As famous balladeer Woody Guthrie sang in “Pretty Boy Floyd”:
“Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered/
I’ve seen lots of funny men/
Some will rob you with a six-gun/
And some with a fountain pen/”
While I mostly write about blue-collar criminals and their utilization of strong-arm tactics in my crime fiction, the ways and means of white collar criminals are fascinating and instructive.
Take for example in 2012 Wells Fargo, the world’s largest bank, paid a $175 million settlement with the government because “…mortgage brokers working with Wells Fargo had charged higher fees and rates to more than 30,000 minority borrowers across the country than they had to White borrowers who posed the same credit risk.”
In 2010, Wachovia Bank, acquired by Wells Fargo in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, reached a $160 million settlement with the Justice Department over allegations that a failure in bank controls enabled drug traffickers to launder drug money by transferring money from Mexican currency-exchange houses to the bank. Prosecutors said the bank processed $420 billion in transactions without using proper money-laundering detection. The bank had already set aside money to cover the penalty from their profits in the deal.
On the homefront, white-collar shenanigans of a more personal nature are on display as recently reported in the March 12 Los Angeles Times. A former lawyer, James V. Reiss, who did work for the Metropolitan Transit Authority was convicted of stealing some $2 million from the agency. His job was to defend the MTA in injury lawsuits. Reiss was busted submitting fake invoices and other documents, and making off with settlement monies as well as bilking other clients out of a cool million or so.
Then there’s the case of former senior Department of Building and Safety inspector Samuel In, sentenced to 2 1/2 years prison time for bribery. He pleaded guilty last year to signing off on permits of at least a dozen properties—that he either didn’t inspect at all or were not compliant with code—in the Koreatown area from roughly 2007 through 2010. He was ordered by the judge to repay some $30,000.
As has been reported in print and on television, the FBI had set up a sting operation targeting the city’s Department of Building and Safety in 2010 based on an allegation by an informant. Two inspectors were caught on tape accepting cash from people seeking permits. They both pleaded guilty and received prison sentences. Two other department employees were dismissed in connection with the city’s internal investigation of wrongdoing. The informant also alleged contractors could pay off inspectors by providing building materials for Building and Safety projects, paying laborers to work at properties owned by inspectors, and paid for a vacation for a Building and Safety inspector.
Even as In does his time in the joint, he’ll be getting paid. Due to a quirk in the law (State law dictates that public employees convicted of a felony had to give up their retirement benefits earned during the period when their crimes were committed. But the City of L.A., which administers its own retirement system, is exempt.), he keeps his $72,000 pension—money he can use to pay off his restitution.
Now if that isn’t a riff on Woody’s words then I don’t know what is. Guess I better go catch those re-runs of White Collar, the light-hearted show on basic cable about a conman pressed into service catching others of his ilk, like crooked bankers and double-dipping politicians for the FBI. There’s lessons to be learned—strictly in a research way of course.
Gary Phillips’ latest work is The Extractors, a novella about a mysterious man called McBleak, a “one percenter” who steals from other one percenters, available on Kindle and all other e-readers.
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