, ninth in a class of 300, was selected for law journal and won the school’s criminal law award. She went to work as in-house counsel at Centel Corporation and later Citicorp. In March 1981, she joined the staff of New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

During a prosecutorial career in Manhattan, Ms. Brown worked in the Office of Special Narcotics Prosecutor (representing all five boroughs) prosecuting narcotics offenses including multi-national conspiracies. She also was assigned to the Rackets Bureau, which investigated and prosecuted organized crimes. Ms. Brown was a courtroom deputy in Manhattan with special expertise in wiretaps, narcotics offenses, and organized crime. She worked in conjunction with DEA, FBI, and international law enforcement agencies and operated grand juries investigating crimes in Manhattan, including the December 1985 "Sparks Steakhouse" hit murders of Paul "Big Paulie" Castellano and his driver, in which their assassins blocked off a section of East Forty-Sixth Street during the Christmas shopping rush. Casellano was the head of the Gambino Crime Family, and the ensuing grand jury investigation implicated John Gotti.

Ms. Brown was born in Chicago and has been practicing law for 30 years. She graduated from Michigan State University in 1973 with a bachelor of arts degree. She was licensed in Illinois in 1977, in New York in 1981, and in Colorado in 1987. She is licensed to practice law in all three jurisdictions, and is admitted to practice before numerous courts, including the United States Supreme Court. She is also known for her work in charitable organizations, is a clothing designer and has owned her own clothing company. She has attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and the University of Colorado, studying foreign languages, and traveled extensively abroad on legal, personal, and business matters. Ms. Brown is an executive officer of a privately held corporation that operates in London and Rome. She has devoted her life to the cause of justice.

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