The best white-collar defense wins - at least for the client - are those that nobody hears about, when prosecutors are dissuaded from filing charges in the first place.

Keker Van Nest & Peters name partner Elliot Peters got the next-best thing, when a California state court judge last week dismissed a 10-count indictment against his client, real estate developer John Wessman, in a Palm Springs public corruption case.

The win brings a speedy end to a high-profile ordeal for 82-year-old Wessman, who faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.

"When I called him on Friday night with the news, he was in tears," Peters told me.

In a wide-ranging interview on Tuesday, Peters, 62, who is routinely ranked as one of the nation's premier white-collar defense lawyers, talked about the Wessman case, the highs and lows of white-collar work and what he sees ahead for the practice area under the Biden administration.

Like many white-collar pros, he got his start as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, where he was sworn in as an AUSA by then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani (something that he used to take pride in, he said ruefully).

In 1991, he moved to San Francisco and joined Keker & Van Nest, an elite, litigation-only shop founded in 1978 that now stands at about 100 lawyers.

In 2016, the firm added Peters as a name partner, bucking the trend among law firms of all stripes to shorten their monikers.

Seeing his name on the door, Peters said, has had a bigger impact that he originally anticipated.

"I feel very responsible for the whole firm," he said. That includes everything from training new associates - the firm just added 12 of them - to promoting diversity and inclusion. "I don't just do my work and go on my merry way," he said, adding that the name change also reflects "a clear understanding that I'll work at the firm for the rest of my life."

Over the years, his clients have included cyclist Lance Armstrong, financier Frank Quattrone and securities litigator William Lerach, as well the Major League Baseball Players Association in a landmark privacy case involving the seizure of electronic drug-testing records.

Even as the pandemic has halted in-person court proceedings, Peters has remained busy. Current clients include 600-lawyer Nixon Peabody, which is being sued for malpractice by investors who object to the firm's tax-related work in an alleged Ponzi scheme involving a solar panel manufacturing company.

A Nixon Peabody spokesman did not respond to a request for comment and Peters declined comment on the case.

His work for Wessman heated up when the Riverside County, California, district attorney's office empanelled a grand jury in August 2019 to consider bribery and conspiracy charges against Peters' client, as well as former Palm Springs mayor Stephen Pougnet and developer Richard Meaney.

At issue: alleged corruption stemming from a project to revitalize downtown Palm Springs.

The FBI investigated the charges, even executing a warrant to search city hall, Peters said. But the feds walked away from the case without bringing charges.

The Riverside DA's office was undeterred. Over the course of a seven-day hearing, local prosecutors persuaded the grand jurors to return a 30-count indictment against the defendants.

But Peters in a motion to dismiss the charges against Wessman dismantled the prosecution's case to devastating effect.

"No direct evidence connects Wessman to payments to (Mayor) Pougnet. None of the People's witnesses who attended meetings involving Wessman and Pougnet identified anything even slightly suspicious," Peters wrote.

"In public corruption cases the payer normally wants something from the public office, not vice versa," he continued, noting that the city of Palm Springs was so eager for Wessman to proceed with the downtown redevelopment that "they threatened to sue Wessman to make the project happen. Indeed, every single City Council vote on the project was unanimous."

Riverside County Superior Court Judge Harold Hopp was convinced, dismissing all charges against Wessman on Dec. 4 but allowing the case against his co-defendants to proceed.

A spokesman for the Riverside County DA in a statement said the office "will be reviewing our options and may likely appeal the judge's decision."

In the meantime, such an unequivocal win is deeply satisfying for Peters.

As a criminal defense lawyer, he noted, you can "put your heart and soul in a case and still lose. I take it personally every time." But winning "feels wonderful … to deliver someone out of a dangerous situation to safety."

Looking ahead to the Biden administration, he doesn't expect radical shifts in white collar enforcement, which historically has not been a partisan area of law enforcement. (He posits that if David Anderson, the current U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, and Melinda Haag, who held the position in the Obama administration, were to look at the same set of facts in 100 potential white collar cases, they'd agree on how to proceed 99 times.)

But he is hoping for shifts in how diligently prosecutors respond to Brady obligations to disclose materially exculpatory evidence — and for judges to hold them accountable, pointing to a September decision by U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan excoriating the government for Brady violations.

A self-described liberal Democrat, Peters is also hopeful that a new attorney general will burnish the reputation of the Justice Department "as a group of lawyers who care about the rule of law and the Constitution."