[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)
 
web link (www.newyorker.com)
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)