[2] In fact, following a meeting with Senator Fletcher in March 1933, President Roosevelt publicly gave Pecora carte blanche to go wherever his investigations might lead him.

[3] The Senate committee hearings that Pecora led probed the causes of the Wall Street crash of 1929 that launched a major reform of the American financial system.

Pecora, aided by John T. Flynn, a journalist, and Max Lowenthal, a lawyer, personally undertook many of the interrogations during the hearings, including such Wall Street personalities as Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, George Whitney (a partner in J.P. Morgan & Co.) and investment bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Otto H. Kahn, Albert H. Wiggin of Chase National Bank, and Charles E. Mitchell of National City Bank (now Citibank).

[4][5] Pecora's investigation unearthed evidence of irregular practices in the financial markets that benefited the rich at the expense of ordinary investors, including exposure of Morgan's "preferred list" by which the bank's influential friends (including Calvin Coolidge, the former president, and Owen J. Roberts, a justice of Supreme Court of the United States) participated in stock offerings at steeply discounted rates.

With the United States in the grips of the Great Depression, Pecora's investigations highlighted the contrast between the lives of millions of Americans in abject poverty and the lives of such financiers as J.P. Morgan, Jr.; under Pecora's questioning, Morgan and many of his partners admitted that they had paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932; they explained their failure to pay taxes by reference to their losses in the stock market's decline.

[8] Returning to the practice of law, Pecora represented such major clients as Warner Bros. Pictures Distributing Corporation, et al. as respondents before the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1954 case, Theatre Enterprises v. Paramount, 346 U.S. 537.