Why They Do It

Getting inside the mind of a white-collar criminal.

BernardMadoffWhy do people commit white-collar crimes? What makes people who are generally not truly desperate, and who generally have decent lives, decide to do things that could, and often do, land them in jail?

I think about this a lot in my job, and especially when we’re coming up on sentencing. As I wrote about last time, a lawyer’s job at sentencing is to show the judge that his client is a living, breathing human being, and not just the sum of his crimes or the number spat out by the infernal Sentencing Guidelines.

And you often can’t do that effectively without answering one simple question: why did he do it?

A recent book, which I’m surprised hasn’t received more attention, attempts to answer that question.

It’s called Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of White-Collar Criminal (affiliate link). Author Eugene Soltes, a Harvard Business School professor with four degrees (wait, is that redundant?), attempts to answer that question by reviewing some recent high-profile white-collar cases and speaking, often at great length, with some of the members of the white-collar Hall of Fame. (I think it’s somewhere in Jersey.)

Bernie Madoff. Andrew Fastow. Dennis Kozlowski. Robert Allen Stanford. They’re all in there.

In an interview with Fortune, Soltes was asked, “Were most of the white-collar criminals fundamentally like you and me, or were they sociopaths?”

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His answer, unsurprisingly, was that most of them are like us — ordinary people who just happened to be in extraordinary positions:

Once they’ve been indicted or convicted, we tend to distance them from ourselves and say we’d never do this. We’re not like them. But when we look at their errors more carefully, they’re actually ones we are all susceptible to making. The main difference is that we are not generally in those types of leadership positions that when we make an error it actually has that kind of cataclysmic consequences on thousands or tens of thousands of people.

He also notes that it’s a lot easier to steal from people when you’re not looking right at them:

The main challenge that not just managers face, but that we all face as humans, is that we’re not hardwired to detect harm that we’re doing when the harm is distant. It’s not enough to know the difference between right and wrong. One actually has to feel that one’s actions are harmful to avoid going forward. So take something like insider trading. You don’t see the victims. It’s actually impossible in many instances to identify who those victims are. So it’s not surprising that if you engage in insider trading, there’s not going to be any internal alarm screaming out that you’re engaging in some extraordinarily heinous crime.

In my experience, this is often true. It is easy to perceive the victims in white-collar crimes in the aggregate, particularly the more abstract the crime itself is.

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And I think there’s a deeper reason why people commit these crimes — one about which another book, published almost 75 years before this one, provides remarkable insight.

In The Screwtape Letters (affiliate link), C.S. Lewis used the wonderful conceit of an old devil (Screwtape) writing letters to his nephew, a young devil named Wormwood, and instructing him in the finer arts of temptation. In one passage, Screwtape has just finished telling Wormwood how to draw his subject — all devils are assigned to a particular person — gently, almost imperceptibly, away from the right path.

He ends the letter this way:

It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

I have been in the room with many clients who have lived through this; I actually once quoted that passage at a sentencing. These people started down the path slowly, not quickly. And before they knew it, they, too, were in this hell.

Why do they do it? They do it because they’re human, just like you and me.


Justin Dillon is a partner at KaiserDillon PLLC in Washington, DC, where he focuses on white-collar criminal defense and campus disciplinary matters. Before joining the firm, he worked as an Assistant United States Attorney in Washington, DC, and at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. His email is jdillon@kaiserdillon.com.