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Life After White-Collar Crime

By Evan Osnos

In the nineties, Jeffrey D. Grant had a law firm in Westchester County, a seat on the local school board, and an ownership stake in a bistro called, if you’ll forgive the irony, the Good Life. He was in his early forties, garrulous and rotund, and he gloried in his capacity to consume. Each year, he took his wife and daughters on half a dozen “shopping vacations,” though they sometimes neglected to open the bags between trips.

Grant had developed an early appreciation for personal displays of wealth and power. Born in 1956, the son of a marketing executive, he grew up on Long Island, graduated from SUNY Brockport, and worked his way through New York Law School as a shoe salesman. By then, his parents had divorced, and his father had moved in with Lynda Dick, a wealthy widow whose properties included one of the most storied mansions in Greenwich , Connecticut, a hilltop estate known as Dunnellen Hall. (It later became famous as the home of Leona Helmsley , the hotel magnate convicted of tax evasion in 1989, after a trial in which a housekeeper testified that Helmsley had told her, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”)

Grant cultivated an ability to muscle his way into one opportunity after another. In law school, he approached the box office of a concert venue in Boston and, pretending to be the son of a music promoter, threatened revenge if he and three friends were not admitted free of charge. The brazen charade worked so well that the headliner, the rock-and-roll pioneer Gary U.S. Bonds, hosted the group backstage and, at the concert, sang “Happy Birthday” to one of Grant’s friends. As a lawyer, Grant specialized in real estate and corporate work and regarded himself as an “assassin.” In business and out of it, his philosophy was “Win, win, win.”

As he reached his mid-forties, however, Grant found himself unravelling. He had become addicted to painkillers—first Demerol, prescribed for a torn Achilles tendon, and then OxyContin. He was increasingly erratic and grandiose, betting wildly on dot-com stocks. In 2000, as his debts mounted, he started filching money from clients’ escrow accounts. The following year, after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Grant applied for a disaster-relief loan from the Small Business Administration, claiming to have lost the use of an office near Ground Zero. That was a fiction. He received two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars, which he used to cover personal and office expenses.

In July, 2002, under investigation for breaching his clients’ accounts, he surrendered his law license and was later disbarred. That summer, as he sat in a Ralph Lauren wicker chair in his greenhouse in Rye, he attempted suicide, swallowing forty tablets of Demerol. He survived, and entered drug and alcohol rehab. He and his wife moved to Greenwich, seeking a fresh start, but the marriage was too badly frayed to survive.

Grant’s undoing was not yet complete: officers of the Internal Revenue Service discovered the false claim on his loan application, and in 2004 a warrant was issued for his arrest. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering, and a judge sentenced him to eighteen months in prison, chastising him for exploiting a national tragedy. On Easter Sunday, 2006, two friends drove Grant three hours west from Greenwich to Allenwood Low, a federal prison in the mountainous Amish country of central Pennsylvania. Grant quickly learned the rules: never take someone’s seat in the TV room or ask a stranger what landed him in prison. And he mastered the black-market economy that runs on “macks,” or foil packages of smoked mackerel, which sell for about a dollar in the commissary. He marked time mostly by walking—circling an outdoor track three or four hours a day, listening to NPR on headphones. “In the morning, all the airplanes from the East Coast would fly over going west, and at night they would come the other way,” he told me. “I would remember myself as a businessman.”

Grant was released to a halfway house in June, 2007, after fourteen months in prison. He had walked thirty-five hundred miles around the track and shed sixty-five pounds. He returned to Greenwich with no idea of what to do next.

Many people who have served time for white-collar felonies look to get back into business. Barely six months after the home-wares mogul Martha Stewart emerged from prison—she had been convicted of lying to investigators about a stock trade—she was hosting two new television shows. Grant, who no longer had a law license, tried applying himself to good works instead. He volunteered at rehab facilities that had helped him get sober. He joined the board of Family ReEntry, a nonprofit in Bridgeport, which aids formerly imprisoned people and their families, and he later served as its executive director. Hoping to improve his inner life, he studied for a divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary, in Manhattan. In 2009, he married Lynn Springer, a Greenwich event planner he had met in recovery. In 2012, they founded the Progressive Prison Project, a ministry focussed on white-collar and other nonviolent offenders.

As word of his experience spread, Grant started hearing from neighbors who were heading to prison or had recently returned and were seeking advice or companionship. At the time, a sense of alarm was animating conversations among businessmen along the Metro-North corridor: Preet Bharara , the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, had imposed a crackdown on insider trading, leading to more than eighty guilty pleas and convictions. Some of these cases were later invalidated by an appeals court, but Operation Perfect Hedge, as it was known, had punctured the realm of traders, analysts, and portfolio managers. “My phone would ring in the middle of the night,” Grant said. One financier, under indictment, called while hiding in his office with the lights out. “He said, ‘I’m afraid that people will recognize me on the street,’ ” Grant recalled. A reporter from Absolute Return , a trade publication for the hedge-fund industry, asked Grant, “How do Wall Street skills usually translate in prison?” His reply: “These skills are not only in large degree useless, they are probably counterproductive.” As he told me recently, “Business rewards a certain type of attitude and assertiveness—all things that will get you killed in prison.”

Grant, in his pastoral role for anxious brokers, fallen hedgies, and other wobbling pillars of late capitalism, came to expect fresh inquiries from desperate people each morning when he opened his e-mail. “Everyone going through this is freaking out, so they’re up all night, Googling,” he said. In the hope of nourishing his unlikely flock, Grant developed an ambitious reading list, which included “ Letters and Papers from Prison ,” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and “ The Gulag Archipelago ,” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If some callers found that Bonhoeffer’s words of resistance to the victims of national socialism did not seem immediately applicable, Grant also offered practical tips. Before reporting to prison, he advised them, mail yourself the phone numbers of family members and friends on the visitors’ list, because “you’ll be too discombobulated to remember them once you’re inside.” And remind your wife never to touch paper money on the morning of a visit; almost every bill bears traces of drug residue, which will set off the scanners.

In 2016, Grant established what he called the White Collar Support Group, an online meeting inspired by twelve-step programs for drug and alcohol addiction. He described the program as a step toward “ethics rehab” and, on his Web site, explained that it was for people who wanted to “take responsibility for our actions and the wreckage we caused.” In blunter terms, he told me that it was for “guys detoxing from power and influence.”

The first session attracted four attendees, including a hedge-fund manager and a man who had pilfered from his child’s youth-soccer club. But soon the program grew. In the next five years, more than three hundred people cycled through, either on their way to prison or just out and trying to reëstablish a semblance of their old order. Some of Grant’s flock were familiar from front-page scandals, born of Ponzi schemes, insider trading, and other forms of expensive corruption; others were virtually unknown to the public. This summer, I asked him if I could sit in on a meeting of the White Collar Support Group. He agreed, but alerted his members in advance, in case anyone wanted to preserve his privacy.

At seven o’clock one evening in July, I signed on to Zoom and found myself with twenty-eight people, mostly male and white, each identified by a name and a location. Meetings are free, though Grant suggests a donation of five dollars to his ministry. He draws a distinction between his work and the industry of white-collar “prison coaches” who offer bespoke services for a price. Among them, Wall Street Prison Consultants promises to “ensure you serve the shortest sentence possible in the most favorable institution.” It sells consulting packages at the levels of Bronze, Silver, and Gold, the finest of which includes “Polygraph Manipulation Techniques,” “Prison Survival Orientation Coaching,” and an “Early Release Package” that helps clients apply for a drug-treatment program to reduce the length of a sentence.

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Grant, who now lives in Woodbury, Connecticut, appeared on camera wearing a pale-blue oxford shirt and sitting before a stone fireplace. As he called the meeting to order, we recited Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, and then Grant reminded everyone of the rules: with few exceptions, anyone who talked for more than three minutes would hear a snippet of music—on this occasion, the Parliament funk classic “Mothership Connection (Star Child)”—signalling him to wrap it up. Surrendering control, Grant likes to tell his charges, may not come naturally.

Before the meeting, Grant had warned me not to expect universal contrition. “Almost everyone who contacts us has been successful, controlling, and perhaps narcissistic,” he said. “The elements that made them successful are also the elements that contributed to their demise.” Throughout their pre-indictment careers, aggression and rule-bending were considered strengths. In American culture, white-collar crime is often portrayed less as evidence of unfettered greed than as a misguided sibling of success.

By and large, the country’s governing class has encouraged that view. After the stock market crashed in 1929, Congress faced public pressure to curb the backroom manipulation that had helped devastate millions of shareholders. But Richard Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, a graduate of Groton and Harvard, told senators in Washington, “You gentlemen are making a great mistake. The exchange is a perfect institution.” In 1938, Whitney was caught embezzling from the New York Yacht Club, his father-in-law, and a number of others. He went to Sing Sing dressed in a double-breasted suit.

Not long after Whitney’s fall, the sociologist Edwin Sutherland devised the term “white-collar crime,” to describe wrongdoing committed “by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.” Since then, each cycle of boom and bust has delivered new iterations of rapacious self-dealing, often indelibly linked to time or place, like schools of painting—the naked fraud of a Savings & Loan, the whimsical math of an Arthur Andersen. In 2001, following the accounting scandals at Enron and other companies, a publication called CFO Magazine quietly abandoned its annual Excellence Awards, because winners from each of the previous three years had gone to prison.

Since the turn of the millennium, the prosecution of white-collar crime has plummeted—but this should not imply a surge in moralism among our leading capitalists. After the attacks of September 11th, the F.B.I. began to shift resources toward counterterrorism. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers cut the budget of the Internal Revenue Service so sharply that it had the same number of special agents in 2017 as it had half a century earlier, even though the national population has grown by two-thirds.

The effects of impunity have become more blatant since the Great Recession of 2007-09, when, infamously, almost no top executives went to prison—despite the loss of more than nineteen trillion dollars in household wealth. At the time, leaders at the Department of Justice claimed that they could not prove fraudulent intent by Wall Street titans, who were many layers removed from the daily handling of toxic securities. Jed Rakoff, a judge in the Southern District of New York, believes that this was a catastrophic misreading of the law. Executives, he argues, could have been prosecuted under the principle that they were “willfully blind” to patterns of abuse that enriched them. “Dozens of people defrauded millions of people out of probably billions of dollars,” Rakoff told me. The imperatives had less to do with compensating victims than with deterring crimes not yet conceived. “There are studies that are more than a hundred years old that show that the best way to deter any crime is to catch the perpetrators quickly,” he said.

In the years since, the failure to hold top executives accountable has become intertwined with historic levels of income inequality, a phenomenon that Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law, calls “criminogenic.” In her 2020 book, “Big Dirty Money,” she wrote, “In our society, extreme wealth often confers tremendous power. So just as power tends to corrupt, so does excessive wealth.” But nothing expressed America’s ambivalence toward white-collar crime more eloquently than the election of Donald J. Trump, whose life and career as a business fabulist merited no fewer than a hundred and twenty-five mentions in “ Big Dirty Money .” Under his leadership, federal prosecutions of white-collar crime reached an all-time low. In 2020, Trump delivered pardons and clemency to a slew of affluent felons, including Michael Milken, the junk-bond trader who had pleaded guilty to securities violations three decades earlier. Taub noted that the official White House announcement about the pardoned businessmen used the word “successful” to describe them four times.

Measurements of success, or something like it, haunt the conversations in the White Collar Support Group. In the Zoom meeting, one of the first people to speak up was Andy Tezna, a thirty-six-year-old former executive at NASA , who had been sentenced the previous week for fraud. Applying for COVID relief in the name of fictitious businesses, Tezna had collected more than three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, including loans issued under the Paycheck Protection Program. He used the money to finance a Disney Vacation Club time-share, a swimming pool ($48,962), and, to ease the social isolation of the pandemic, a French bulldog ($6,450).

“I got eighteen months,” Tezna told the group, glumly. “Definitely not the number I had in mind.” He was sitting beside a window covered by venetian blinds; he wore white earbuds and several days’ growth of beard. He was waiting for word on when to report to prison. In court, Tezna and his lawyer had presented him as an American success story gone wrong. His family had come from Colombia when he was thirteen and lived in an unfinished basement, while he helped his mother clean houses. Later, he earned a degree from George Mason University and landed a job at NASA, which paid him a hundred and eighty-one thousand dollars a year. In the job, he attended a space launch with members of Trump’s Cabinet and Elon Musk. “I just thought, My life is great,” he told the group.

To the judge, Tezna had framed his malfeasance narrowly, arguing, “I was bad at managing my finances.” The Justice Department thought it was worse than that. “These are not one-off mistakes,” a prosecutor told the court. “This was greed.”

A voice on the call piped up: “Hey, Andy? It’s Bill Baroni.”

It took me a moment to place the name. Then I remembered Bridgegate. In 2013, after the New Jersey governor Chris Christie appointed Baroni as the deputy executive director of the Port Authority, he was accused of helping to arrange a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge, in order to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, who had refused to endorse Christie for reëlection. Baroni was convicted of fraud and served three months in prison. But he denied the charges, and eventually the Supreme Court overturned his conviction. Justice Elena Kagan wrote that, even though the evidence showed “deception, corruption, abuse of power,” the Bridgegate episode did not meet the legal threshold of fraud. Baroni’s victory in the Supreme Court gave him unique status in the group. “I got the exact same sentence you did—eighteen months,” he told Tezna. “I know what’s in your head today.”

For the next ninety minutes, the mood veered between grave and celebratory. Members swapped tidbits about mutual friends (“He got moved out of the private prison in Mississippi”) and applauded new ventures (“I signed a lease last week”). Grant has developed a soothing vocabulary—about strength regained and community embraced—which collided occasionally with members’ laments. “As a single guy, I can tell you dating sucks,” a man in Delaware said, “because the reactions from women run the gamut from ‘Oh, my God, you’re the worst form of life on earth’ to ‘Oh, that’s cool! Women like bad boys.’ ” A former hedge-fund manager in Chicago was still smarting over the publicity around his indictment. “Reporters were calling my parents and my brother,” he said. “I don’t even know how they got their phone numbers.” Members of the group arrive in disparate circumstances: some have managed to keep significant assets, while others are tapped out after restitution and legal expenses. According to Grant, the biggest distinction is between those who have been to prison and those who have not. Those who haven’t served time, he told me, are “sort of outside the club.”

More than a few members attributed their crimes to a kind of consumerist inadequacy. Craig Stanland, who defrauded the networking company Cisco of equipment worth more than eight hundred thousand dollars, told the group, “It was just pure shame from the beginning—not being able to tell my wife that I couldn’t afford that life style, all the way through getting arrested. And then the scarlet letter.” But Bill Livolsi, speaking from the Tulsa suburbs, who went to prison for his role in a Ponzi scheme that passed itself off as a hedge fund, had come to see his new circumstances as an unburdening. “I finally got a job after a year of being out. It makes a whopping fifteen dollars an hour, but I’ve never been happier with a job,” he said. “My focus isn’t on what flight I’m taking or where I’m going on this particular vacation. It’s on how my family’s doing and how I’m doing.”

Grant is solicitous. He asks new members to introduce themselves and, when needed, draws them out. Richard Bronson, a former Lehman Brothers stockbroker with cropped gray hair and a beard, said, “I used to work on Wall Street. I did very well.” In fact, Bronson became a partner at Stratton Oakmont, the firm made infamous by Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.” He moved to Florida and converted a small trading house called Biltmore Securities into a firm with five hundred employees. In Miami, he joined the boards of the ballet and the museum of contemporary art, opened a night club and started a magazine, and held court at an oceanside villa. But prosecutors said that all this was built on deceit; they accused him of running a boiler room that fed investors a stream of bogus stocks, causing losses estimated at ninety-six million dollars. Bronson disputed this figure, and insisted that he had repaid his clients. Nevertheless, he pleaded guilty to securities and wire fraud in 2002, and served twenty-two months in prison.

Bronson told the group, “This is really the first time I’ve ever been around people who have similar comeuppances.” He has been trying to revive his business career, launching 70 Million Jobs, a post-prison employment service, and an app called Commissary Club (“the exclusive social network for people with criminal histories”). “I’ve been out of prison for sixteen years, and I committed my crimes more than twenty-five years ago, and yet I wake up every morning with this gaping hole in my heart, out of regret for the things that I did.” He choked up momentarily and paused to collect himself. “I don’t suspect that I’ll get over this feeling,” he said, “and that saddens me.”

Others tried to buck him up. “I think we’re going to have to have a meeting about self-care soon,” Grant said.

Behind each new revelation of white-collar crime lurks an uncomfortable question about some of America’s most lucrative businesses: Are they attracting rogues or grooming them? Eugene Soltes, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me that regulations were partly to blame. “There is more white-collar crime today because there are more things that are criminal today than fifty years ago,” he said. Bribing a foreign official, for instance, was legal until the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, and insider trading was rarely prosecuted until the nineteen-eighties. Today, those are among the most common offenses. But, Soltes went on, “I suspect that you might be asking the more intuitive version of this question. Given the same laws, same number of people, et cetera, is the proclivity for someone to engage in white-collar crime higher than it was fifty years ago?”

For his book “ Why They Do It ,” Soltes interviewed scores of people convicted or accused of white-collar crime. He said that he had found no evidence of a growing inclination to break laws. What has changed, though, is what he calls the “psychological distance” between perpetrators and their victims: “Business is done with individuals at greater length now, which reduces the feeling that managers are harming others.” In thought experiments, people agree to sacrifice the life of someone they can’t see far more readily than that of someone who stands before them. In Soltes’s interviews with people who had committed price-fixing or fraud, he found that many of them had never had a personal encounter with the victims.

In recent years, the lament that moral constraints have weakened has been voiced not just by critics of Wall Street but also by practitioners. In 2012, John C. Bogle, an iconic investor who founded the Vanguard Group and spent more than six decades in finance, wrote, “When I came into this field, the standard seemed to be ‘there are some things that one simply doesn’t do.’ Today, the standard is ‘if everyone else is doing it, I can do it too.’ ” Soon afterward, the law firm Labaton Sucharow conducted a survey of finance professionals, in which a quarter of them said that they would “engage in insider trading to make $10 million if they could get away with it.” Around the same time, Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, announced his resignation, decrying a “decline in the firm’s moral fiber.” Writing in the Times , he observed, “Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets.’ . . . You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about ‘muppets,’ ‘ripping eyeballs out’ and ‘getting paid’ doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.”

Researchers have elucidated the way that dubious behavior moves through a community. In the mid-aughts, the federal government brought criminal and civil cases for backdating stock options—manipulating records so that executives could take home a larger return than their options really delivered. Studies found that the practice had started in Silicon Valley and then infected the broader business world; the vectors of transmission could be traced to specific individuals who served as directors or auditors of multiple companies. An unethical habit spreads in encounters among neighbors and colleagues, through subtle cues that psychologists call “affective evaluations.” If people are rising on one measurement (profit) even as they are falling on another (ethics), the verdict about which matters more will hinge on the culture around them—on which values are most “exalted by members of their insular business communities,” Soltes observed in his book. As he told me, “If you spend time with people who pick locks, you will probably learn to pick locks.”

In 2013, prosecutors announced an indictment of S.A.C. Capital Advisors—named for its founder, Steven A. Cohen —calling it a “veritable magnet for market cheaters.” Cohen, like a considerable number of his peers, lived in Greenwich. In the previous decade, as the hedge-fund industry surged in scale and profits, the rise of the Internet had allowed funds to leave Wall Street, and many moved to southern Connecticut to take advantage of favorable tax rates and easy commutes. By 2005, hedge funds had taken over two-thirds of Greenwich’s commercial real estate.

After the charges against Cohen were announced, David Rafferty, a columnist for Greenwich Time , a local paper, published a piece with the headline “ Greenwich, Gateway to White-Collar Crime .” He wrote, “A few years ago you might have been proud to tell your friends you lived in ‘The Hedge Fund Capital of the World.’ Now? Not so much.”

Rafferty, in his column, described a “growing sense of unease in certain circles as one hedgie after another seems to be facing the music.” Cohen, however, faced the music for a limited interlude. Under an agreement brokered with prosecutors, his firm pleaded guilty to insider trading and was sentenced to pay $1.8 billion in penalties. After a two-year suspension, Cohen returned to the hedge-fund business, and made enough money to buy the New York Mets. The price was $2.4 billion, the largest sum ever paid for a North American sports franchise.

Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago, told me that he wishes his profession spoke more candidly about accountability and impunity. Most of the time, he said, business schools find “every possible way to avoid the moral questions.” He added, “I don’t know of any alum that has been kicked out of the alumni association for immoral behavior. There are trustees of business schools today who have been convicted of bribery and insider trading, and I don’t think people notice or care.” He went on, “People are getting more and more comfortable in the gray area.”

One of the longest-running members of the White Collar Support Group is a lean and taciturn man in his forties named Tom Hardin—or, as he is known with some notoriety in Wall Street circles, Tipper X. Not long after graduating from business school at Wharton, Hardin went to work for a hedge fund in Greenwich. He had much to learn. Almost instantly, he began hearing that some competitors, such as the billionaire Raj Rajaratnam , were suspected of relying on illegal tips from company insiders. (Rajaratnam was later convicted and sentenced to eleven years.) In 2007, after Hardin became a partner at Lanexa Global Management, a hedge fund in New York, he got his own inside tip, a heads-up on an upcoming acquisition, and he traded on the information and beat the market. He repeated similar stunts three times. “I’m, like, I would never get caught if I buy a small amount of stock,” he told me. “This is like dropping a penny in the Grand Canyon.” He went on, “You can say, ‘I’m highly ethical and would never do this.’ But once you’re in the environment, and you feel like everybody else is doing it, and you feel you’re not hurting anybody? It’s very easy to convince yourself.”

One morning in 2008, Hardin was walking out of the dry cleaner’s when two F.B.I. agents approached him. They sat him down in a Wendy’s nearby and told him that they knew about his illegal trades. He had a choice: go to jail or wear a wire. He chose the latter, and became one of the most productive informants in the history of securities fraud. The F.B.I. gave him a tiny recorder disguised as a cell-phone battery, which he slipped into his shirt pocket, to gather evidence in more than twenty criminal cases brought under Operation Perfect Hedge. For a year and a half, his identity was disguised in court documents as Tipper X, fuelling a mystery around what the Times called “the secret witness at the center of the biggest insider-trading case in a generation.”

In December, 2009, Hardin pleaded guilty, and his identity was revealed in court filings. He had avoided prison but become a felon, which made features of a normal life all but impossible, from opening a brokerage account to coaching his daughters’ soccer team. He was unsure how he could earn a living. “I would ask my attorney, ‘Are there any past clients you can connect me with who’ve got to the other side of this and are back on their feet?’ He was, like, ‘Sorry, not really.’ ”

He heard of Grant’s group through a friend. “I had no idea something like this existed,” Hardin said. “Jeff was the first one who said, ‘Hey, here’s a group of people just in our situation. Come every Monday.’ ” In 2016, the F.B.I. called him again—this time, to invite him to brief a class of freshman federal agents. Hardin’s lecture at the F.B.I. led to more speeches—first for free, and eventually for a living. He was back on Wall Street, as a teller of cautionary tales. It was not quite motivational speaking; his niche, as he put it, dryly, was “overcoming self-inflicted career decimation.”

In his dealings with his peers, Hardin has learned to distinguish who is genuinely remorseful from who is not. “I’ll hear from white-collar felons who tell me, ‘I made a mistake,’ ” he told me. “I’ll say, ‘A mistake is something we do without intention. A bad decision was made intentionally.’ If you’re classifying your bad decisions as mistakes, you’re not accepting responsibility.”

In the era of rising discontent over injustice, some Americans accused of white-collar crimes have sought to identify with the movement to curb incarceration and prosecutorial misconduct. So far, the spirit of redemption has not extended to the members of the White Collar Support Group, whose crimes relate to some of the very abuses of power that inspire demands for greater accountability. For the moment, they are caught between competing furies, so they rely, more than ever, on one another. “A white-collar advocate still doesn’t have a seat at the table of the larger criminal-justice conversation,” Grant told me. “We exist because there’s no place else for us to go.”

The group members’ predicament rests on an unavoidable hypocrisy: after conducting themselves with little concern for the public, they find themselves appealing to the public for mercy. Baroni, the former Port Authority executive, told me, “I can’t go back. All I can do now is to take the experiences that I’ve had and try and help people.” His regrets extend beyond his scandal. He had been a New Jersey state senator, and, he said, “I voted to increase mandatory minimum sentencing. I never would have done that had I had the experience of being in prison.”

Baroni recently helped establish a nonprofit called the Prison Visitation Fund, which, if it can raise money, promises to pay travel expenses for family members who can’t afford to travel. His partner, and first funder, in the endeavor is a former lawyer named Gordon Caplan, who is one of fifty-seven defendants in the college-admissions scandal known as Operation Varsity Blues. Caplan was a co-chairman of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher until 2019, when he was indicted for paying seventy-five thousand dollars for a test proctor to fix his daughter’s A.C.T. exam. “To be honest,” Caplan said, on an F.B.I. recording at the time, “I’m not worried about the moral issue here.” He pleaded guilty and was sent to a federal prison camp in Loretto, Pennsylvania, a minimum-security facility that houses low-risk offenders with less than ten years left on their sentences.

Caplan was one of America’s most prominent lawyers, but he never paid much attention to complaints about the criminal-justice system until he was in the maw of it. “What I saw is other people going through a system that’s built for failure, built for recidivism,” he told me recently. Caplan had presumed that incarcerated people had reasonable access to job training and reading materials. He was wrong. “The only courses that were offered were how to become a certified physical trainer and automotive repair.” Inmates could create their own classes, and Caplan taught a short course on basic business literacy. “I had fifteen to twenty guys every class,” he said. “ ‘Do I set up an L.L.C. versus a corporation?’ ‘Should I borrow money or should I get people to invest in equity?’ ” Since getting out, Caplan has been alarmed by the barriers that prevent even nonviolent felons from rebuilding a life. “I have assets and I have family and I’ve got all that. But how does a guy who came out for dealing marijuana even start a painting business?”

Hearing Caplan, Grant, and others talk about their sudden understanding of America’s penal system put me in mind of the work of Bryan Stevenson, a leading civil-rights lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which advocates for criminal-justice reform. He beseeches people to “get proximate”—to step outside the confines of their experience. Stevenson often quotes his grandmother, the daughter of enslaved people, who went on to raise nine children. “You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan,” she told him. “You have to get close.”

But getting close is not the same as staying close. After serving twenty-eight days in prison, Caplan returned to Greenwich, where he lives in a seven-million-dollar Colonial, down the hill from the old Helmsley estate. For all his recent concern about the failings of criminal justice, I suspected that the country might have more to learn from him about his own failings. What, I asked, possessed him to pay someone to falsify his kid’s college-admissions test results? He was not eager to answer. “Achievement, I think, is like a drug,” he said, after a pause. “Once you achieve one thing, you need to achieve the next thing. And, when you’re surrounded by people that are doing that, it becomes self-reinforcing. When you also have insecurities, which a lot of highly motivated people do, you’re more apt to do what is necessary to achieve. And it’s easy to step off the line.” Caplan convinced himself that paying to change his daughter’s test results was scarcely more objectionable than other forms of influence and leverage that get kids into school. “I saw what I believed to be a very corrupt system, and I’ve got to play along or I’ll be disadvantaged.”

Greed, of course, is older than the Ten Commandments. But Caplan’s experience illuminated the degree to which greed has been celebrated in America by the past two generations, engineered for lucrative new applications that, in efficiency and effect, are as different from their predecessors as an AR-15 rifle is from a musket. If you have the means, you can hone every edge, from your life expectancy to the amount of taxes you pay and your child’s performance on the A.C.T.s. It’s not hard to insure that the winners keep winning, as long as you don’t get caught.

In the most candid moments on the Zoom call, people acknowledged the damage that their crimes had inflicted on their spouses and children. Seth Williams, a former district attorney of Philadelphia, pleaded guilty in 2017 to accepting gifts in exchange for favors, and served nearly three years in federal prison. Afterward, he struggled to find an apartment that would accept a felon. His first job was stocking shelves overnight at a big-box store; eventually, after an online course, he became a wedding officiant for hire. He was not surprised that former colleagues avoided him, but watching the effects on his family left him in despair. “It affects all of us in how our children are treated at their schools, on the playground,” he said. “Some of our spouses, people want nothing to do with them.”

Not long ago, Grant regained his law license in the State of New York, based largely on his work as a minister and as an expert on preparing for prison and life after. Nineteen years after being disbarred, he rented an office on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan and started practicing again, as a private general counsel and a specialist in “white-collar crisis management.” At seminary, he had studied migrant communities, and he came to see an analogy to people convicted of white-collar crimes. “We have one foot in the old country, one foot in the new,” he told me. If they hoped to thrive again, they would have to depend on one another. “Greek Americans funded each other and opened diners. They lift each other up.” He went on, “The problem we have in the white-collar community is that people who have been prosecuted for white-collar crimes want to become so successful again that they are no longer associated with it. I’ve approached some of the household names, and to a one they’ve rejected it.” I asked him if he was referring to people like Michael Milken and Martha Stewart. Grant demurred. “My mission is to help people relieve their shame, not to shame someone into doing something.”

Grant will tell you that shame does not help in recovery. But America’s record in recent years suggests that, in the nation at large, too little shame attaches to white-collar crime. If the country has begun to appreciate the structural reasons that many of its least advantaged people break the law, it has yet to reckon with the question of why many of its most advantaged do, too. Members of Grant’s group usually come to accept that they got themselves into trouble, but more than a few hope to follow Milken and Stewart back to the club they used to belong to—winners of the American game.

As the Zoom meeting wound down, Grant asked Andy Tezna, the former NASA executive on his way to prison, if there was anything else he wanted to say. “I had a lapse of judgment,” he began, then caught himself and confessed impatience with the language of confession. “I’m so tired of using that word, but, whatever it was that led me to make my mistake, it’s not going to define me for the rest of my life.” He thanked the members of the group for helping him get ready to embark on his “government-mandated retreat.” He’d see them afterward, he said, “once I’m out, a little wiser, a little older, with a few more gray hairs.” ♦

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Understanding White-Collar Crime, Essay Example

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The term “white-collar crime” covers a broad area of behaviors and actions. In recent years, as headlines have been dominated by corporate and banking scandals, the notion of white-collar crime has received a significant amount of attention. Generally speaking, white-collar crime covers crimes committed by persons employed in non-labor, “blue collar” positions, and involve actions intended to achieve financial gains through illegal means. Not all white-collar crimes fall under the purview of criminal justice, however; some actions taken by white collar employees or their related companies might be considered actionable in civil, rather than criminal courts. For the purposes of this discussion, “white-collar crimes” will be understood to be crimes committed by upper-class individuals during the course of their occupation or employment. Understanding what motivates white-collar criminals has been a concern of psychologists and criminologists since the term was originally coined in the 1930s.

White-collar criminals typically differ in many respects from so-called “street criminals”(Braithewaite, 1985). They are more likely to be college educated, older white males who have not spent a lifetime as criminals (sagepub.com). These white-collar criminals often have certain personality traits, such as being extroverted and manipulative. White-collar crimes are sometimes committed by individuals alone, while others are committed by small or large groups of conspirators who find opportunities to profit illegally within the context of their employment. Because there are a variety of different types of white-collar criminals, it is difficult to say with certainty what drives this behavior.

A number of theories have been presented to explain the behavior of white-collar criminals, including Social Control Theory and Organizational Theory (Coleman, 1987). In the end, most of these theories fall short, as there is such a broad number of types of white-collar crimes and white-collar criminals. It seems that in most cases, white-collar crimes are crimes of opportunity; in that context, white-collar criminals have not been involved in a lifetime of crime, but instead find themselves in a position to take advantage of a particular situation in the course of their employment. It is this disparity between street criminals and white-collar criminals, and the disparity among the different types of white-collar criminals, which makes it so difficult to come up with an all-encompassing theory to explain the behavior.

Braithewaite, John. White Collar Crime. Annual Review of Psychology. Vol. 11. 1985.

Coleman, John William. Toward an Integrated Theory of White-Collar Crime. American Journal of Psychology. Vol. 93 No.2. September 1987.

Understanding White-Collar Crime: Definitions, Extent, and Consequences. Sagepub.com. http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/43839_2.pdf

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How to Stop White-Collar Crime

A federal judge says fear of prison is the best way to deter bad behavior.

July 25, 2017

It’s politically safer for federal prosecutors to fine corporations than take the risk of trying to convict executives. | iStock/chinaface

Big fines paid by businesses that break the law provide no incentive for companies to change cultures that lead to that illegal activity, says Jed S. Rakoff , a senior judge on the bench of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Even large fines and bad publicity are often viewed as a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent for companies that break the law.

And a common federal tactic, so-called “deferred prosecution,” is in effect a “get out of jail free” card for executives, says the jurist.

Although the public might like to see accused executives wind up behind bars, they don’t because the U.S. Department of Justice finds it easier to prosecute corporations instead of the people who run them, he says. Rakoff spoke to Insights during a recent visit as part of Stanford GSB’s new interdisciplinary Finance and Society Visitor Program, organized by Anat Admati , the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics. Rakoff’s work as a prosecutor is covered in Jesse Eisinger’s recently released book The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives . Eisinger, a journalist, also came to Stanford as part of Admati’s visitor program.

What incentive would work to change corporate behavior? The threat of prison, says Rakoff. “I found that to a person, [executives accused of white-collar crimes] feared prison, and they feared it mightily. They would have paid any amount of money, done anything to avoid going to prison. So prison does have a major deterrent effect,” he says.

Rakoff spent seven years prosecuting white-collar criminals as a federal prosecutor before shifting to a private practice, where he defended many of them for 15 years. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and now hears cases stemming from alleged criminality by corporations at the heart of this country’s financial system.

Unlike many federal judges, Rakoff has spoken out extensively on a variety of broad legal issues. He is the author of five books, 135 published articles, 600 speeches, and 1,500 judicial opinions. Rakoff says he feels it is part of a federal judge’s role to educate the public and legislators about the need to rethink the way white-collar crime is prosecuted and punished.

Deferred Prosecution: Not Just for Juveniles

Until the late 1990s, the United States, along with most of the developed world, prosecuted individuals — not corporations — in cases of white-collar crime. That had been the prevailing view of the Department of Justice for decades and it made a good deal of sense, Rakoff says. “Corporations are not robots that go out and commit crimes by themselves.”

The practice changed for a variety of reasons, Rakoff says, but the driving factor was cost. Building a criminal case against a high-level executive is a lengthy and complex process. It can take several years of patiently “flipping” low-level members of an organization to compile enough evidence to prosecute the people at the top. There’s always a danger that the low-level types will lie to save their necks, and there’s no guarantee that the work will result in a prosecution, let alone a conviction.

Quote Corporations are not robots that go out and commit crimes by themselves. Attribution Jed S. Rakoff

But prosecuting a corporation is faster and cheaper, Rakoff says. “Corporations can’t be in a state of perpetual war with the government. The stakes are too high. You know in advance that sooner or later they will come to terms and it will never go to trial.” Plus there’s a bonus for ambitious prosecutors: “If packaged right, prosecution of corporations can be politically appealing.”

As prosecutors changed strategy, they began to use a tactic called “deferred prosecution.” As Rakoff recounted in an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2015, deferred prosecution came into vogue in the 1930s, as a way to help juvenile offenders. Prosecutors could defer prosecution of a juvenile if the young offender agreed to enter a rehabilitation program. Offenders who completed the program would not be charged.

By the late 1990s, prosecutors agreed to defer corporate prosecution if the business agreed to pay a fine and to adopt various measures designed to “rehabilitate the company’s culture,” Rakoff wrote.

Deferred prosecutions averaged 35 a year between 2007 and 2012, the last year for which data are available. According to Rakoff, crimes for which prosecution was deferred “included felony violations of the securities laws, banking laws, antitrust laws, anti-money-laundering laws, food and drug laws, foreign corrupt practices laws, and numerous provisions of the general federal criminal code.”

Deferred prosecution of white-collar crime has been used for some 20 years, more than enough time to see if it has served as a deterrent to crime or encouraged positive changes in corporate culture. It hasn’t, Rakoff says.

He pointed to research by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which found that more than half of the people who committed serious fraud offenses in the last few years were recidivists. That figure suggests “that the practice of going after companies but not individuals has not changed the corporate culture in which most white-collar crimes are committed,” Rakoff says.

But even if deferred prosecution were effective, Rakoff says, “it would not excuse not going after the individuals, because they are still the people who did the crime.”

For media inquiries, visit the Newsroom .

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• Published: April 2016
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Like it or not, we are emotional creatures, and one reason why crime is a perennially attention-grabbing subject of political discourse and scientific research is because it speaks to our emotions. It scares us. That is, most of us are scared of traditional forms of street crime. Who hasn’t woken up in the middle of the night worried that the front door isn’t locked? Who hasn’t felt on edge entering a deserted parking garage late at night? The possibility of being the victim of a predatory attack in these situations provokes a viscerally primed alertness and a readiness to fight or flee. But such emotional reactions are rarely evoked by the types of crime that are the subject of this Handbook: that is, white-collar crime. The prospect of falling victim to a fraudulently marketed collateralized debt obligation is more likely to provoke bafflement than gut-wrenching fear. Not surprisingly, therefore, white-collar crime typically does not rank high as a matter of public concern even though the threat that it poses to the economy and to civil society exceeds that of street crime by several orders of magnitude. White-collar crime has also long occupied a marginal position in criminology, and the lack of attention that criminologists devote to it can be traced in part to its complexity.

Just because a problem is complex, however, does not mean that it is wise to ignore it. Indeed, complex problems are the ones we should worry about the most, because they pose harms that are hard to see and that cannot be solved with simple solutions. This volume was motivated by a desire to shed light on a problem that is all too often passed over by both researchers and policymakers. We hoped that by bringing together a collection of clearly written and approachable articles on the many facets of white-collar crime and white-collar crime control, we could advance both scholarly and public interest in this important global problem. The essays cover not only the traditional domains of white-collar crime scholarship but also new theoretical developments related to our understanding of the causal factors that underlie white-collar crime and new developments in public policy regarding its control.

This Handbook is divided into eight parts and begins with the debate over the definition of white-collar crime. This debate has gone on since the concept was introduced over three-quarters of a century ago. For many scholars, the white-collar criminal is envisioned as an older, wealthy, white male who orchestrates the theft of millions or who exploits others for personal or business advantage. Even though this stereotype is probably what the general public has in mind when it pictures the white-collar offender, scholars have proposed alternative definitions. These alternative definitions focus on the nature of the crime (clandestine and based on deception) rather than the social and demographic characteristics of the perpetrators. At present, both definitional approaches are used in the field, and as the two chapters in part I as well as chapters in other parts make clear, the choice of definition has theoretical, empirical, and policy implications.

Regardless how it is defined, though, the impact of white-collar crime cannot be denied. Two essays in part II explicate the monetary, physical, and social costs that are imposed by white-collar crime on those directly victimized by it as well as the costs it imposes indirectly on the economy and society in general.

“Why do they do it?” This question has intrigued criminologists, as well as just about everybody else, for a long time, but it seems especially puzzling in the case of white-collar crime. Perhaps this is because white-collar crime seems counterintuitive. It is easy to understand why a person who is homeless or addicted to illegal drugs might resort to criminal activity to stay alive or to avoid the pains of withdrawal. But this need-based reasoning does not seem to apply as well to the people who commit white-collar crimes. Some answers to the “why” question can be found in the chapters in part III . These chapters focus on the demographic and psychological characteristics of the people who commit white-collar crimes and on their reasons for doing so. Because of changes in the nature of work and the enlarging of economic opportunities for women and racial and ethnic minorities, there are reasons to believe that the pool of potential white-collar offenders is growing and changing in its demographic composition, suggesting that the prevalence of white-collar type crimes may also be increasing.

Throughout most of its history, the study of white-collar offenders has been based on the assumption that they are psychologically normal and socially well integrated into mainstream society. White-collar offenders are thought not to suffer from the developmental and social disadvantages that plague street offenders. Accordingly, investigations of white-collar offenders have been restricted to only one stage in the life course: adulthood. The exclusive focus on white-collar offenders as adults is now out of step with the rest of criminology, where life-course and developmental perspectives now dominate. However, as the chapters in part IV demonstrate, there are signs that this situation is changing. Researchers have begun to investigate whether there are adolescent precursors to white-collar crime, and they have started to apply the principles, concepts, and statistical techniques of developmental theory to white-collar offenders. It is too early to say where this new theoretical approach will lead, but, at a minimum, it represents a step toward bringing the study of white-collar crime closer to the theoretical mainstream of criminology.

One of the distinguishing features of white-collar crime is that it is almost always integrated into or parasitic upon legitimate economic activities. As the structure and organization of legitimate economic activities change so, too, does white-collar crime. Thus, the nature of the white-collar crime problem that is found in a particular society or a particular historical period depends on the larger cultural and institutional context. The essays in part V delve into the complex interconnections that exist among economic fluctuations, cultural variations, and trends in the nature and prevalence of white-collar crime.

Part VI deals with another contextual feature of white-collar crime. It is often situated in an organizational context. This context influences both opportunities and motivations for white-collar offending. While organizations provide a setting in which white-collar offenses by individuals can occur, organizations themselves can also be conceived as offenders. The chapters in this section explore the criminogenic properties and dynamics of organizations and also address the factors that may lead to organizational self-restraint.

The final three parts of the volume—VII, VIII, and IX—focus on the tough problem of controlling white-collar crime. The control of white-collar crime is complicated for two main reasons. First and more important, since white-collar crimes are almost always integrated into legitimate economic activities, it follows that steps taken to control white-collar criminals inevitably affect legitimate businesspeople. Although regulatory restrictions are necessary to protect the common good, they also impose costs on legitimate businesses and reduce their efficiency. Trade-offs have to be made, and this stubborn reality is a source of continual political conflict and debate. The chapters in part VII explore how regulatory policy is made, how it is enforced, and its overall effectiveness.

Second, the clandestine nature of white-collar offenses makes them difficult to detect and investigate using the traditional legal tools available to law-enforcement agencies. Nevertheless, even though regulation is the most important means of controlling white-collar crime, the criminal justice system also has a role to play. Unfortunately, it is a role that is fraught with logistical difficulties and confounded by policy conundrums. As the essays in parts VIII and IX show, white-collar crimes pose challenges for investigators and prosecutors because the crimes often involve organizations as well as individuals and raise ethical questions about who or what should be held accountable. Finally, when white-collar offenders are convicted in criminal court, what should be done with them? Should they be sentenced harshly to satisfy the principle of just deserts, or should the penalties they suffer as a result of their “fall from grace” mitigate the severity of their sanctioning?

Such questions animate the study of white-collar crime and make it an exciting and ever-changing area of criminological investigation and public policy. We believe the essays presented in this volume will help readers explore these questions and help them to see that even though white-collar crime may not speak to the emotions like violent crime does, it poses far more important and far-reaching challenges to all of us.

Michael L. Benson, Shanna R. Van Slyke, and Francis T. Cullen

April 23, 2015

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What Is White-Collar Crime?

Understanding white-collar crime, corporate fraud, money laundering, securities and commodities fraud, the bottom line.

• Financial Crime & Fraud
• Definitions M - Z

What Is White-Collar Crime? Meaning, Types, and Examples

Adam Hayes, Ph.D., CFA, is a financial writer with 15+ years Wall Street experience as a derivatives trader. Besides his extensive derivative trading expertise, Adam is an expert in economics and behavioral finance. Adam received his master's in economics from The New School for Social Research and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology. He is a CFA charterholder as well as holding FINRA Series 7, 55 & 63 licenses. He currently researches and teaches economic sociology and the social studies of finance at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Investopedia / Eliana Rodgers

White-collar crime is a nonviolent crime often characterized by deceit or concealment to obtain or avoid losing money or property, or to gain a personal or business advantage.

Examples of white-collar crimes include securities fraud, embezzlement, corporate fraud, and money laundering. Entities that investigate white-collar crime include the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and state authorities.

Key Takeaways

• White-collar crime is a nonviolent crime of deceit or concealment to obtain or avoid losing money or to gain a personal or business advantage.
• Securities fraud, embezzlement, corporate fraud, and money laundering are white-collar crimes.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and state authorities investigate white-collar crime.

"White-collar crime" is a term first coined by sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 who defined it as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status during his occupation. White-collar workers historically held non-laboring office positions while blue-collar workers traditionally wore blue shirts and worked in plants, mills, and factories.

High-profile individuals convicted of white-collar crimes include Ivan Boesky, Bernard Ebbers, Michael Milken , and Bernie Madoff . Their crimes have included insider trading, accounting scandals, securities fraud, and Ponzi schemes .

Rampant new white-collar crimes facilitated by the Internet include so-called Nigerian scams , in which fraudulent emails request help in forwarding a substantial amount of money to a criminal ring. Other common white-collar crimes include insurance fraud and identity theft.

$3.7 Billion

The Madoff Victim Fund (MVF) distributed over $3.7 billion to nearly 40,000 victims worldwide in connection with the Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC (BLMIS) fraud scheme.

Large-scale corporate fraud that occurs in corporate or government institutions incurs a significant financial loss to investors and can damage the U.S. economy and investor confidence.

Corporate fraud gathers the widest group of partners for investigations, including the FBI, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

Falsification of Financial Information

The majority of corporate fraud cases involve accounting schemes that are conceived to deceive investors, auditors, and analysts about the true financial condition of a corporation or business by manipulating financial data, share price, or other measurements to inflate the financial performance of the business.

In 2014, Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to helping U.S. citizens avoid taxes by hiding income from the Internal Revenue Service and paid penalties of $2.6 billion. Bank of America sold billions in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to properties with inflated values without proper collateral and agreed to pay $16.65 billion in damages.

Self-Dealing

Self-dealing occurs when a fiduciary acts in their own best interest rather than in the best interest of their clients. Considered a conflict of interest, this illegal activity can lead to litigation, penalties, and termination of employment for those who commit it.

Self-dealing includes front-running , when a broker enters into a trade with the foreknowledge of a non-publicized transaction that will influence the price of the asset, resulting in a financial gain for the broker. It also occurs when a broker or analyst buys or sells shares for their account ahead of their firm's buy or sell recommendation to its clients.

Insider trading occurs when individuals act upon or divulge to others information that is not yet public and is likely to affect share price and company valuations once it is known. Insider trading provides an unfair advantage for individuals to profit and does not matter how the material nonpublic information was received or if the person is employed by the company.

Money laundering is accepting cash earned from illicit activities, such as drug trafficking, and making the cash appear as earnings from legal business activity. Criminals often filter money from crimes such as human and narcotics trafficking, public corruption, and terrorism in a three-step process:

• Placement is the initial entry of a criminal’s financial proceeds into the financial system.
• Layering separates the criminal’s financial proceeds from their source and creates a deliberately complex audit trail through a series of financial transactions.
• Integration occurs when the criminal’s financial proceeds are returned to the criminal after "laundering" from what appear to be legitimate sources.

A cash-based business, such as a restaurant that is owned by a criminal organization, is a common tool for laundering illegal money. Daily cash receipts may be inflated to funnel illegal cash through the restaurant and into the bank for distribution to the owners.

The  Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 assists financial institutions in their efforts to meet their obligations under laws and regulations designed to combat money laundering by targeting foreign and domestic terrorist financing, transnational criminal organizations, drug trafficking organization activity, human trafficking, and human smuggling, and proliferation financing.

The perpetrator of a securities fraud can be an individual, such as a stockbroker, or an organization, such as a brokerage firm, corporation, or investment bank, and includes crimes such as:

• High-yield investment fraud involves promises of high rates of return coupled with claims of little or no risk in investments like commodities, securities, and real estate.
• Ponzi and pyramid schemes are fraudulent investment scams that generate returns for earlier investors with money taken from later investors.
• Advance fee schemes involve fraudsters convincing their targets to advance small amounts of money with a promise to deliver greater returns.
• Broker embezzlement schemes involve illicit and unauthorized actions by brokers to steal directly from their clients, usually with a myriad of false documents.
• “ Pump and dump ” schemes artificially inflate the price of lower-volume stocks on small over-the-counter markets. The "pump" involves recruiting unwitting investors through false or deceptive sales practices, public information, or corporate filings. Once the target price is achieved, the perpetrators “dump” their shares at a huge profit and leave innocent investors to foot the bill.
• Late-day trading is the illegal practice of recording trades that are executed after hours as having occurred before a mutual fund calculated its daily net asset value (NAV). Late-day trading can dilute the value of a mutual fund's shares and harm long-term investors.

What Are Well-Known Securities Fraud Cases Investigated by the FBI?

Examples of cases of securities fraud are the  Enron , Tyco, Adelphia, and  WorldCom  scandals.

What Are the Penalties for White-Collar Crime?

If convicted, an individual may be sentenced to time in county jail, state prison, or federal prison, depending on the severity of the crime. Additionally, fines may be imposed as well as required restitution to the victim.

Who Investigates Securities Fraud?

Allegations of securities fraud are investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), often in concert with the FBI.

State authorities can also investigate investment scams. In a unique attempt to protect its citizens, the state of Utah established the nation’s first online registry for white-collar criminals where photos of individuals who are convicted of a fraud-related felony rated as second-degree or higher are featured on the registry.

What Are Anti-Money Laundering Rules Used in Banking?

Many companies, especially those involved in finance and banking, have anti-money laundering (AML) rules in place to detect and prevent money laundering. For banks, compliance starts with verifying the identity of new clients, a process sometimes called  Know Your Client (KYC) and customer due diligence detects money laundering strategies like breaking up large money laundering transactions into smaller ones to evade reporting limits and avoid scrutiny.

What Is Intellectual Property Theft?

Intellectual property theft is a white-collar crime that robs people or companies of their ideas, inventions, and creative expressions, known as intellectual property, and may include trade secrets and proprietary products or movies, music, and software.

Securities fraud, embezzlement, corporate fraud, and money laundering are considered white-collar crimes, perpetrated traditionally by those in corporate or office settings. The SEC, NASD, the FBI, and state authorities work in concert to investigate white-collar crimes which are often prosecuted at the federal level. Penalties for committing a white-collar crime include prison, fines, and restitution.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. " White-Collar Crime ."

Federal Bureau of Investigation. " The Measurement of White-Collar Crime Using Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Data ." Page 1.

North Carolina Attorney General's Office. " Nigerian Money Transfer Scams ."

Georgia Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division. " Nigerian Fraud Scams ."

U.S. Department of Justice. " Justice Department Announces Additional Distribution of More than $568 Million to Victims of Madoff Ponzi Scheme ."

U.S. Department of Justice. " Bank of America to Pay $16.65 Billion in Historic Justice Department Settlement for Financial Fraud Leading up to and During the Financial Crisis ."

U.S. Department of Justice. " Credit Suisse Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Aid and Assist U.S. Taxpayers in Filing False Returns ."

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). " Trust Examination Manual ."

Congressional Research Service. " The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN): Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 Implementation and Beyond ."

Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). " The Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 ."

State of Utah Office of the Attorney General. " White Collar Crime Offender Registry ."

• What Is Fraud? Definition, Types, and Consequences 1 of 31
• What Is White-Collar Crime? Meaning, Types, and Examples 2 of 31
• What Is Corporate Fraud? Definition, Types, and Example 3 of 31
• What Is Accounting Fraud? Definition and Examples 4 of 31
• Financial Statement Manipulation 5 of 31
• Detecting Financial Statement Fraud 6 of 31
• What Is Securities Fraud? Definition, Main Elements, and Examples 7 of 31
• What Is Insider Trading and When Is It Legal? 8 of 31
• What Is a Pyramid Scheme? How Does It Work? 9 of 31
• Ponzi Schemes: Definition, Examples, and Origins 10 of 31
• Ponzi Scheme vs. Pyramid Scheme: What's the Difference? 11 of 31
• What Is Money Laundering? 12 of 31
• How Does a Pump-and-Dump Scam Work? 13 of 31
• Racketeering Definition, State vs. Federal Offenses, and Examples 14 of 31
• Mortgage Fraud: Understanding and Avoiding It 15 of 31
• Wire Fraud Laws: Overview, Definition and Examples 16 of 31
• The Most Common Types of Consumer Fraud 17 of 31
• Who Is Liable for Credit Card Fraud? 18 of 31
• How to Avoid Debit Card Fraud 19 of 31
• The Biggest Stock Scams of Recent Time 20 of 31
• Enron: Scandal and Accounting Fraud 21 of 31
• Bernie Madoff: Who He Was, How His Ponzi Scheme Worked 22 of 31
• 5 Most Publicized Ethics Violations by CEOs 23 of 31
• The Rise and Fall of WorldCom: Story of a Scandal 24 of 31
• Four Scandalous Insider Trading Incidents 25 of 31
• What Is the Securities Exchange Act of 1934? Reach and History 26 of 31
• Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Defined, How It Works 27 of 31
• Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Overview 28 of 31
• Anti-Money Laundering (AML): What It Is, Its History, and How It Works 29 of 31
• Compliance Department: Definition, Role, and Duties 30 of 31
• Compliance Officer: Definition, Job Duties, and How to Become One 31 of 31

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Crime — White Collar Crime

Essays on White Collar Crime

White collar crime is a topic that has gained increasing attention in recent years. As a result, there is a growing demand for research and analysis on this subject. When it comes to writing an essay on white collar crime, choosing the right topic is crucial. A well-chosen topic not only makes the writing process more enjoyable, but it also ensures that your essay will be engaging and relevant. In this article, we will discuss the importance of choosing the right white collar crime essay topic and provide a detailed list of recommended topics.

White collar crime encompasses a wide range of illegal activities committed by individuals or organizations in a professional or business environment. This includes fraud, bribery, insider trading, embezzlement, and money laundering, among others. Given the complexity and prevalence of white collar crime, it is an important topic for academic study and research. Understanding the causes, impacts, and consequences of white collar crime is essential for developing effective prevention and enforcement strategies.

When choosing a white collar crime essay topic, it is important to consider your interests, the relevance of the topic, and the availability of research material. Selecting a topic that aligns with your interests will make the writing process more enjoyable and engaging. Additionally, ensure that the topic is relevant and timely, as this will make your essay more compelling and valuable. Finally, consider the availability of research material on the chosen topic to ensure that you have access to credible and up-to-date sources.

List of the Right White Collar Crime Essay Topic

Corporate fraud.

• The impact of corporate fraud on the economy
• Ethical considerations in corporate fraud investigations
• The role of corporate culture in preventing fraud

Financial Crimes

• Money laundering regulations and enforcement
• The psychology of white collar criminals
• The evolution of financial crime in the digital age

Regulatory Compliance

• The effectiveness of regulatory compliance programs
• The impact of regulatory changes on white collar crime
• Regulatory challenges in combating white collar crime

Corruption and Bribery

• The impact of corruption on developing economies
• Best practices for preventing bribery in international business
• The role of technology in detecting and preventing corruption

Insider Trading

• The legal and ethical implications of insider trading
• The impact of insider trading on market integrity
• Enforcement challenges in combating insider trading

Environmental Crimes

• The role of corporations in environmental crime prevention
• The impact of environmental crimes on public health
• Regulatory and enforcement challenges in combating environmental crimes

Healthcare Fraud

• The impact of healthcare fraud on patient care and costs
• Best practices for detecting and preventing healthcare fraud
• Regulatory and enforcement challenges in combating healthcare fraud

These are just a few of the many White Collar Crime essay topics that you can explore in your research and writing. Whether you are studying law, business, economics, or criminology, these topics provide a rich and diverse landscape for academic inquiry and analysis.

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WHITE-COLLAR CRIME essay

 The term “white-collar crime” was first used by criminologist Edwin Sutherland back in 1939 for the various nonviolent crimes usually committed in commercial areas for financial gain (McNISH, 2010). There is a common misconception that the white-collar crimes do not have victims, and thus they are not that dangerous. Indeed, these crimes are committed without the use of weapons or threats of physical violence, but it does not mean that they are really harmless. According to the FBI, in the United States white collar crimes steal more than $ 300 billion a year (Gottschalk, 2011).

All kinds of white collar crime are taking place in our community nowadays. The most wide spread crimes are fraud, fraud with bankruptcies, bribery, computer fraud, credit card fraud, counterfeiting and securities, corporate appropriation of funds, “identity theft” (using other people’s financial documents), securities transactions which use insider information, insurance fraud, “money laundering”, obstruction of justice, perjury, tax evasion, economic espionage, artificial price bubble, etc (Williams, R. (2013).

With the rapid development of Internet technologies, there is a rapid development of Internet fraud schemes. For example, online investment scheme is one of the recent ones. Commission on Securities and Exchange Commission on Law Enforcement, and criminal trials indicate that criminals use two basic methods to manipulate securities markets for personal gain. First, in so-called “pump-and-dump” projects, they usually disseminate false or misleading information in order to cause a sharp rise in stock prices which are not in demand, or shares of companies not having substantial assets and leading operations. Immediately after that they sell their shares of such companies to get substantial profits before the stock price falls back to its normal low level. All other buyers of the stock, unaware of the falsity of the information, become victims of the scheme as soon as the price falls.

For example, in one federal prosecution in Los Angeles, the defendants purchased shares in a bankrupt company NEI Webworld, Inc. for the sum of 130,000 dollars, directly or through an intermediary. Assets of NEI Webworld, Inc. had been liquidated several months before. Then the defendants sent e-mail messages to hundreds of Internet bulletin boards, falsely stating that wireless telecommunications company planned buyout of NEI Webworld. At the time defendants purchased shares of NEI Webworld, share price ranged from 9 to 13 cents apiece. However, one day share price of NEI Webworld rose in 45 minutes from $8 per share to $15.5-16, and half an hour later it fell to 25 cents per share. The defendants made ​​a profit of 362,625 US dollars (Benjamin, 2011).

In another federal case in Los Angeles, a man who worked for California company PairGain Technologies, created a fake website Bloomberg news, which had fake news about the impending PairGain Technologies acquisition by an Israeli company. He sent fraudulent e-mail messages with links to fake Bloomberg news site to financial news bulletins. On that day PairGain Technologies shares rose by about 30% before the company issued its own refuting press release (Wanless, 2010).

At the moment in San Diego, there is a federal prosecution of massive fraud using the Internet and telemarketing to attract potential investors in the so-called “general partnerships” involving investments in “high technology”, such as Internet shopping mall and Internet access providers. The scheme defrauded more than 3,000 victims nationwide for nearly $ 50 million (Miller, 2013).

Corruption, as one of the types of economic crimes, is very common in our society and it slows the development of the country. In the anti-corruption fight it is recommended to implement legislative reform, which would bring not harsher penalties for corruption, but simplification and reduction of state control (reducing the frequency of inspections, tax cuts) in order to reduce the very possibility of abuse official position.

However, legislative actions of the State can not make a decisive breakthrough in the fight against corruption (at least because of the fact that the fight against corruption sometimes is headed by corrupt officials). Decisive success is only possible by increasing the dependence of the state of citizens. This requires such long-term institutional reform as reducing the number and size of authorities, creation of special or even independent of the State institutes authorized to investigate allegations of corruption (for example, Sweden and some other countries have institution of Ombudsman), introduction of ethical standards for authorities, etc. Finally, the fight against corruption is impossible without the help of whistleblowers. In the US, the informant receives from 15% to 30% of identified material damage and he is protected from persecution of violators (Kim, 2012).

Economists say that successful fight against corruption provides immediate benefits that are many times higher than the related expenses. According to some estimates, $1 spent for the fight with corruption brings an average of 23 dollars in the fight against corruption at the level of state and about 250 dollars in the fight at the international level (Brody, 2010).

General recommendations to fight white collar crime in the community include the following actions by the state:

• ensuring political and economic stability in the society
• creating legal framework necessary for effective fight against economic crimes
• improving the system of government agencies dealing with economic crimes
• increasing control of the public authorities for the activities of enterprises, which commit most economic crimes, including the activities of their officers and materially responsible persons
• strengthening preventive, precautionary actions of authorities fighting with economic crimes (in particular, explore conditions that contributed to the commission of crimes and take measures to prevent further similar crimes).

Fighting white-collar crime is one of the main problems of modern society. This struggle must be carried out in all possible ways. Since the damage from such crimes is huge, the end justifies any means. According to the FBI, between 2007 and 2009, white-collar crimes amounted 3.8% of all crimes committed in the United States. Despite their relatively small number, annual average white-collar crime costs victims much more than ordinary theft or robbery. For example, average property crime costs a victim $1.8 thousand, while the average white-collar property crime costs $9.2 thousand. White-collar crimes today account 42% of all crimes committed by using a computer (Akopyan, 2010). Many experts expect the growth of this number. According to National Fraud Center, the number of arrests for white-collar crime, especially fraud and misappropriation of corporate funds, has increased dramatically over the past few years, while the number of arrests for crimes related to violence against the person declines.

White-collar crime is very dangerous. It causes great damage to society and country as a whole and, ultimately, each of us. Today, fight with this type of crime is of utmost importance. State and federal laws, and the US Constitution give the federal government the authority to curb white-collar crimes. A number of federal agencies, including FBI, Tax and the US Secret Service, US Customs Service, Agency for Environmental Protection, deal with white-collar crimes. In addition, most states use their agencies to fight white-collar crime. Penalties for white collar crime are very strict, much more severe than for other crimes (Waldie, 2010).

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Law Enforcement: White-Collar and Corporate Crimes Essay

White-collar crime as described by Edward Sutherland from the interactionist school of thought is crimes committed by people of high social status and class. It includes crimes such as fraud, embezzlement, bankruptcy fraud, insider dealing, public corruption, identity theft, pension fund crime, occupational crime, and the likes of all those activities that are done by people of high standards and education. These crimes are usually done through computers or by means of paper. They account for around $300b in losses as stated by the FBI. It is also a fact that these crimes largely go undetected and are therefore a huge threat to the sustenance of economic growth in any country.

White-collar crimes are essentially based individually. They are hard to catch but when they are it is often seen that their punishment is far less than what petty criminals get for stealing a mere television set. Often their payoffs are greater than the hard time they have to face with the law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, the exact extent of their victims is hard to diffuse. Essentially white-collar criminals are motivated to carry out various acts of fraud because of greed or their current economical positions.

There is hardly any difference between them and petty street criminals as both are after the same thing sustenance, the only difference perhaps lies in the fact that white-collar criminals are more sophisticated in their means of carrying out crimes and are not easily caught whilst the petty street criminal has to face the consequences. (Keel, 2008)

Professional crime is different from corporate crime in the sense that it is carried out for the benefit of the individual alone and not for the corporation as a whole and almost always the victim is the client alone. So there is a direct link with the client. However, when it comes to corporate crime the victim cannot be easily identified as the victims are society as a whole, the employees, the shareholders, the customers, etc (Keel, 2008)

Corporate crimes are those that are committed by business entities or by individuals who can be identified with the business corporation. They are responsible for huge losses and their victims are infallibly the public at large. When it comes to the impact of these crimes clearly the winner is atrocities committed by big corporations. Such is the case of the pharmaceuticals company and the incident of the poison cyanide that killed several people and impaired several more. Incidentally, people are more hateful towards corporate crimes as opposed to professional crimes. They would rather see severe consequences for big business entities than individuals and rightly so as the losses and damage were done by big companies Enron which is a case in point have long-lasting effects and unnerving results. (Erman, 2005)

Unlike white-collar crime, a corporate crime includes a wide range of misbehavior at the corporate level most of which is serious in nature. It includes giving false statements of assets thus deceiving and manipulating potential investors, occupational safety health hazards, exploitation of labor, misleading advertisements, formation of illegal monopolies, environmental as well as moral degradation, corrupting people, and bribing them all for the purpose of corporate benefits.

Thus we can understand from this that corporate crime has bigger fish to catch and it does not focus solely on individual benefits such as in the case of white-collar crimes but focuses on the attainment of profits that can prove fruitful for the entire company.

Corporate offenses are hard to study as one must have knowledge of not only criminal law but civil and administrative laws as well. Furthermore, a lot more funds are required to study this area of concern as opposed to white-collar crime. Even though corporate crimes have a far-fetched effect on society as compared to conventional professional crimes they are usually not given much media coverage. In fact, the last time such mega coverage was given to acts of corruption by corporations was when the Enron case became highly publicized in the early 2000s. (Clinard and Yeager, 2005)

The most striking difference between the two lies in the resultant impacts. As mentioned before professional crimes have impacts at an individual level but the damage done by corporations is massive. They sell faulty products to millions of their consumers, they collude with one another and keep prices outrageously high thus stealing from consumers, they give false information on their asset holdings and this leads to the defrauding of thousands of investors and pensioners. Similarly, unsafe working conditions put the lives of millions of workers in danger, and have workplace hazards have resulted in the death of millions of workers. (Clinard and Yeager, 2005)

More importantly when it comes to calculating the cost of corporate crimes and those committed by professionals corporate crime far exceeds the amount as compared to the latter. In fact, the cost of corporate crime far exceeds the cost of all kinds of crimes put together such as burglaries, thefts, arsons, and robberies. When corporate crimes do come in court they almost always get away because they have enough resources to fight any case against them whereas a mere white-collar professional is hard to let off the hook.

Furthermore, corporations or corporate officials cannot be stigmatized as criminals and they hardly come in that domain anyway. At a professional level, the story is a little different. Since they are the sole perpetrators of a specific crime they have to bear the stigmatized label of criminal and undertake a heavier penalty. (Clinard and Yeager, 2005)

Corporate crime is more efficient when it comes to undertaking bribery and corruption is more rampant in this case as compared to white-collar crimes. It takes into account window-dressing which although may not be a crime but can still be misleading as it does not take into account the principle of prudence. Furthermore, misinterpretations and deliberate miscalculations in the accountancy department also lead to fraud. (Clinard and Yeager, 2005)

Lastly, the level of power and influence between a corporation and an individual professional is massive. This great difference explains why crimes conducted on behalf of or by corporations are not easily penalized as opposed to those that are carried out by white-collar professionals.

David Erman, 2005, responses to corporate versus individual wrongdoing. Web.

Marshall B Clinard, Peter C. Yeager. Corporate Crime, 2005. Web.

Robert O Keel, White Collar Crime, 2008. Web.

White Collar Crime. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, September 23). Law Enforcement: White-Collar and Corporate Crimes. https://ivypanda.com/essays/law-enforcement-white-collar-and-corporate-crimes/

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Bibliography

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Home / Essay Samples / Crime / White Collar Crime / White-Collar Crime In Education Sector

White-Collar Crime In Education Sector

• Category: Crime , Education
• Topic: Organized Crime , Research , White Collar Crime

Pages: 4 (1920 words)

Views: 1688

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Background of Research

Research problem & rationale, research purpose, objectives & question, research question, the study is designed to answer the following research questions:.

• How auditors react when suspicion of white-collar crime emerges?
• What is the most appropriate situational approach to actions on suspicion of white-collar crime in universities of Kohat?

Justify your epistemological & ontological position of research?

Ontological position of research, epistemological position of research.

• What is knowledge?
• How do we gain knowledge?
• How do we know reality

What research philosophy is more suitable for your research? Justify your answer?

Philosophy of research.

• Post Positivism
• Constructivism (often combined with Interpretivism)
• Advocacy / Participatory
• The reality is multiple because during interviewing the individuals (auditors), it is quite possible that they have different views about action on suspicion of white-collar crime in universities. The case of multiple realities is used in constructivism.
• The responses from respondents are collected at specific point in time, so there is chance of variation in responses if researcher collects the same information from same individuals after some period. Therefore, study will considered time bound which is another belief of constructivism.
• Similarly, the reality is context bound & cannot be generalized because the data was collected only from Kohat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan; it is not necessary, the response to action on suspicion on white-collar crime will same in countries other than Pakistan. Therefore, the study is context bound & findings of study may prove false across the geographical boundaries. This is also a function of constructivism.
• The reality is subjective because it is based on experiences of the respondents & explained from their perspectives. Subjectivism also deals with constructivism.
• It is impossible to capture the reality through formula or law of any discipline, so researcher is trying to explore the reality and constructivism is philosophy where things or objects are explored.
• While, collecting the responses of individuals about actions on suspicion of white-collar crime in education sector, the researcher was very active & close to the participants with intention to constitute the reality based upon themes developed from cluster of responses.
• The reality is interpretive because the researcher makes the interpretation of what he find from the individuals during the interview.
• The responses of individuals (auditors) are shaped by researcher’s own experiences, making sense or interpreting the meanings of responses.
• Bookman, A. (2008). Innovative models of aging in place: Transforming our communities for an aging population. Community, Work & Family, 11(4), 419-438.
• P Gottschalk (2011, Professional Issues in Criminal Justice Vol. 6(1&2), 2011; Actions on Suspicions of White-Collar Crime in Business Organizations, an empirical study conducted on intended responses of Chief Financial Officers in Norway
• Sutherland, E. H. , Geis, G. , & Goff, C. (1983). White collar crime: The uncut version (Vol. 58). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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