Federal prosecutors haven’t sought the extradition of the indicted Swiss advisers because Switzerland generally won’t extradite its own citizens.Family Business

After a brief meeting in the lobby of his apartment building, Beck declined, via e-mail, to comment. Any discussion of the two firms “may affect me and my family’s private sphere, which I need to protect,” he wrote.

“People are indicted all the time,” said Dustin Milne, the Zurich attorney representing Beck’s company, Beck Verwaltungen AG, and his sons’ firm, which manages $22.7 million for a handful of mostly wealthy Americans in New York and Florida, according to an SEC filing. “Should the family stop being interested in running the family business? Should they stop looking for opportunities that they heard about at the dinner table?”

Milne, who spoke on behalf of the two companies, said Beck’s firm no longer has U.S. clients and that he “has no ownership, management or influence on investment advisory services of Beck Asset Management,” or BAM, the entity owned by his sons.‘Natural Process’

He said it was likely that clients from Beck’s firm would have joined his sons’ company as clients. That “would be a natural process and something that BAM would have anticipated at the outset, as both companies serve the same type of clientele, i.e., the Jewish investment community.”

Although SEC filings show that Beck’s sons are the owners of the new firm, Milne said neither man plays a role in the daily business of Beck Asset Management. Efrajim Beck is in the commercial real estate business and Naftali is chief financial officer for a different firm, according to the lawyer. He said the two men are in their late 20s.

For decades, Beck worked closely with UBS, meeting in the bank’s offices to set up accounts that weren’t declared to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, prosecutors say. He specialized in helping Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, according to two people familiar with the matter. UBS declined to comment.

In one case, a New York client who needed funds from an offshore account was directed by an anonymous caller to drive to a Brooklyn address. When the client pulled up, a 5-year-old child walked out of the house and handed over a brown paper bag, according to the indictment. Inside was approximately $150,000 in cash.New Bank

When news broke in 2008 that federal prosecutors were probing UBS, Beck allegedly helped clients move money to Wegelin & Co., then Switzerland’s oldest private bank, hoping to avoid U.S. detection, according to the indictment.

The space shared by his firm and his sons’ firm on the fourth floor of a Zurich office building is still one story above a UBS office. Wegelin closed in 2013 after pleading guilty in the U.S. to conspiracy to evade taxes.