Prosecutor in Insider Crackdown Is Leaving U.S. Attorney's Office Christopher L. Garcia, a federal prosecutor who helped lead the government's widespread crackdown of insider trading on Wall Street, is leaving the Justice Department for the private sector. Mr. Garcia will join Weil, Gotshal & Manges, one of the country's largest corporate law firms, as a partner in its white-collar defense and investigations group. For the past two years, Mr. Garcia has served as chief of the securities fraud unit for the United States attorney's office in Manhattan. In that role, he has supervised dozens of insider trading prosecutions brought against hedge fund traders and the corporate insiders who leaked them secret information. Working under Preet S. Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mr. Garcia's unit has brought insider trading charges against 63 people and secured 56 convictions, including the successful prosecution of Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire head of the Galleon Group hedge fund. The vast investigation has been called the biggest insider trading scandal in a generation, and some legal experts say it has surpassed the prominent 1980s-era cases involving the financiers Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. "Back in the Boesky days, there was a sense that the worst of the insider trading emanated from a particular group of players," said J. Robert Brown Jr., a law professor at the University of Denver. The current wave of cases shows that it appears to be prevalent throughout Wall Street. The well-worn path from the federal prosecutor's office in Manhattan to practicing white-collar defense at a corporate law firm has been an especially busy one as of late. Boyd M. Johnson III, the former deputy United States attorney in Manhattan, recently joined WilmerHale, and Jonathan Streeter, the lead prosecutor in the case against Mr. Rajaratnam, has departed for Dechert. Several firms recruited Mr. Garcia, including WilmerHale, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and Zuckerman Spaeder. Weil is said to be paying a Mr. Garcia about $1.2 million a year for the next two years, according to a person with direct knowledge of his compensation who requested anonymity because he was unauthorized to discuss it. That amount is at the high end of the pay range for federal prosecutors entering private practice in New York, reflecting Mr. Garcia's high-ranking post in the United States attorney's office. Marc P. Berger, who has served as Mr. Garcia's deputy, is expected to become the securities fraud unit's next chief. Mr. Garcia departs the United States attorney's office on Friday. Mr. Garcia joins a firm that is perhaps best known for its bankruptcy practice, having represented, for example, Enron and WorldCom in their Chapter 11 cases last decade. Some of that bankruptcy work flows through to Weil's white-collar criminal defense practice. In recent years, the firm has represented some of the highest-profile companies at the center of the financial crisis, including the government's investigations of Lehman Brothers, the American International Group and Washington Mutual. None of those criminal inquiries has yet to produce any charges. The son of a retired New York City firefighter, Mr. Garcia, 38, grew up in Mineola, on Long Island. After graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he worked at Davis, Polk & Wardwell for four years before becoming a federal prosecutor in 2004. He earned his stripes as one of the lead government lawyers on the Refco case. Refco, a New York brokerage firm that traded commodities and futures contracts, collapsed in 2005 after disclosing that its chief executive, Phillip R. Bennett, was hiding hundreds of millions in bad debt from the company's auditors and investors. Three Refco executives, including Mr. Bennett, pleaded guilty to crimes; two others connected to the case were convicted at trial. Last month, a federal appeals court last month overturned one of those convictions, citing judicial error. "Chris is a first-class lawyer," said Gary P. Naftalis, a defense lawyer who represented Refco's chief executive and is now representing several insider trading defendants. He's fair and honorable but a formidable adversary.