Our team

Annemarie McAvoy is a nationally recognized expert in financial crime, including anti-money laundering, sanctions, cryptocurrency and anti-bribery and corruption compliance, internal investigations, fraud detection and crisis management. She has been a federal and state prosecutor, an in-house attorney at major global financial institutions and a consultant at a Big Four accounting firm.

Since 2001 she has built and enhanced compliance programs for international banks, brokerage firms and cryptocurrency exchanges, and has run AML projects for major U.S. and foreign institutions and regulators, including program assessments, gap analyses, risk assessments and independent historical transaction reviews. She has served as an expert witness in money laundering, fraud and financial crime cases.

Annemarie teaches financial crimes at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and is called upon by the media as an on-air legal expert. She has received awards for her work from the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Christopher Aquilino is a multilingual strategic adviser who combines legal expertise, intelligence operations and international diplomacy. He works with senior executives to turn multi-source data and risk signals into clear, actionable strategy.

As a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI, he led complex investigations spanning white-collar crime, national security and counterterrorism, and he applies that background to intelligence-driven approaches to risk management, cybersecurity, anti-money laundering and regulatory compliance. At global law firms including Davis Polk & Wardwell and Freshfields, he advised on multinational mergers and acquisitions, corporate reorganizations and cross-border financing.

His experience also includes diplomatic service overseas and at the United Nations, where he was known as a persuasive negotiator in complex, multi-party settings. Christopher is fluent in German and proficient in French.

Roseanne Colletti brings together decades as an investigative reporter with major broadcast news outlets and a career as an attorney. She advises clients on how legal and regulatory matters will play in the court of public opinion, and trains executives, spokespeople and attorneys to present themselves effectively to the media.

Her reporting has earned numerous awards, including two Emmy Awards and the Associated Press Broadcasters Best Documentary Award. That newsroom experience shapes how she helps clients anticipate coverage, get ahead of the story and respond when a matter becomes public.

Roseanne is licensed in New York and New Jersey. She is a member of the New York City Bar, the New York State Bar and the New York County Lawyers Association, where she serves on the Art Law Committee.

Svetlana Stepanaviciute is a forensic accountant and AML and compliance specialist with more than 15 years of Big Four and global advisory experience, including at PwC, at StoneTurn, where she was a Managing Director, and at Deloitte. She is an ICAEW chartered accountant (ACA) and a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS).

She leads investigations into bribery and corruption, internal fraud and accounting irregularities, and supports litigation and disputes with payment tracing and forensic analysis. Her work has included forensic review of hundreds of suspicious transactions for a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry, an FCPA investigation spanning India, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, and assurance testing for a major European bank remediating its AML controls across KYC, onboarding and enhanced due diligence.

Svetlana has worked across the United States, the United Kingdom and the Middle East, including the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Oman, for clients in financial services, life sciences, energy, consumer markets, technology and manufacturing. She began her career in audit with Mazars.

Rebecca Rakoski is a cybersecurity and data-privacy expert who helps clients identify risk, implement tailored security and privacy governance programs, and respond to regulatory issues and data breaches. She advises public and private companies and their boards on cybersecurity threats, ransomware attacks and regulatory matters.

She serves on the New Jersey State Bar Association’s Cyber Task Force, is Vice-Chair Elect of its Bankruptcy Law Section, and has served on committees shaping electronic discovery rules. She has been appointed Discovery Special Master in multiple New Jersey Superior Court cases.

Rebecca serves on the Board of Governors of Temple University Health System, on its Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Committee, and teaches cyber law as an adjunct professor at Drexel University and Rowan University.

Suzanne Israel Tufts is an executive and trusted adviser to C-suite leaders, family organizations, nonprofits, and government and private-sector organizations. She has worked with more than 300 U.S. and international nonprofits on board recruitment, governance, program development, legal consulting, internal investigations and training, and has worked closely with Inspectors General across several federal agencies.

She held senior roles in two U.S. presidential administrations, including Assistant Secretary for Administration at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, confirmed unanimously by the Senate. As President and CEO of the American Women’s Economic Development Corporation, she established emergency small-business services within 72 hours of the 9/11 attacks.

Suzanne practiced white-collar and complex commercial litigation at Paul, Weiss and at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, and has served as a consulting attorney at Friedman, Kaplan, Seiler & Adelman.

Keith Furst is a financial-crime technologist, data scientist and engineer with more than 15 years of experience designing analytics, machine-learning models, data pipelines and controls for compliance programs. His work spans eight of the ten largest U.S. banks as well as foreign bank branches, broker-dealers, money services businesses, payments companies and fintechs.

He specializes in transaction monitoring, fraud detection, sanctions screening and customer risk rating: tuning monitoring systems to reduce false positives, assessing sanctions-screening technology, building customer risk-scoring models and reconstructing financial records for litigation. He founded the consultancy Data Derivatives after roles with NICE Actimize and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and brings the explainability and validation discipline regulators now expect of AI in compliance.

Keith has spoken at conferences in London, Paris, New York, Toronto, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, contributed to the ACAMS sanctions specialist program, and has been published in American Banker, The Asian Banker, ACFCS and the South China Morning Post.