The Most Beautiful Woman in the World stared at the space in front of the house where her car should have been. She called her kids. None of them had borrowed the car.
It was gone. Stolen.
The car was recovered and repaired, but it's not the same. The steering wheel doesn't quite fit the way the old one did. Neither does the radio, which isn't quite as nice as the one that used to sit in the dash. The sheet music for the chorus and the CDs that belonged to the kids are gone.
When you lose something important, your world changes. That's what happened to a lot of people who owned stock in companies like Enron. Their stock represented money. It represented retirement plans. It represented security. One day it was there, and the next day it was gone.
When something you value is ripped away, you get angry. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World is angry at the people who stole her car and trashed it. She doesn't get angry often, but she wants the thieves caught and punished. She's hurt and she's angry.
Everybody who lost money at companies like Enron and Worldcom and Adelphia and others knows that feeling. There are lots of those people, too, because more Americans own stock today than ever before.
As recently as 1993 only about a fifth of all US households owned stock, but by 2000, thanks to the Dot-Com Bubble, 401(K) plans and online trading, that had shot up to more than half. So when the stock market or an individual stock like Enron dove it affected the wealth of a lot of us. We're angry over our losses, but it's more than that.
We're angry because we know that when everything is said and done, fat cats like Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and Bernie Ebbers are going to wind up better off financially than most of us could ever dream of being. The simple fact is that very few of these folks ever get caught and fewer get prosecuted.
In the period from 1992 to 2001 the Securities and Exchange Commission referred 609 cases to the Justice Department for possible criminal charges. You can do the math. That's about sixty cases a year. Not all of those cases even got prosecuted.
The Justice Department decided to prosecute less than two hundred of them. Less than twenty a year. But guess what? Only 87 of the convicted white-collar criminals spent even a single day in jail.
Now look at how the punishment seems to match up to crime. To get an idea of how out of whack it is, let's go back to the last really, really big business scandal, the one involving the Savings and Loan industry.
That scandal broke in the late Eighties and early Nineties. The convicted fat cat criminals got an average of three years in jail. Sound harsh? A person convicted of burglary was likely to get almost five years for a crime involving less than $300. The S & L folks took $3.5 billion.
When the fat cat goes to prison, he doesn't go to one like you see on reality TV. He's not going to the same prison that the burglar goes to. Instead, our fat cat crook is going to a place like the Duluth Federal Prison Camp. It's one of several that are known as "Club Fed."
This prison is "more like junior high school with uniforms," according to Stan Gotlieb who actually spent some time there. Sure you have to sleep in a barracks, but you might get lobster for dinner if the chef can get a good deal on it.
Want to get angrier? Our fat cat crooks can invest their money in places that are safe from prosecution. Ken Lay for example has a few of these investments that will give him an income of almost a million dollars a year, no matter what he's convicted of.
Maybe we feel like Marcellus Wallace, a character in the movie Pulp Fiction. He wants to torture someone who's done him wrong with pipes and pliers and a blowtorch. Marcellus refers to this as "getting medieval." Not a bad idea. Why fantasize about just sending these fat cats to a real jail, when we can dream about getting medieval? Dante knew about that.
In the Inferno Dante created a Hell that is very different from the equal opportunity, one-size-fits-all Hell that I learned about in Sunday School. In that Hell everybody burned for eternity. It didn't matter if you'd gone on a multi-state killing spree or just stolen money for candy from your mom's purse. Everybody burned in the same fire.
Dante's Hell has nine different levels, which he calls circles. Dante outlines specific, graded punishment designed to fit the crime.
Legislators should be in Dante's hell, but not very far down. They didn't actually create the problem, but they didn't do much to fix it either. Now they're going to pass a lot of ill-considered legislation quickly so they look like they're doing something.
Any legislator who blamed the other party for the problem should be forced to do a public accounting of his or her campaign contributions on prime time TV. A second offense would require a public review of the legislator's voting record on any issue affecting a large corporation and a detailed description of his or her investments.
Then go way down to deepest Circle of Hell, the Ninth Circle. That's where I'd like to see folks like Ken Lay. He was selling stock because he knew Enron was in trouble. But he told his employees and stockholders that things were just fine. They trusted him and he broke that trust. He made money while they believed him and lost their retirement and savings and jobs.
Imagine Mr. Lay there, in the depths of hell as the demons strip him of his money and position. Imagine his victims able to take some revenge. Blowtorches and pliers might be appropriate.
That's the kind of fantasy that the Most Beautiful Woman in the World has about the people who stole her car. She thinks it would be great if she could just hit the thief hard in the face. But it's a fantasy, like getting medieval with fat cat crooks. In the real world we have to tone things down a bit.
There are some things we can do.
Let's not lose sight of the fact that white collar crimes are real crimes. They might look fancy, but they're still lying, cheating and stealing dressed in a nice suit. They might even look victimless, but they're not.
Treat them like real crimes. Prosecute them aggressively. Put some fat cat crooks in jail. Not Club Fed jail, either. Send some of these fat cats to real jail, the kind a poor kid would go to. They did the crime. Now they can do the time.
Remember the victims. They're the folks who used to have a retirement plan, or used to have a job. They aren't statistics, they're people. They've had things taken away and they should have a shot at getting some of it back.
Get serious about restitution. No criminal who destroyed the retirement plans of people who trusted him should be allowed to live in luxury, until and unless he's made restitution to the victims.
It's not getting medieval. But it's a start.
This feature appeared on 29 July 2002
