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Mr. Dreier was the only equity partner in the firm, and deals were structured so that only he knew all the specifics and had access to all accounts, people with the firm said in court papers. Mr. Dreier convinced lawyers that such an arrangement was best by emphasizing that it would allow them to concentrate on their first love, the law, while he worried about running the firm.

There would be no executive committee. No partners meetings. Mr. Dreier would handle all administrative chores.

For lawyers there now, the delegation of responsibility means that they are just now figuring out that Mr. Dreier had let their malpractice insurance lapse, exposing them to enormous risk if they are sued by Mr. Dreier’s growing list of potential victims, lawyers said.

Mr. Dreier, who grew up on Long Island, the son of a refugee from Poland who owned movie theaters, evolved into a bon vivant who belonged to the Harmonie Club and was a staple of high-wattage charity events.

As a lawyer, Mr. Dreier could be aggressive, as was evident when he was reprimanded in 2004 by a bankruptcy court judge. The judge found that Mr. Dreier had, on Mr. Solow’s behalf, played a role in placing false legal ads that highlighted the financial debts of a Solow Realty rival, Peter S. Kalikow.

The judge called the ads “an affront to the court” and “somewhat sleazy.”

Two years later, though, Mr. Dreier still did some work for the Solow firm and relied on that connection to convince Wall Street veterans that he was legitimately selling promissory notes issued by the company.

In 2007, one investment house, Perella Weinberg Partners, bought a company that had purchased the supposed Solow paper through Mr. Dreier, someone familiar with the situation said.

The investment firm has told its investors it had no reason to be overly suspicious about the notes because someone, ostensibly Mr. Dreier, had been paying interest on them in a timely manner. Now worthless, those and other notes purchased through Mr. Dreier were valued by the firm in November at $45 million, roughly 4 percent of the portfolio holding them.

A subpoena shows the government is seeking information about a dozen more hedge funds that may have been defrauded.

One investor on the list was Nick Maounis, the Connecticut trader who made headlines two years ago when a $6 billion fund he started called Amaranth blew up. He is now operating a new hedge fund known as Verition. A person close to Verition said the fund had declined to purchase the notes.

Making it harder to reconstruct the sale of the notes is the possibility that investors sold them among themselves. Prosecutors say the evidence against Mr. Dreier is strong and includes recordings in which he admits that some of the notes he was selling were fabricated.

Days before Mr. Dreier’s arrest in New York, court documents showed, a lawyer with his firm asked Mr. Dreier to release $38 million from an escrow account for a client, only to discover that much of the money had vanished.

The next day, Dec. 2, Mr. Dreier flew to Canada and tried to hold a meeting there very much like the unauthorized gathering he is said to have held in Solow’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the authorities say.

In the offices of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, the authorities say, he tried to pass himself off as a lawyer for the plan and close the sale of an additional $33 million in fraudulent promissory notes supposedly backed by the plan.

A receptionist there caught on, the authorities said, and called the police, who arrested him.

Being jailed in Toronto did not curb Mr. Dreier’s interest in moving money, and he feverishly worked the phones, according to court papers.

At this point, the law firm’s comptroller refused his requests to move millions of dollars. He did agree, though, to Mr. Dreier’s request to be connected to the bank that handled the law firm’s accounts, an assistant United States attorney, Jonathan R. Streeter, said in a bail hearing on Thursday. “He successfully got $10 million transferred out of an escrow account into a personal account that he controlled,” Mr. Streeter said.

That money, like all the rest, remains unaccounted for.