Corporate executives, bankers, stockbrokers, and other white-collar types commit fraud, insider trading and bribery. They peddle dangerous and faulty products or endanger the environment. If they’re caught, they and their companies might pay a fine, but it’s usually a manageable fee, and rarely does anyone go to jail.
Left behind are countless damaged or ruined lives: people who lose their homes because of bogus mortgages, their savings because of shady investments, or their loved ones to the abuse of prescription painkillers such as Oxycontin, marketed relentlessly by its manufacturer, Purdue Pharma.
If you feel there are two levels of justice in the country — one for the wealthy, and one for everyone else — you’re not alone, says Jennifer Taub. And in her new book, “Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime,” the Northampton legal scholar and writer brings a sense of quiet outrage to a subject she believes is causing untold damage to the country.
In her book, published by Viking, Taub offers a blunt assessment of the situation: “Everywhere you look, prominent predators are profiting off countless targets and then striding away with their catch. They might lie low for a brief period while waiting for the predictable public outcry to fade, and then they go out hunting again…. The rest of us are victims, directly or indirectly, even if we’ve never invested in their companies or bought their shoddy products.”
In a crisp, accessible writing style, Taub details some of the more egregious cases of white-collar crime that have made news in the past decade, such as Purdue Pharma (the company has just pleaded guilty to three felonies as part of an $8.3 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice) and Wells Fargo Bank, which had its employees open millions of accounts in the names of unsuspecting “customers”; those accounts were then used to collect overdraft fees and other charges.
Taub, who teaches at Western New England University School of Law and previously taught at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, among other schools, cites numerous other cases, such as the securities fraud and insider trading scandals of the 1980s involving figures like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, in which white-collar criminals have consistently gotten off easy, either escaping jail or doing relatively little time.
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, she notes, resigned “in shame” following the bank’s 2016 scandal, but his disgrace was softened by a $134 million golden parachute, and no senior executives of the company were charged in the case.
“Why does this keep happening?” Taub said in a recent phone interview. “Why don’t we take a harder position on white-collar crime, and why do we have this collective sense that it’s somehow a victimless crime?”
As just one example, she writes, the companies and people behind drugs such as Oxycontin are “as bad as the drug pusher on the street corner or the kingpins behind the cartel.”
Taub also says that when she took part in a promotional tour for her 2014 book, “Other People’s Houses,” a study of the 2008 financial meltdown and housing crisis, people kept asking her “Why didn’t any of the bankers go to jail?”
In retrospect, she notes, she didn’t have a clear understanding of that herself, “So I began looking into it. The book really began in 2016 when I had a sabbatical, and I used the time to begin my research.”
Personal exposure
Her interest in the subject goes back even further. Taub, a graduate of Harvard Law School who grew up in Michigan, started her law career in business in the 1990s. But then came a bad experience in the late 1990s, when she served as a marketing lawyer for what she calls “a promising start-up company” in Connecticut that then merged with another to form the Cendant Corporation in 1998. Cendant’s stock value quickly collapsed when it was discovered that some senior management figures from the start-up had been deeply involved in accounting fraud. Two of them went to jail.
“That eventually sent me into academia, which I’ve really come to love,” said Taub with a laugh. “I did not want to be a part of (private business) any longer.”
