Many classmates have wondered where Douglas Chang went and what he was doing after serving as our class sergeant-at-arms and later leaving Kaimuki High School. Rumors began to spread of him doing random sergeant-at-arm jobs while hitchhiking across Europe. Well, after an exhaustive manhunt, we found Douglas hard at work protecting America as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Department of Justice (DOJ).
Douglas works at the DOJ’s San Francisco office and makes periodic trips to Washington, D.C. to prosecute the “bad guys” for complex financial fraud. As a member of DOJ’s Residential Mortgage Back Securities Working Group, Douglas and his DOJ colleagues have been busy pursuing and recovering BILLIONS of dollars in settlements from the big financial institutions responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis that many experts believe was one of the main causes of the Great Recession in 2008. This work was so intense and far reaching that he received an award from the U.S. Attorney General, one of several during his career that recognized Douglas’ effort.
In one of the recent cases, Douglas and his team recovered $2.6 billion from one of the big subprime mortgage banks after years of litigation. Douglas and his team are busy investigating another bank for similar conduct and expect to obtain a similar recovery.
Now after hearing all of this, some of you might think that Douglas was a hard-nose police officer during high school, maybe even tracking down truant classmates when not in class. Douglas admits that he wasn’t always in class when he should have been. What he actually did during this time, only he and Head Counselor Seiso Taniguchi know for sure.
We appreciate that Douglas’ experience as our class sergeant-at-arms is paying dividends in his work at the Department of Justice.
