Anton Valukas has seen some of the nation’s most powerful institutions at their worst. As U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in the 1980s, he presided over Operation Greylord, an undercover investigation that exposed rampant corruption in the county’s local courts. As a special examiner in the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy after the 2008 financial crisis, he saw how unchecked greed poisoned the financial system.
But it didn’t make him cynical, he says. “It left me wary,” Valukas, now 73, says about the experiences. “What I’m troubled by,” he says, “is pretending that things are other than what they are.”
