After prosecuting some of Sacramento’s biggest cases, Matthew Segal moves to law firm

When Matthew Segal moved to Sacramento in 2004 to work as a prosecutor for U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott — a conservative Republican who was appointed to his post by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump — Segal knew what people were thinking.

“When I came out here it was pretty clear to everybody, ‘Here comes a Volvo-driving, San Francisco, Ivy League liberal,’” Segal said. “Greg thought I could do the job and he looked at it objectively and he gave me the best job I ever had.”

Segal, who over 17 years rose from assistant U.S. attorney to chief of the special prosecutions unit in the Sacramento-based Eastern District of California, ended up handling some of the most complex — and bizarre — cases in the office in recent years.

He sent Matthew Muller, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate and former Orangevale resident, to prison with a 40-year sentence in a kidnapping case that was so strange police originally labeled it a hoax.

Segal prosecuted F. Scott Salyer, the so-called Tomato King of California and SK Foods owner who ended up being sentenced to six years in prison in a racketeering and bribery case.

And he handled his first murder case involving a 38-year-old cold case in which a former Sacramento man was charged with two counts of maritime murder and accused of hog-tying two British tourists aboard a boat in the Caribbean before tossing them overboard.

The defendant, Silas Duane Boston, died before he could be brought to trial, but Segal called it “one of the most challenging and interesting things I’ve ever done.”

“The Duane Boston case was a cold case homicide that was committed when I was 8 years old in 1978, and he’d been walking around free ever since he killed those two people,” Segal said. “Who would have thought that somebody could commit murder on a boat in the Caribbean and end up prosecuted in a courtroom in Sacramento?”

Now, the 51-year-old lawyer is trying something new, accepting a position as a partner in the Sacramento office of the Stoel Rives LLP law firm, where he will focus on white-collar crime, antitrust cases and internal government investigations.

“I think it’ll be something of an adjustment, but that’s also part of why I want to do it,” Segal said in an interview in the firm’s downtown Sacramento offices overlooking the state Capitol. “It’s the new challenge that’s attracted me to the job.”

Segal spent a total of 24 years working with the Department of Justice, including seven working in antitrust in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco before deciding he wanted a new challenge and applying to become a prosecutor in California’s U.S. attorneys offices.

“Sacramento was the first to give me an offer, and 17 years later here I am,” he said.

Scott, who left the U.S. attorney’s post in February, called Segal “a cornerstone of the office for the last several years, both as a line prosecutor and a team supervisor.”

“He’s a smart, capable, thoughtful lawyer, and I wish him the very best in the next phase of his legal career,” Scott said.

One of his courtroom opponents echoed that praise, saying Segal’s preparation was exhaustive.

“Matt Segal is a great lawyer, a hugely aggressive lawyer who’s extremely tough in all his work,” said Tom Johnson, who defended Matthew Muller in the 2015 kidnapping of Denise Huskins.

Huskins was a young woman snatched from her boyfriend’s Vallejo home and taken blindfolded and bound to a family cabin in Lake Tahoe, where she was sexually assaulted twice before being driven to Southern California and released on the street.

Muller eventually pleaded guilty in a bid to avoid the possibility of a life sentence.

“As a prosecutor, he was a handful, for sure,” Johnson said of Segal.