[HN Gopher] Life After White Collar Crime
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Life After White Collar Crime
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-08-28 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| simonw wrote:
| Love this detail: "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."
| paulcole wrote:
| Reminds me of the Tour de France. Where you basically can't
| find anybody to give a vacated title to because everybody else
| in line has been guilty of doping, too.
| duncan-donuts wrote:
| Yeah looking at the legs of pro cyclists and it's clear
| they're all doping. At this point idk why we don't let pros
| dope and just accept it. Baseball went through this 20 years
| ago but was there another period as exciting as
| Bonds/Sosa/McGwire? We've had flashes of incredible players
| but doping made the game a more exciting game.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I think 2000-2003 was just an extreme outlier in corporate
| malfience. Nowadays ,with technology rise of high tech and big
| retail, there hardly seem to be any noteworthy arrests.
| Businesses these days are so successfull and profitable, such
| as ads or intellectual property, no need to cheat and steal.
| Rather than outright fraud vcs get burned by overinflated
| expectations like wework.
| ghaff wrote:
| And Sarbox was put in place partly in response. I won't argue
| that 1.) stuff doesn't still happen and that 2.) Sarbox
| doesn't add quite a bit of compliance overhead, but outright
| financial fraud is probably reduced from ~2000 considerably.
|
| Obviously 2008 brought many examples of risk not being
| properly accounted for but that's mostly something different.
| lucretian wrote:
| FTA:
|
| "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."
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I heard under Bush, the SEC budget was cut drastically.
|
| This couldn't be right, but I heard at one time, it was
| down to eight employees, and two room in a federal
| building's basement.
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or they haven't come crashing down just yet... It seems as
| long as things appear fine nothing will happen.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| With zero, or low, internet rates the wealthy boys might not
| have to cheat as much?
|
| Just throw it into a pumped up stock market, and watch the
| money flow in?
|
| It's basically only the wealthy whom have access to that free
| money though.
|
| The poor are screwed as usual. I still miss my 5% cd rates.
| blueyes wrote:
| This is a great piece, the deep reporting of the old New Yorker.
| Some highlights:
|
| > 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."
|
| ....
|
| > 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.
|
| ....
|
| > 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > As he told me recently, "Business rewards a certain type of
| attitude and assertiveness--all things that will get you killed
| in prison."
|
| Are these people going to the same sort of prisons where
| getting killed is a serious risk?
| elliekelly wrote:
| I think getting killed is a serious risk in _every_ prison in
| America. Even in the minimum security facilities where people
| serve sentences for non-violent crimes.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Do you actually know anyone who's been to prison? What's
| your source for this?
|
| I do know someone (I'm not going to disclose any details to
| protect his privacy). But I don't think he'd agree with you
| on that.
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, it's seems to be on the increase:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/220920/number-of-
| state-p...
|
| And given that there are ~ 1.8 million people in prison
| in the US, you have 1 in 15000 chances to be murdered in
| prison per year.
|
| For context, your chances are 1 in 20000 in the general
| US population [1].
|
| [1] From the reported 5 per 100,000 people murder rate,
| which includes the 0,5% of the population in prison
| (though the latter is such a small percentage that
| doesn't really change the general result).
| Retric wrote:
| That's showing 120 murders across just sate prisons. "
| 1,291,000 people were in state prison, 631,000 in local
| jails, 226,000 in federal prisons, 44,000 in youth
| correctional facilities, 42,000 in immigration detention
| camps, 22,000 in involuntary commitment, 11,000 in
| territorial prisons, 2,500 in Indian Country jails, and
| 1,300 in United States military prisons.[8]" https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
|
| So it's 1 in 10,000 per year aka a 1 in 500 shot of being
| murdered in a 20 year prison sentence which seems
| dangerous but still unlikely.
| Animats wrote:
| _Wall Street Prison Consultants promises to "ensure you serve
| the shortest sentence possible in the most favorable
| institution."_ This is an actual business.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.wallstreetprisonconsultants.com/
| cbozeman wrote:
| I love that this exists.
|
| God Bless America.
| blueyes wrote:
| Separately, shout out to Richard Bronson, a founder who appears
| in this story, and whose YC startup Commissary Club tries to
| get former convicts to adjust to life after prison:
| https://www.commissary.club
|
| I believe there's a lot of work to be done to help people re-
| integrate with society.
|
| This is a theme with YC. Another cool startup they have backed
| is: Recidiviz https://www.recidiviz.org
| paulpauper wrote:
| Or how about ppl who don't go to jail. I am sure there are
| plenty of those who need help. So if going to jail for 2
| years means I will get a more help and opportunity then I
| otherwise would get, maybe it is a good tradeoff.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Congrats, you've just described nearly every other
| company's hiring procedure...
| burnished wrote:
| I think the reason you're talking about this in the
| hypothetical instead of doing it is because you know it
| isn't a good trade off and you're being incredibly glib.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >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.
|
| so - America has an extremely large prison population. I've
| never heard this before though. I mean I've heard the money has
| trace amounts of drugs thing, but not when visiting family
| members in prison don't touch paper money.
|
| You'd think it was a common problem, people touching paper
| money and setting off scanners and then getting stopped,
| searched and maybe questioned depending on a lot of stuff, like
| skin color. Being black and touching money on the day of
| visiting a relative in prison must be in some ways an extremely
| dangerous thing to do.
|
| Unless of course this guy is full of shit. Or I just haven't
| heard of this problem which I guess is also a possibility, it's
| just - my sensors are going off here.
| SilasX wrote:
| Yeah I thought white collar criminals got sent to minimum
| security "resort" prisons where they'd be less stringent
| about this kind of thing and not be likely to have super
| sensitive scanners like these.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| This smells to me like a myth spread by prison staff to
| explain away false positives and/or discourage drug
| smuggling.
| cmckn wrote:
| Highly doubt this kind of equipment is present at the
| majority of institutions, or that it's sensitive enough to
| find the trace of a trace amount like this. Sounds cool for a
| movie, though
| hammock wrote:
| Why? Prison contracts are big business. I've seen even
| small prisons with giant x-ray body scanners (the kind that
| were removed from airports, actually not those but more
| serious ones where you stand on a conveyor belt and your
| exposure is a full 3-5 seconds).
|
| A mass spectrometer of the type they use at airports for
| explosives, can be used for drugs and easily acquired by
| any prison.
| [deleted]
| paulpauper wrote:
| _"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._
|
| Are you kidding me. 18 months (of which he will likely only serve
| 12 behind bars) for stealing $350k seems very lenient. He should
| have put it in bitcoin would have made $1.8 million or about 10
| years at NASA. People have gotten longer sentences back in the
| 2000s for fraud on ebay. I would say he got very very lucky to
| only get 18 months for such blatent fruad.
| GDC7 wrote:
| I always find myself looking at the uber successful and thinking:
| "society is discounting the possibility of them being frauds"
|
| In the end only them know if they broke the laws or not, but for
| sure it's not the 0% which society implies.
|
| Trump has been mentioned and the consensus around him is pretty
| high that he committed white collar crimes, but at the same time
| I think that the intelligencia pricing Obama's possibility of
| white collar crimes at 0% is too low.
|
| Same goes for the elite of the elite in business:
|
| Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin...only them know what they
| did, and if something about them emerges it should be received as
| a surprise ....but not that huge of a surprise if you get what I
| mean.
|
| Musk we know that he has repeatedly violated securities laws, but
| for sure there is much more brewing below the surface that we
| don't know of.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/NIjjz
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(page generated 2021-08-28 23:00 UTC)