White Collar Criminals Quotes

It was a white-collar crime.” Illium gave her an odd look. “In the human world, such crimes are lightly punished, though they harm hundreds, leading some to choose death out of despair, while the man who beats a single person is considered the worse criminal.

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

People aren't pissed just to be pissed. They're mad because a tiny group of crooks on Wall Street built themselves beach houses in the Hamptons through a crude fraud scheme that decimated their retirement funds, caused property values in their neighborhoods to collapse and caused over four million people to be put in foreclosure.

Government has coddled, accepted, and ignored white collar crime for too long. It is time the nation woke up and realized that it's not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it's the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most. They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives.

Reagan's promise to enhance the federal government's role in fighting crime was complicated by the fact that fighting street crime has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local law enforcement. After a period of initial confusion and controversy...the Justice Department announced its intention to cut in half the number of specialists assigned to identify and prosecute white collar criminals and to shift its attention to street crime, especially drug-law enforcement.

However, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. The fact that people tend to carry umbrellas when it rains creates a high correlation between umbrella carrying and rain showers. However, it is obvious that choosing to carry an umbrella does not cause rainfall.

Hirschi was convinced that people who were usefully busy didn’t commit crimes. “The child playing ping-pong, swimming in the community pool, or doing his homework,” he said, “is not committing delinquent acts.” Hirschi didn’t spend a whole lot of time looking at people who had good jobs and became criminals anyway, completely ignoring in this way a whole class of crime. White-collar crime by its very nature involves a high degree of self-control and planning. It’s committed almost overwhelmingly by people who had enough self-mastery to make it through high school and college and hold down good jobs.

Excerpt from page 3 of "Wicked Washington" Shelly Williams, the main character, speaking about her life: And close and dangerous calls were almost my last name. Yet I felt as comfortable among the street hustlers, junkies, thieves, and criminals of D.C. as I did dining with my white-collar, college-pedigreed friends over filet mignon, Maine lobster, and strawberry cheesecake at LaMermaid Seafood Restaurant.

The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended - indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized not as crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.

In the mid-1980s, Congress authorized the creation of the US Sentencing Commission to examine prison terms and codify norms to correct the arbitrary punishments meted out by unaccountable judges. First, in 1989 the commission’s guidelines for individuals went into effect, establishing a point system for how many years of prison a convicted criminal might get, based on the seriousness of the misconduct and a person’s criminal history. In 1991, amid public and congressional outrage that sentences for white-collar criminals were too light and fines and sanctions for corporations too lenient, the Sentencing Commission expanded the concept to cover organizations. It formalized the Sporkin-era regime of offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and reform. The new rules delineated factors that could earn a culprit mercy. In levying a fine, the court should consider, the sentencing guidelines said, “any collateral consequences of conviction.” 1 “Collateral consequences” was, and remains, an ill-defined concept. How worried should the government be if a punishment causes a company to go out of business? Should regulators worry about the cashiering of innocent employees? What about customers, suppliers, or competitors? Should they fret about financial crises? From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: “too big to jail.” Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America’s “Wild West” of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father. New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world’s epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa. Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever. After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach. While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced medical equipment and drugs, my father and I documented our notorious and cinematic life together as equal parts biography and memoir. This is our story.

In the end, therefore, the successful prosecution of environmental crimes may not be so much about the complexity of the laws and the competence of those agencies struggling to enforce them, but rather about changing a fundamental reluctance in American society to accept white-collar criminals as true criminals. When that happens, they may start being treated as such.

white-collar crime costs the communities in which it occurs more money than common crimes, but because white-collar criminals steal with a pencil they get away with it, while the eighteen-year-old kid who steals with a gun goes to prison for a long time.

In stark contrast were the white-collar criminals who appeared before Shoob. Most were the people about whom Kennedy spoke—people who had been given opportunities. Their crimes were those of the well educated and well heeled, crimes of greed, arrogance, and a blatant disregard for the rules that governed the rest of society—crimes that Uhlmann realized did arouse the anger in him. It pissed him off. When

Let's consider the facts: Carole is comfortably installed at a research university—dysfunctional, yes; second tier, without question—but we do have a modest reputation here at Payne. Shepardville, on the other hand, is a third-tier private college teetering at the edge of a potato field and is still lightly infused with the tropical flavor of offbeat fundamentalism propagated by its millionaire founder, a white-collar criminal who is currently—correct me if I'm wrong—atoning for multiple financial missteps in the Big House in Texas. You've reinvented yourselves and gone secular, but clearly, in various pockets and odd recesses of the campus, glassy-eyed recidivists and fanatics are still screaming hosannas, denying the basic tenets of science, and using a whetstone to sharpen their teeth.

many of the issues I discuss in this book are not simply about senior executives who face criminal punishment, but are just as applicable to others who are enmeshed in murky situations who are never likely to face a public reckoning.

Society must show that blue-collar crime never pays. Insidious white-collar crime pays very well, and nothing is declared. It's the same reason why Financial Education, probably the most important subject of all, is absent from the general school curriculum - to keep the have-nots ignorant and the establishment's riches safe.

For as long as statistics have been kept, blacks have had higher crime rates than whites. Containing crime is one of the top priorities of any society, so it is perplexing that the United States has added to its crime problem through immigration. Hispanics, who have been by far the most numerous post-1965 immigrant group, commit crimes at rates lower than blacks but higher than whites. Some people claim that all population groups commit crimes at the same rates, and that racial differences in incarceration rates reflect police and justice system bias. This view is wrong. The US Department of Justice carefully tracks murder, which is the violent crime for which racial data on victim and perpetrator are most complete. In 2005, the department noted that blacks were six times more likely than whites to be victims of murder and seven times more likely to commit murder. There are similar differences for other crimes. The United States regularly conducts a huge, 100,000-person crime study known as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), in which Americans are asked to describe the crimes of which they have been victim during the year, and to indicate race of perpetrator. NCVS figures are therefore a reliable indication of the racial distribution of violent criminals. The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is another huge database that records the races of all suspects reported to the police as well as those arrested by police. Both these data sets prove that blacks commit a vastly disproportionate amount of violent crime. In fact, blacks are arrested less frequently than would be expected from reports by crime victims of the race of perpetrator. Racial differences in arrest rates reflect racial differences in crime rates, not police bias. Justice Department figures show that blacks commit crimes and are incarcerated at roughly 7.2 times the white rate, and Hispanics at 2.9 times the white rate. (Asians are the least crime-prone group in America, and are incarcerated at only 22 percent of the white rate.) Robbery or “mugging” shows the greatest disparities, with blacks offending at 15 times and Hispanics at just over four times the white rate. There are practically no crimes blacks and Hispanics do not commit at higher rates than whites, whether it is larceny, car theft, drug offenses, burglary, rape, or alcohol offenses. Even for white collar crimes—fraud, racketeering, bribery/conflict of interest, embezzlement—blacks are incarcerated at three to five times the white rate, and Hispanics at about twice the white rate. Racial differences in crime rates are such an embarrassment they can interfere with law enforcement. In 2010 the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority had a problem with scores of young people openly beating fares—which cuts into revenue and demoralizes other riders. It considered a crackdown, but decided against it. The scoff-laws were overwhelmingly black, and the transit authority did not have the stomach to take any action that would fall heavily on minorities.

America rarely prosecutes white-collar criminals. Even after the 2008 financial crisis, despite widespread illegal conduct that destroyed lives around the country, just one banker went to jail; in contrast, back in the 1980s, almost nine hundred bankers were jailed in the aftermath of the savings and loan scandal. Without much discussion, we have created a two-tier justice system. If you shoplift at the grocery store, you can be carted off to jail. But if you steal tens of millions of dollars from the tax authorities or fraudulently peddle dangerous drugs from a corporate suite, you’ll be hailed for your business savvy.

My intentions were good. I was trying to do what was best for Enron, but the way we as a company defined success was incorrect. We defined success by reported earnings and the stock price. We were not defining it as increasing economic value,