John Cassara
Mr. Cassara began his 26-year government career as a covert intelligence officer during the Cold War. He later served as a Treasury Special Agent in both the U.S. Secret Service and US Customs Service where he investigated money laundering, trade fraud, and international smuggling. He was an undercover arms dealer for two years. Assigned overseas in the Middle East, he developed expertise in money laundering, value transfer, and underground financial systems. He also worked six years for the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and was detailed to the Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. Mr. Cassara’s final assignment was with the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI). Since his retirement, he has lectured in the United States and around the world on a variety of transnational crime issues. He has been a consultant for government and industry, and is currently on the Board of Directors of Global Financial Integrity. Mr. Cassara has authored and co-authored several articles and books. His latest publications include Trade Based Money Laundering: The Next Frontier in International Money Laundering Enforcement (Wiley 2016) and Money Laundering and Illicit Financial Flows: Following the Money and Value Trails (Amazon/KDP 2020). More information is available at www.JohnCassara.com.
Steve K. Francis
Mr. Francis is the Assistant Director for Global Trade Investigations Division with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Director of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. In this position, he is responsible for the oversight of HSI’s national programs related to trade enforcement, intellectual property, and counter proliferation.
Prior to this assignment, from August 2017 through May 2019, Mr. Francis served as the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) for HSI Detroit with an area of responsibility that included the states of Michigan and Ohio. In this position, Mr. Francis was responsible for overseeing more than 220 law enforcement agents, intelligence analysts and professional administrative staff throughout Michigan and Ohio. The law enforcement personnel were charged with investigating over 400 violations of U.S. laws in furtherance of promoting Homeland Security, Public Safety and Border Security.
Preceding his appointment, Mr. Francis served in several critical managerial positions. As the Deputy SAC, Mr. Francis was responsible for managing and directing all investigative operations within Michigan and Ohio. As the Assistant SAC, Mr. Francis was the administrative overseer of HSI Detroit’s Certified Undercover Operation and maintained operational oversight of four criminal investigative groups comprised of law enforcement officers from local, state, federal and foreign task force officers.
Mr. Francis holds a bachelor’s degree at Michigan State University. More information available at www.iprcenter.gov.
David Luna
Mr. Luna is a Senior Fellow for National Security with the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University. Mr. Luna is a globally-recognized strategic leader. A disruptive innovator for social impact, he is a visionary, thought leader, and a leading voice internationally on the full spectrum application of convergence strategies and net-centric approaches across today’s global threat landscapes and markets.
A former U.S. Diplomat and national security official, Mr. Luna is a frequent speaker on transnational threats, international affairs, geopolitical risks, illicit trade and the global illegal economy (“dark side of globalization”) including transnational organized crime, corruption, money laundering, terrorist financing, IPR enforcement, counterfeit and pirated goods, cybersecurity/cybercrime, environmental crime, and smuggling/trafficking crimes that impact the US homeland, and destabilize global security and world order.
With over 21+ years of Federal Service in the U.S. Government, Mr. Luna held numerous senior positions with the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), including directorships for national security, transnational crime and illicit networks, and anti-corruption and good governance; and served as an advisor to the Secretary’s Coordinator for the Rule of Law. Mr. Luna also served as an Assistant Counsel to the President, Office of the Counsel to the President, The White House; Special Assistant, Office of the Secretary, Congressional and Inter-Governmental Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor; and Law Clerk and Special Assistant to the Minority Counsel, U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Special Committee on Investigations.
Mr. Luna previously served as the President (Chair) of the OECD Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade; Chair and Vice Chair of the APEC Anti-Corruption and Transparency (ACT) Working Group, U.S. Coordinator, APEC ACT Pathfinder Dialogues on Fighting Corruption and Illicit Trade; co-Chair of the U.S.-China Anti-Corruption Working Group of the Joint Liaison Group (JLG) on Law Enforcement; Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade and Organized Crime (and Member of the Human Trafficking Task Force); co-Chair G-7 Experts Group on Combating Illegal Wildlife Trade; U.S. Coordinator, Dialogues on the Crime-Terror Nexus and Dismantling Transnational Illicit Networks; U.S. Representative, Global Forum on Fighting Corruption II-VI; and other diplomatic initiatives and public-private partnerships on anti-crime and global security.
Mr. Luna is the CEO and President of Luna Global Networks & Convergence Strategies LLC – a new global advisory consultancy that is helping to advance and harness new energies, partnerships, and a new coalition to mobilize greater collective action to counter illicit trade, illicit markets, and related converging security threats. Mr. Luna is a co-Founder and Director of the NGO, The Conservation Project International. He is also a Director of the Board of Directors at the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area (UNA-NCA).
Mr. Luna is a graduate of the U.S. Army War College and received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his J.D. from The Columbus School of Law, The Catholic University of America.
Click here to view David M. Luna’s website.
Louise Shelley
Dr. Louise Shelley is the Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Endowed Chair and a University Professor at George Mason University. She is in the Schar School of Policy and Government and directs the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) that she founded. She is a leading expert on the relationship among terrorism, organized crime and corruption as well as human trafficking, transnational crime and terrorism with a particular focus on the former Soviet Union. She also specializes in illicit financial flows and money laundering. She was an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her newest book written while on the Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy is Threatening our Future, on illicit trade, the new technology and sustainability was published with Princeton University Press in November 2018.
Dr. Shelley received her undergraduate degree cum laude from Cornell University in Penology and Russian literature. She holds an M.A. in Criminology from the University of Pennsylvania. She studied at the Law Faculty of Moscow State University on IREX and Fulbright Fellowships and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. She held a Fulbright and researched and taught on crime issues in Mexico. She has also taught on transnational crime in Italy. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim, NEH, IREX, Kennan Institute, and Fulbright Fellowships and received a MacArthur Grant to establish the Russian Organized Crime Study Centers and recently completed a MacArthur grant studying non-state actors and nuclear proliferation. In 1992, she received the Scholar-Teacher prize of American University, the top academic award of the university.
Her previous books include Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime and Terrorism, published by Cambridge University Press, and Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective (Cambridge 2010). She has also authored Policing Soviet Society (Routledge, 1996), Lawyers in Soviet Worklife, and Crime and Modernization, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on all aspects of transnational crime and corruption. She is also an editor (with Sally Stoecker) of Human Traffic and Transnational Crime: Eurasian and American Perspectives.
From 1995-2014, Dr. Shelley ran programs in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia with leading specialists on the problems of organized crime and corruption. She has also been the principal investigator of large-scale projects on money laundering from Russia, Ukraine and Georgia and of training of law enforcement persons on the issue of trafficking in persons as well as wildlife trafficking She has testified before the House Committee on International Relations Committee, the Helsinki Commission, the House Banking Committee, the House Financial Services Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Task Force on Terrorist Financing on transnational crime, human trafficking and the links between transnational crime, financial crime and terrorism. Professor Shelley served on the Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade and Organized Crime of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and was the first co-chair of its Council on Organized Crime. Professor Shelley is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has spoken at various international fora and at many universities both in the United States and abroad on transnational crime, terrorism, human trafficking, illicit trade and corruption. Additionally, she often appears on television and radio, including appearances on CNN, NPR’s Marketplace and Takeaway, PBS, A&E, the History Channel, C-span, Tavis Smiley, Kojo Nnamdi and 60 Minutes as well as in the European media such as BBC, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Die Welt.
John H. Zacharia
Mr. Zacharia is the Founder of Zacharia Law PLLC, a law firm dedicated to helping clients combat cyber theft and protect and enforce their intellectual property rights. Previously, as the Assistant Deputy Chief for Litigation of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) of the United States Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, John was responsible for supervising all of the intellectual property and cybercrime prosecutions by the Section’s 40 attorneys. In his 12 years at CCIPS, John became one of the most experienced federal prosecutors of intellectual property (IP) crime in the country. Notably, John prosecuted and obtained jury verdicts in one of the largest counterfeit goods prosecutions in U.S. history, and he successfully argued and defended the convictions before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. John also secured a number of “first of its kind” convictions, including the first-ever conviction and sentencing of a cyberlocker operator, and the first-ever prosecution and conviction for criminal copyright infringement of mobile device applications (“apps”). John is a globally recognized expert in intellectual property law and policy, having worked directly with and trained law enforcement officials from over sixty countries and presented to a variety of international fora across the globe, including the European Union, Interpol, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conferences, Association of Southeast Asian (ASEAN) conferences, and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Before joining CCIPS, John was a trial attorney with the Federal Programs Branch of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, where he personally handled several significant IP cases of first impression, including cases in which he successfully defended against challenges to the constitutionality of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. John has authored and co-authored several articles and studies in the area of intellectual property. Most recently, John co-authored an article entitled “Congress’s Proposed E-Commerce Legislation for Regulation of Third-Party Sellers: Why It’s Needed and How Congress Should Make It Better” (published by the University of California-Davis Business Law Journal) and co-authored a study entitled “International Judicial Cooperation in Intellectual Property Cases (published by the European Union Intellectual Property Office). John currently teaches Intellectual Property Criminal Law at the George Washington University School of Law. More information is available at www.zacharialaw.com.