Stock scammers. Ponzi schemers. He spent years busting Miami’s fraudsters (2025)

Eric Bustillo has arguably seen more fraud committed by more people than anyone else in South Florida.

He has investigated and prosecuted hundreds of scoundrels, including a University of Miami booster and Ponzi schemer who hawked bogus investments in a grocery business as well as a Fort Lauderdale company that sold billions of dollars in dubious life insurance policies belonging to people with AIDS.

But after a combined 35 years as the director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Miami office and as a senior federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Bustillo has decided to step down and slow down. What made his rise to the top of Miami’s legal field so striking is that he overcame a personal tragedy as a young college student to reach that height.

When he enrolled at Tulane University, Bustillo’s future seemed boundless — until, suddenly, it wasn’t. During the spring semester in 1982, he and his friends were returning to the New Orleans campus one night when their car swerved to avoid another and slammed into a tree. Bustillo’s spinal cord was severed, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

The accident, however, didn’t stop him. Drawing inspiration from his family, Bustillo underwent extensive physical therapy and proceeded to earn bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Miami — before embarking on a notable career as a lawyer for the federal government. After 15 years at the helm of the SEC office in Miami, he officially retired at the end of March as the Trump administration began a reshuffling of the agency.

“I got incredible support from my parents and my sister,” Bustillo, 60, said during an interview at the Casa Cuba restaurant in South Miami. “My dad always taught us that no matter what stage you were at and how well off you were, there was always somebody else who wasn’t as well off as you. That outlook rubbed off on me.”

Born in New Jersey to Cuban exile parents, Bustillo grew up in Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Panama as his father, a former diplomat, worked as an executive for International Telephone & Telegraph. He returned to the United States in the late 1970s, going to boarding school at Georgetown Preparatory at the same period future Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch attended the Jesuit school outside of Washington, D.C.

For Bustillo, whose family eventually settled in the Miami area, his education at UM pointed a way forward. As an undergraduate, a professor also gave him a piece of advice that would launch him on a career path.

“A professor suggested that a law degree was a better investment than an MBA,” Bustillo recalled.

First SEC job

While he was attending UM law school, he did an internship with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1990, the agency’s regional office in Miami hired him as an attorney, and he started investigating securities fraud at a time when boiler rooms and penny stock schemes were commonplace in South Florida.

By 1995, he began to realize he needed trial experience if he was ever going to become a solid litigator. And the place to develop courtroom skills was the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which was looking to expand its white-collar fraud division. Bustillo fit the bill and got a job offer.

“It’s the kind of offer you only get once in a lifetime,” he said.

Like many newcomers, Bustillo went through a rotation at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, starting with the appellate division and then moving into narcotics. “I got to learn how to use a whole bunch of investigative tools,” he said, including using wiretaps and informants for a slew of maritime and airport drug-smuggling cases.

“It was like the wild west back in the 1990s,” he said.

Tackling white-collar fraud

With that initial trial experience, Bustillo moved over to the economic crimes section and prosecuted securities, bank, healthcare and tax fraud cases over the next decade — sometimes as parallel investigations with SEC lawyers on the regulatory side. One of his first big cases — dubbed “Operation Bermuda Shorts” — was built on an FBI sting investigation of about 60 suspects charged with securities violations extending from South Florida to California to Canada.

As both a prosecutor and eventual chief of the section, Bustillo played roles in major cases against scofflaw executives at Espirito Santo Bank, Hamilton Bank and Mutual Benefits Corp., the Fort Lauderdale company that sold AIDS life insurance policies. He started recruiting SEC lawyers to work on white-collar fraud cases at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

One of his SEC recruits, Miami lawyer Ryan O’Quinn, said that when he and fellow prosecutor Andrew Levi were handling the Mutual Benefits prosecution in 2007, they struck a deal with one defendant who pleaded guilty to securities fraud and perjury. It was supposed to come with a maximum five-year sentence.

But when they presented the deal to U.S. District Judge Paul Huck, he said the prosecutors might have made a mistake and that he would have to stack the two charges and sentence the defendant to 10 years. O’Quinn said that he and Levi took a short break during the sentencing and presented their problem to Bustillo.

Bustillo cut to the chase: “What’s the right thing to do?”

“We need to dismiss a count,” the prosecutors told him, so the defendant would get five years in prison, a sentence that the judge approved.

O’Quinn, in an interview with the Herald, said that decision spoke to his character: “That was him, that was his true nature as a prosecutor trying to achieve a just result.”

SEC beckons again

After 15 years at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Bustillo learned that the SEC’s regional director in Miami was retiring in 2009. He considered it an opportunity to return to where his career had started as a lawyer.

“It was like coming home,” said Bustillo, who took over an office with more than 100 staffers that covered Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

He arrived as the SEC was struggling to recover from the black eye of two massive securities fraud cases with links to investors in South Florida: the multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemes of Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford. Those scandals forced the agency to change its culture and structure.

During his 15-year tenure as SEC director in Miami, Bustillo’s office collaborated on dozens of civil securities fraud actions with federal prosecutors while they handled the criminal cases. The fraud schemes ranged from tens of millions to more than one billion dollars, leading to settlements and convictions involving real estate and finance companies such as the Woodbridge Group and 1 Global Capital, as well as UM booster and Ponzi schemer Nevin Shapiro. His office also went after insider traders, including the recent prosecution of a couple of Gulliver Preparatory School graduates enmeshed in a MasTec acquisition deal.

Bustillo’s enforcement team also focused on rampant “affinity fraud” in South Florida, where Ponzi schemers ripped off friends and family members in the Cuban, Haitian and Venezuelan communities, among others.

“The internet became a huge facilitator for fraudsters to commit a whole host of new crimes,” he said, reflecting on the biggest change in crime during his career. “It made it easier to steal vast amounts of personal data for fraudulent purposes.”

Thinking about retirement

Bustillo said that even before President Donald Trump took office for his second term in January, he was already contemplating doing something different with his life. When Trump appointed billionaire Elon Musk to a head a new government division called DOGE to make sweeping cuts across the federal government, the SEC was among various agencies being offered retirement buyouts.

According to published reports, hundreds of longtime SEC staffers including senior enforcement lawyers chose to retire or resign by the end of March.

But for Bustillo, that was one factor of many in his decision to step down as the SEC’s regional director.

“I loved the work that I did and loved the people I worked with — I’ve been at the front row of securities fraud for the past three decades,” he said. He now plans to continue teaching a litigation skills class at UM law school and to work as an attorney advising companies and others in financial, securities and compliance issues.

“The opportunities are out there, especially now that South Florida has become a more significant financial center,” he said. “Some say it will one day rival the financial center of New York.”

This story was originally published April 26, 2025 at 5:30 AM.