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Frank Quattrone, the one-time investment-banking kingpin of Silicon Valley, won an agreement conditionally dropping all charges against him -- ending the government's effort to include him in the nearly six-year crackdown against the excesses of the 1990s Internet boom.

By staying out of legal trouble for a year, the 50-year-old Mr. Quattrone will avoid a third criminal trial on obstruction charges after the first ended in a hung jury and a second led to a conviction that was reversed on appeal earlier this year. He even will be able to return to Wall Street -- a remarkable turn considering that at one point he was banned for life by one securities regulator.

Yesterday's deferred-prosecution agreement, approved by a U.S. District Court judge in New York, capped an aggressive three-year legal battle by Mr. Quattrone to clear his name. After a career in which he became one of the most powerful -- and wealthy -- figures on Wall Street during one the biggest booms in U.S. history, the former banker for Credit Suisse First Boston had drawn more protracted regulatory scrutiny than any prominent Wall Street figure since former junk-bond king Michael Milken in the late 1980s.

"This is an extraordinary win for Quattrone," said Jerry Bernstein, a former federal prosecutor and now a white-collar defense attorney at law firm Blank Rome LLP. "A deferred prosecution is as good as it gets, short of a dismissal."

Indeed, the end result of Mr. Quattrone's case contrasts starkly with others involving noted Internet-era firms and individuals. Telecom analyst Jack Grubman and Internet analyst Henry Blodget, for instance, were banned from the securities business in 2003 after their firms settled charges of research fraud based on their reports. The two neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in their cases.

A beaming Mr. Quattrone, sporting a red tie with insignias of golf clubs, cigars and trophies, said he was "very pleased that the case will be concluded," and spoke of plans to resume his business career, though he offered no specifics on what he might do. Throughout his legal battles, Mr. Quattrone had denied all charges against him.

Mr. Quattrone first gained fame as an early backer of technology stocks while working at Morgan Stanley from 1981 to 1996. He was the first banker at a major firm to build a career specializing in tech, assembling a network of venture-capital executives whose companies he took public.

In 1995, he led the initial public offering that sounded the start of the dot-com era, Netscape Communications Corp., which doubled in price on its first day of trading. Among other celebrated names whose IPOs he led were Amazon.com Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., and he claims his clients collectively gained $200 billion in stock-market value.

Eventually, Mr. Quattrone left Morgan Stanley dissatisfied with the level of pay and control he had over his own staff of bankers and research analysts. He set about increasing both, first at Deutsche Bank AG and then at Credit Suisse. He created his own teams, which shared directly in their financial results and whose brokers received a set percentage of IPO shares available for banking clients' accounts.

During the Internet bubble of the late 1990s, his group at CSFB led more than 100 IPOs -- more than any other Wall Street firm. As his reputation spread, Mr. Quattrone maintained his own public-relations team at his two-story red-brick offices in Palo Alto, Calif., often boasting of his IPO prominence. "We are thrilled to have achieved our goal of No. 1 market share in by far the most active year the technology industry has seen to date," he said on Jan. 31, 2000, just as the bubble crested.

But Mr. Quattrone also drew notice for sometimes aggressive pricing, and for producing some IPOs that he jokingly referred to in one email as "woofers" -- that is, stocks of tech companies that plummeted after the bubble burst. Among them: Corvis Corp., an optical telecom switching company which went public in a $1.14 billion IPO in July 2000 only to see its stock price fall by more than 98% by late 2002.

Ultimately, the collapse of many Internet stocks early this decade, and allegations of fraud at companies like Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc., sparked investor outrage and a tough crackdown by prosecutors and regulators. The period of 2002 and 2003, around Mr. Quattrone's criminal indictment, coincided with lows in the stock market, in which market averages had fallen by half and many Internet stocks had lost more than 90% of their value.

The criminal obstruction case against Mr. Quattrone stemmed from a single email. In 2000, regulators began probing whether CSFB had received excessive commissions as kickbacks from some investors who got hot IPOs. Shortly after Mr. Quattrone learned those probes had become criminal, he endorsed a colleague's emailed suggestion in December 2000 to "clean up those files" in accordance with company policy. That endorsement became the basis for the obstruction case, though Mr. Quattrone said he wasn't thinking about the probes and wasn't responsible for IPO allocations.

Mr. Quattrone also faced scrutiny from securities regulators, who alleged he engaged in a practice known as "spinning" -- that is, steering hot IPOs to clients to win additional business -- through a program informally dubbed "Friends of Frank" by some Silicon Valley investors. They also went after him when he delayed testifying in that case -- he said he didn't want to incriminate himself in the face of the criminal investigation -- and charged that he failed to guard against research bias through a flawed organizational structure.

The criminal case contributed to Mr. Quattrone's resignation from CSFB in early 2003 -- and his delayed testimony in the civil cases drew a lifetime ban on him from the NASD. That led his then-criminal lawyer, John Keker, to blast agency officials as "sanctimonious bastards" in an interview with American Lawyer magazine. Mr. Keker added that they were "piling on" after the criminal charges, "trying to self aggrandize their little agency." After NASD denied Mr. Quattrone a hearing, the ban was overturned by the Securities and Exchange Commission last March.

In May, NASD decided not to pursue the civil spinning and research-related charges, not long after the appeals court reversed Mr. Quattrone's criminal conviction -- which itself carried an automatic ban from the securities industry. Though the agency cited the unavailability of witnesses who had left the industry, outside observers saw the decision as reluctance to risk another loss after a few recent defeats.

Mr. Quattrone also had benefited from the NASD's decision not to pursue the other civil charges against him while the ban was in force. With the criminal conviction reversed and the ban overturned nearly two years after the first criminal conviction, the agency wasn't able to revive the remaining charges.

Mr. Quattrone's former firm, the Credit Suisse unit of Credit Suisse Group formerly known as Credit Suisse First Boston, had earlier paid $200 million to settle civil charges that analysts who worked in Mr. Quattrone's technology group published fraudulent or exaggerated research, and that his group's brokers engaged in improper "spinning." The firm neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in an SEC complaint that featured Mr. Quattrone's name prominently in the third paragraph.

Mr. Quattrone was aided in his legal fight by being able to tap the deep pockets of his former employer, which paid his legal costs -- estimated by outsiders at more than $20 million. He also enjoyed support from some Silicon Valley executives and investors -- a group for whom he had sold stock at high prices during the boom.

In the end, he won more from his agreement yesterday than do many defendants. Deferred-prosecution agreements usually require a fine and an admission of wrongdoing, but neither was required of Mr. Quattrone. Moreover, agreements involving securities cases often prohibit an individual from working in the financial industry for a period of time, or even life.

Yesterday's settlement may not go over well with some former investors. Attorney Jacob Zamansky, who represents investors in legal cases against Wall Street firms, said, "Investors in high tech stocks were left holding the bag while the underwriters made hundreds of millions of dollars in fees. Letting Mr. Quattrone go free sends the wrong message."

The retreat by the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York partly reflects turnover in the office, and current prosecutors' greater distance from the original case. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia is the third chief of the office since the original criminal charges were brought in April 2003. The two attorneys who originally prosecuted the case have left for private practice.

Moreover, after having won high-profile convictions of Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom, Martha Stewart and members of the Rigas family who ran Adelphia Communications Corp., prosecutors have more current matters on their plate, such as the "backdating" of stock options -- a scandal in which corporations allegedly grant their executives stock options but retroactively change the dates they take effect, making them more lucrative.

In a statement, Mr. Garcia said Mr. Quattrone's deferred prosecution "is an appropriate resolution of the case in light of all the facts and circumstances, and the posture of the case at this time."