Class of 1979
KAREN LOEFFLER prosecutes—and makes no butts about it.
If the producers of Northern Exposure wish to create another quirky, Alaska-based television show, they need look no further than the U.S. attorney's office in Anchorage for inspiration. As chief of the criminal division, assistant U.S. attorney Loeffler last spring prosecuted an Iranian dog musher/loan officer who was convicted for his role in a mortgage fraud ring. In January she will try the case against an exmayor of Fairbanks and his wife, who are accused of misappropriating $450,000 in federal grant money to help build a church and travel to London. And a few years ago Loeffler convinced a jury that the 6-foot-I-inch armed bank robber who was identified by 17 witnesses as a male was, in fact, a female in disguise. "I've gotta tell you, this is not a guy's rear end," Loeffler said to the jury upon producing two security camera photos of the suspect's backside. "I always refer to that as the 'big butt' closing," adds the Harvard Law School honors graduate. "It took a lot of education to do a big butt closing."
While recognizing the humor in some of her cases, the former member of Dartmouth's ski and tennis teams is deadly serious about prosecuting white-collar criminals. "When I was working on street crime a lot of the criminals weren't capable of thinking cause and effect," says Loeffler, who moved to Alaska from Minnesota in 1985. "White-collar criminals are, they just think they'll get away with it. I try to make sure they don't."
