Lawrence Barcella

E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr., often known as Larry Barcella (23 May 1945 - 4 November 2010) was an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia (1971 - 1986) and a criminal defense lawyer in private practice (1986 - 2010), specializing in white-collar crime.

Barcella graduated in history from Dartmouth College in 1967, and from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1970. Barcella sought an internship at the Justice Department in his second year of law school, but with none available, was offered a full-time job on graduation instead.

Barcella joined the District of Columbia Attorney's office in 1971, shortly after graduating from law school. Barcella handled a number of high-profile terrorism cases, and in 2010 The Washington Post said that he became in effect "the Justice Department's de facto lead terrorism prosecutor." These cases included the Letelier assassination (1976), the twin bombings in Beirut in 1983 of a US barracks and the US embassy, and the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking. His best known case, however, was his pursuit of Edwin P. Wilson in 1982, where Barcella "staged a covert business deal that was actually a sting operation and lured Wilson into flying from Libya to the Dominican Republic", from where Wilson was extradited.

In 1985 Barcella gave a legal opinion to an unnamed government official on giving go-ahead to an Iran-Contra-related weapons shipment: "a private $5 million shipment of Soviet-bloc rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers to the Nicaraguan contras - 10 months after Congress had cut off government support to the contras." Barcella's boss, when first asked about the opinion, said "Assistant U.S. attorneys do not issue legal opinions on arms shipments... Larry would never have done that. ... It's a quagmire for any prosecutor to get into that stuff."

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