CHAPTER EIGHT

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Crime and No Punishment

We love to punish people in America—some people, at least.

The United States is more punitive than any other advanced democratic society. We stand alone among such nations in putting people to death. We have “three strikes” policies that can send people to jail for life for petty theft. We are uniquely tough with the poor and unemployed, cutting off benefits to the jobless whether the economy has improved or not. We mete out long prison terms for drug offenses that are treated as personal health problems in Western Europe or Canada. We expel children from our schools for misbehavior under “zero tolerance” policies. For a while, we even had a Speaker of the House (Newt Gingrich) who advocated forcing unwed mothers to give up their children to orphanages.

Toughness runs deep in the veins of American culture. We imagine ourselves as a country where everyone is responsible for themselves and if you don’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps, something must be wrong with you. The linguist George Lakoff has called this “strict father morality”—a code stressing that personal improvement and social order are best achieved by tough rules along with swift punishment to enforce those rules. “The strict father wants his kids to become disciplined, pursue the self-interest, and become self-reliant and be good people because they are disciplined,” explains Lakoff.¹

Strict father morality jibes easily with laissez-faire ideas about the moral health that flows from competition, and it bolsters the conviction that government shouldn’t help people through social programs. Over the past quarter century, get-tough notions have spread in step with other values associated with the market and have helped to usher in big changes in our politics. Conservatives brought the curtain down on an era of liberal dominance in large part by caricaturing liberals as breeders of social pathology—as the indulgent political parents to violent criminals, lazy welfare moms, and thieving drug addicts. To save the day, and America’s soul, conservatives have promoted a society that is harsher, more punitive, and less forgiving—assuring us that these steps are for everyone’s own good.

And yet this toughness does not extend to everyone. While a punitive morality increasingly governs the lives of those in America with little wealth or power—the poor, minorities, immigrants—better-off Americans are actually coddled and nurtured more than ever, whatever their sins. Big-time white-collar criminals are untouched by prosecutors, SAT cheats go to Harvard, famous wrongdoers are feted by the media and paid six figures for their “confessions,” ex-cons emerge from country-club prisons with healthy tans and go on to make millions of dollars through insider business dealings.

These second chances aren’t doled out in Appalachia or Harlem or Roxbury. Indulgent morality thrives the most where the prerogatives of class privilege rule, big profits are at stake, and government enforcers have been disarmed.

And that is a lot of places.

 

A FEW YEARS BACK the co-valedictorian of Taylor Allderdice, the most prestigious public high school in Pittsburgh, was booed by some of his classmates at graduation. Flyers circulated in the audience raising “doubts” about the co-valedictorian’s “academic integrity.” The star student was from a well-to-do family. He had been enrolled in Allderdice’s Center for Advanced Studies, an academic track for the best of the best. There, amid feverish competition for Ivy League admission, he was allegedly one of three students who consulted a dictionary during the SAT. When another student reported the violation, an avalanche of cheating stories tumbled forward from honest students who had, till then, kept their mouths shuts about rampant cheating at Allderdice. Students were said to have offered money for homework and to have used their calculators to store prohibited information during math and science exams. Test stealing had allegedly become so brazen and widespread that a “repeat cheater” did not hesitate to run down the hall brandishing his prize, shouting, “I’ve got it!” One student, Lianne Mantione, commented about Allderdice: “Cheating has just been a way of life.”

What came of these troubling allegations? Nothing. Neither Taylor Allderdice nor the Educational Testing Service acted to penalize the alleged offenders in the SAT case, citing conflicting accounts of what happened. The so-called “chief cheater,” in fact, not only was made co-valedictorian of his class but headed off to a top college. The girl who initially reported the incident found herself harassed in the hallways. Her family received obscene phone calls in the middle of the night.²

The episode was deeply disillusioning to those students who played by the rules, but it was not surprising. People who have gone to Taylor Allderdice remember it as the kind of school where parents call up teachers to hassle them about their kids’ grades—and get the principal to hassle the teachers. It was also not uncommon at Allderdice for the principal to change student grades without the consent of teachers.

Graduates of America’s top high schools and colleges tell many similar stories about permissive environments where cheaters thrive. For example, Ronah Sandan, a recent graduate of Tenafly High School, describes a school where cheaters had nothing to fear and much to gain. Many of the students at Tenafly have wealthy parents; the kids drive new SUVs to school, chat away on their cell phones between class, and wear the latest designer clothes. To ensure their future position in the Winning Class, these high school students will do nearly anything to succeed. Cheating was rampant in Sandan’s advanced placement classes, filled with the top students in the school. “They had elaborate schemes for cheating in every class,” Sandan says. “These were people who could have done well even if they didn’t cheat.” Yet despite widespread knowledge among teachers of the cheating, “there was so little enforcement.” In one case, a student was caught cheating on the SAT by a proctor and suffered no penalty at all, besides having to take the test over. The student went on to attend Wharton. Other known cheaters also glided upward. “One of three guys who was known to be one of the biggest cheaters went on to Harvard,” says Sandan. “It was an appalling situation. . . . It was a cutthroat, fend-for-yourself kind of thing. People didn’t think about the fact that they would take someone’s rightful place, because everybody was doing it, and it was so easy that if you didn’t do it, you were a sucker.”

Sandan didn’t cheat and didn’t get into an Ivy League school, or any of her top-choice schools. She’s now at Rutgers University, where she says the faculty are even more tolerant of cheating than they were at Tenafly. “It’s very easy to cheat and most professors don’t make much of a fuss about it, or make it clear there would be any repercussions.”

Most academic cheating does, in fact, go unpunished. A consistent finding of the research on academic cheating is that there are few consequences for those suspected of cheating. In a 1999 survey of 1,000 faculty at twenty-one colleges, a third of professors said they were aware of cheating in their classes but didn’t stop it. Likewise, in an earlier survey of student-affairs administrators in colleges across the United States, 60 percent reported that faculty at their schools tended to handle incidents of cheating independently and not subject student violations to formal disciplinary action.³ Many professors would rather let cheaters slide than take on the bureaucratic hassles of pursuing disciplinary actions. Others are afraid of lawsuits filed by the parents of cheaters. In a 1999 survey by the American School Board Journal, roughly half of teachers said that the threat of litigation discourages them from punishing student cheaters.⁴ When cases are brought against students, the wealth of their parents can help neutralize the fallout in other ways. Stuart Gilman, president of the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C., recalls an episode from his days as a college professor. “I had a student who handed in an unsatisfactory paper. The dean then begged me to give him a ten-day extension. Then he handed it in (this is the day before graduation) and it was plagiarized. It had nothing to do with the topic, and I felt like I had read it somewhere. It turns out it was an article in the American Political Science Review. I failed him. The course was a departmental requirement to graduate in political science. I was at graduation and I saw him there. I thought, ‘Oh that’s nice, they let him come.’ But then he came over to me and said he was actually graduating even though he had failed my course, because they had waived the requirement for him.”

Gilman later learned from the dean why the student had been allowed to graduate: “The student’s father had just given a milliondollar contribution toward a new building on campus.”

In many elite academic settings the presumption of innocence is given to students who, along with their parents, are effectively an affluent “client” base—often with a multigenerational brand loyalty. In contrast, faculty are merely the hired help. When faced with the choice of keeping its clients happy or standing behind the hired help, schools often make the same choice that any self-preserving business might make.

In a 2000 incident at Dartmouth College, a visiting instructor accused students in his introductory computer science course of cheating. An anonymous telephone call tipped off Rex Dwyer that students had visited his personal Web page and downloaded answers to a class assignment. Though the cheating was initiated by members of the Gamma Delta Chi fraternity, access to Dwyer’s Web site was shared widely. Eventually, Dwyer learned that his site had been accessed by thirty-two different campus computers, and that seventy-eight of his students had taken part in the cheating.

Dwyer filed formal charges with the university and ended up spending fifty hours documenting the case, writing numerous memos describing in detail his evidence of cheating, which included server Web logs. Yet in the end, even though investigators agreed that cheating had occurred in the class, Dartmouth’s disciplinary body, the Committee on Standards, dismissed all the charges brought by Dwyer, saying it was too difficult to verify exactly who had cheated. Dwyer said that strong evidence did exist, and that he could have gotten much more precise evidence if he had been allowed to access other campus computer records—a request that Dartmouth denied. “More bizarre,” he wrote, “is that the Committee’s members apparently were less willing to acknowledge the truth than some of the accused.”

Dwyer condemned the investigation as a “whitewash” aimed at avoiding a “public relations nightmare.” Beyond his many hours of work on the case, Dwyer’s reward for his commitment to academic integrity was to be publicly maligned for being a poor teacher and, some alleged, even tempting the students to cheat in the first place.⁵

Many top universities create a permissive environment around cheating by failing to institute tough honors codes. The research of Donald McCabe and others shows clearly that honor codes and/or a serious institutional commitment to academic integrity reduce cheating.⁶ Still, many universities haven’t enacted honor codes, or made such a commitment. Some seem to fear that doing so will attract negative attention. But there is also the issue of resources. Creating an honest academic culture on campus can’t be done by just passing an honor code or putting flyers in students’ mailboxes. It requires sustained and involved efforts, every year, by faculty and administrators. Given these downsides, it’s a whole lot easier for a school’s leaders to pretend that cheating is at most a minor problem.

Yale is a classic case of a school in denial. Yale first experienced a high-profile cheating scandal seventy years ago, and it has been rocked by periodic scandals ever since. But it has never instituted an honor code. “The reason they don’t have such a firm policy at Yale, they say, is that they don’t need it,” says Andrea Spencer, a Yale senior. “They say if they made something like that, it would imply that they need it, so it would reflect badly on them. It’s kind of ridiculous because they do need it. There is a lot of cheating here. . . . Most professors say they don’t really look for it. That it doesn’t happen much. But if you look the other way, of course you’re not going to find it.”

Cheating involving athletes is also widely tolerated at universities. School athletics departments are awash in scandal, including cash briberies to recruit high school athletes and flunking athletes who are still allowed to compete on the playing field. The case of a college athlete like Andre Johnson is a good illustration. Johnson is a wide receiver who plays for the Miami Hurricanes and turned in a star performance at the 2001 Rose Bowl. But in 2002 he was found to have cheated on an exam and also to have plagiarized a term paper. Following its internal rules, the university planned to suspend him for two full semesters. Then it changed its mind, downgrading the punishment to suspension for two semesters of summer school, a meaningless slap on the wrist.

Tom Petersen, the professor who brought Johnson’s cheating to light, felt conflicted about turning in the star athlete and hoped that the incident could spark a dialogue on campus about the pressures that young athletes are often under. He wrote a set of proposals along these lines, but he was ignored by the school’s administrators and castigated by others. “I was demonized for talking about a national, systemic problem with the way we exalt college football,” Petersen said later. “There is fear and loathing among the faculty on football issues. Nobody wants to beat up on Andre Johnson.”⁷ The university was mum about why it changed Johnson’s penalty. But it is safe to speculate that the risk Johnson’s suspension posed to the Hurricanes’ performance—and box-office and broadcasting sales—was simply too great.

The corruption of college athletics is pervasive and well known. Johnson’s slap on the wrist is typical in a world where both coaches and college administrators are either breaking rules themselves or turning a blind eye when athletes break rules. Despite growing regulation over the past two decades by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and other bodies like the Southeastern Conference, rules are bent or ignored all the time. Cheating coaches and top athletes are let off the hook again and again. Schools are put on probation one year, only to violate the rules again the next year. Professors who try to enforce academic rules against athletes find themselves receiving hate mail and obscene phone calls. Some, like Linda Bensel-Meyers, a Renaissance scholar at the University of Tennessee, have even come to fear for their physical safety on campus after reporting academic fraud by athletes.⁸

College athletics has always been an intensely emotional world. But now it is also big business, which explains a lot. University stadiums that used to hold 20,000 people hold 90,000 today. Television rights have become more lucrative with the rise of cable and ESPN, and more viewers have attracted more advertising dollars and more corporate endorsement money. By the late 1990s, the NCAA was pocketing an estimated $270 million in annual income by selling the rights to television broadcasts and collecting dues and fees. In early 2003, the NCAA announced that CBS would pay $6 billion over eleven years for broadcasting rights covering twenty-two college sports. Winning teams can become a cash cow for universities, helping to cover the cost of expensive athletic programs and bringing a luster of prestige to the school. Losing teams can send athletic revenues plunging and lead to a falloff in donations from angry alums.⁹

The pressure to have winning teams is felt acutely by university presidents, whose job security depends on the goodwill of leading alums and other power brokers connected to universities. “A lot of people just care what happens on a Saturday afternoon and they put pressure on trustees and presidents that may be at odds with the direction the university should be headed,” says James Duderstadt, who as president of the University of Michigan for eight years learned “a great deal about corruption and commercialism in university sports.” Duderstadt wrote a scathing book about his experience in fighting these trends. It portrays university presidents as the puppets of powerful alums focused on sports victories who work in close concert with savvy allies within the university, as well as outside commercial interests. “Many presidents don’t have power because they report to governing boards of lay citizens who might have more interest in a winning team than in academics,” Duderstadt says. “The boards are put in place to support the sports teams, to act on behalf of coaches. A lot of presidents keep a low profile and don’t challenge it. They want to choose the ditch they are going to die in, and that’s not the one.” These dynamics mean that university sports coaches have wide latitude to do what it takes to produce winning teams. And this means that cheating is widely tolerated. Like other college presidents, Duderstadt found himself aware of these practices but felt unable to stop them.¹⁰

Top football and basketball coaches at big universities may have the most ethically dodgy jobs in America today. They are often the highest paid and most visible figures on a university campus, and they inhabit a world bracketed by fat carrots and unforgiving sticks. The earnings of top coaches can exceed several million dollars a year from a combination of seven-figure salaries, endorsement deals, hefty bonus payments by alumni “booster” groups, and lucrative speaking gigs. Coaches can become heroes and celebrities—as long as they keep winning. “If you don’t win, you’re not doing your job,” commented University of Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds. “And you don’t survive.”¹¹ To win and keep winning, coaches often leave their ethics at church. “There’s a turn-it-around-quick mentality which encourages you to do whatever you need to do to turn the program around, which sometimes means cheating,” explained Bill Battle, who was the head football coach at the University of Tennessee for six years.

The most common forms of cheating by coaches involve improper recruiting tactics and the flouting of rules governing the academic performance of students. For example, University of Georgia basketball coach Jim Harrick, Sr., was forced out of his job in 2003 after he was caught in an academic fraud case too serious to be swept under the rug. The case involved his son, Jim Harrick, Jr., who was an assistant coach under his father. The junior Harrick was accused of helping some of the team’s players get through school with little work. He taught a class, Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball, in which everyone received A’s, even students who never attended class or did any work.

After Jim Harrick, Sr., was fired many people wondered why he had been hired in the first place. This is a man, after all, who was accused of academic fraud and sexual harassment in his previous job at the University of Rhode Island. He had also been fired from a coaching job at UCLA for lying on expense reports. Yet apparently these past problems were judged insignificant in comparison to his outstanding coaching credentials—over a twenty-three-year career, Harrick had taken four different teams to NCAA tournaments. It was this record that impelled Georgia to hire Harrick at a $750,000-a-year salary to restore the school’s lost stature in collegiate basketball.¹²

Harrick’s involvement in academic fraud was not unusual. Coaches routinely help athletes shirk their studies and circumvent rules designed to ensure that this doesn’t happen. “Less than 50 percent of football players and less than a third of basketball players will ever get a degree,” says Duderstadt. “We have coaches making millions of dollars a year and advertisers and broadcasters making millions of dollars and the kids are being exploited. That’s the most serious indictment.”

The NCAA is supposed to vigilantly police the world of college athletics. It has at its disposal a tough array of sanctions, which have gotten fiercer since the 1970s. But like everyone else involved in college sports, NCAA officials have a strong incentive to look the other way when cheating occurs. The NCAA’s broadcasting revenues depend on quality competition between strong teams with stellar athletes. Actually enforcing the rules often works at odds with this goal, since it can lead to the disqualification of top athletes or even entire teams. “The foxes are in control of the henhouse at the NCAA,” comments Duderstadt, expressing a widely shared view.

Meanwhile, very little is done about the most common form of cheating in pro sports: drug use. While the NFL has a serious drug-testing policy, major league baseball—where the use of steroids and human growth hormones is raging out of control—has no mandatory drug testing. Nor does the NHL. “The current drug tests we have—only careless and stupid people flunk them,” says Charles Yesalis, a leading authority on drugs in sports who teaches epidemiology at Penn State. “It’s done for public relations, directed at naïve journalists and naïve fans.” This means there is no realistic way to sanction players who are violating the rules on performance-enhancing drugs, except if those athletes voluntarily turn themselves in. To toughen things up would mean taking on the unions that represent players and also drawing attention to the problems of drugs in sports.

Nobody has an interest in doing this. The public certainly isn’t clamoring for a crackdown—in one 2003 poll, for instance, only 16 percent of Americans said they thought drugs in baseball were a problem (compared to 40 percent concerned about pay gaps among players).¹³ The teams and the leagues also aren’t anxious to take action. “Unless the drugs hit the bottom line, unless it impacts them financially, nothing will ever be done,” says Yesalis. “Many of these drugs work and it is the bigger-than-life athlete doing the bigger-than-life feat that has made sports the multibillion-dollar industry it is. The entertainment value is so great, the money is so great, and the fans don’t care. That’s why it will continue.”

 

MANY CHEATERS ALSO GET a free ride outside the training grounds of academia and the rarefied sports realm. In particular, while a crackdown on street crime sent America’s prison population surging to record levels in the ’90s, the perpetrators of “suite crime” enjoyed the good life. A growing epidemic of white-collar crime attracted little notice, and no real response, until the collapse of Enron in late 2001.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) is located in Austin, Texas. The group’s 28,000 members are spread throughout the country and many are skilled in the arcane specialty of forensic accounting. The subfield has grown rapidly in recent years. Conferences are held to exchange tips on how to unravel complex financial frauds and, in 1999, a group of academics founded the Journal of Forensic Accounting. Their timing couldn’t have been better.

Fraud examiners are constantly struggling to keep up with sophisticated scams for embezzlement, padding expenses, hiding money overseas, and so on. These are the experts that get called when something doesn’t seem right with a company’s books or when an employee absconds with company cash. Such calls have been going up in recent years.

ACFE is the most authoritative source in the United States for data on “occupational fraud.” In 2002, the group estimated the annual total losses from workplace fraud at $600 billion, or 6 percent of GDP. “It’s a huge problem,” the association’s general counsel, John Warren, has said. “It’s easily the most costly form of economic crime in the world.” The 2002 survey of ACFE members found that while lower-level employees committed more acts of fraud, the misdeeds of those higher up the food chain were far more costly. For example, the median cost of financial statement fraud, one of most sophisticated forms of fraud, was $4.2 million. “The most costly frauds are committed by well-educated senior male executives,” the report found.¹⁴

What happens to the professionals who perpetrate these inside jobs? Often not very much. Most fraud examiners reported in the survey that they felt that punishments were not sufficient in the cases they handled. A quarter of the cases were not even reported to law enforcement agencies, and 81 percent of the companies did not file a lawsuit to recover the money. Many fraud examiners believe that company managers lack the desire to prosecute criminal employees and that most don’t do enough to prevent fraud. “Companies are very reluctant to air their dirty laundry in public,” Joseph Wells has explained. Wells is a former FBI agent who is founder and chairman of ACFE. Most businesses handle the problem of a bad executive or lawyer or accountant with quiet discretion. “It doesn’t do a lot for the depositors’ confidence when they read in the newspaper that their bank just nabbed a crooked loan officer,” said Wells. “As a result many businesses simply fire dishonest employees, who then are unwittingly hired by other companies.”¹⁵

In theory, white-collar fraud and misconduct is policed not only by employers and law enforcement agencies but also by professional groups that are supposed to enforce codes of conduct among their members. Just about every kind of professional belongs to one of these groups, some of which have the power to revoke licenses. Doctors belong to the American Medical Association, lawyers belong to the American Bar Association, stockbrokers belong to the National Association of Securities Dealers, and so on.

These groups have a strong self-interest in policing their ranks, lest they forfeit public trust or end up getting more hassles from government regulators. Yet often that self-interest is sidelined and, in many associations, tolerance for cheaters is the rule rather than the exception.

State bar associations underscore this problem. These groups are the top cops within the legal profession, and each has its own set of disciplinary rules and procedures, as well as committees of lawyers that perform this work. But many state bars have far too few resources to do their job effectively and there is little national oversight of the groups—thanks to the influence of private law associations that consistently block reforms. In many cases, the disciplinary framework they operate within has not been evaluated or updated in decades. Some egregious forms of legal abuse, such as over-billing, are not even in the jurisdiction of state disciplinary groups. And, in nearly all states, people who lodge complaints against lawyers have no way to find out what is happening in their cases.

A 2002 study by HALT, a legal reform group, rated each state’s disciplinary capacity using data provided by the state bars and the American Bar Association. The study, which used a report-card rating, found that thirty-nine states earned below a C, and none received an A. Most complaints in many states are not even investigated, much less result in punishment. Only 3 percent of investigations result in the sanctioning of lawyers, and just 1 percent end in disbarment. Punishments are typically meted out in secret, making them even less effective. “Because private sanctions are so lenient, the legal profession is not effectively deterred from engaging in unethical conduct and because these sanctions are held in secret, consumers are being deprived of valuable information about their lawyers’ discipline history.”¹⁶

Several commissions have called for reform of this flawed system, but nothing ever seems to change—however outrageous the lapses of discipline. For example, in the 1980s, dozens of lawyers were caught up in the savings and loan debacle and received hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from the federal government, but not a single lawyer was disciplined by a state bar association for his or her role. More recently, it’s become widely known that many lawyers played a key role in various of the big corporate scandals—yet there is little evidence that state bars will do any better at disciplining these rogues than it did after the savings and loan scandal.¹⁷

Given the low odds of being hassled by a state bar, it is a wonder that the Arkansas state bar undertook disciplinary proceedings against a lawyer whose main sin was that he lied about his personal life under oath. Then, again, Bill Clinton was no typical bad apple in the legal profession; he was unlucky enough to have many well-financed enemies.

State medical societies are on the front lines of policing the AMAs elaborate code of professional ethics. But these groups often do a poor job of helping either patients or doctors report ethical violations, and it is very difficult to find out what disciplinary actions are taken by these groups against physicians. Public Citizen, a consumer group in Washington, D.C., has commented that state medical societies “cannot prevent a doctor from practicing, and their vested interest, in most cases, is to protect their members, not the public.” Looking out for one’s own kind is a natural impulse. Major hospitals and managed-care companies, which also have the power to discipline doctors, often do not do much better—although hard facts are difficult to come by on this subject since most of these entities keep their disciplinary records secret.¹⁸

The financial services industry is another arena where self-policing is a joke. “Your broker probably has a better chance of getting busted for public drunkenness at the Indy 500 than being nabbed for impropriety by the NASD,” commented one veteran Wall Street journalist who examined the disciplinary record of the National Association of Securities Dealers. A huge number of client complaints are dealt with by arbitration and don’t ever make it to NASD’s disciplinary panel. And many of the complaints that do get to NASD do not result in disciplinary action. This means that a broker can repeatedly commit unethical acts and yet seem to have a clean record.¹⁹

Accounting is also a profession that has its own watchdogs charged with keeping the bookkeepers honest. And how successful has this self-policing been in recent years? Let’s not even go there.

 

SOARING PROFESSIONAL CRIME in the last two decades has not been accompanied by a beefing up of the resources needed to prosecute these crimes. Even as many states went on a prison-building binge through the ’80s and ’90s, and even as the federal government provided billions of dollars in new funds to help localities hire more police officers, and even as federal spending on the “war on drugs” approached $20 billion a year under President Clinton, strapped investigators on the white-collar beat often found themselves with little choice but to let high-level wrongdoers off the hook.

The losing battle against securities fraud is a case in point. Wherever this battle was fought in the past decade—be it Silicon Valley or Wall Street—government investigators were hopelessly outgunned.

In the late 1990s, more money was being made—and stolen—in Silicon Valley than anyplace else on earth. Following Netscape’s extraordinary IPO in 1995, hot IPOs came fast and furious. It seemed that anyone with a half-decent business plan could raise millions, and that any company with a half-baked technology product could become worth billions in the stock market. However, once companies were publicly traded, life got harder for hightech executives as they sought to show profitability and live under the tyranny of “the Number,” that is, their quarterly earnings. Vast personal fortunes depended on what this number was. Executives who met the expectations of Wall Street analysts, even if only for a year or so, could make tens of millions of dollars exercising stock options and then cash out of the company for some other excellent adventure. Those who issued earnings reports that didn’t meet these expectations felt like they were “signing their own corporate death warrants,” in the words of ACFE’s Joseph Wells.

The lure of easy riches was a recipe for bad behavior. In a story line that has since become familiar, many Silicon Valley companies started cooking their books with a variety of scams to misrepresent earnings and pump the value of their stock. Prosecutors in northern California found themselves totally overwhelmed by the crime wave. Even simple acts of securities fraud, such as releasing false earnings reports, are extraordinarily complex to prosecute. Investigators must first prove that a crime actually occurred, which often requires connecting the dots in a vast sea of fragmentary evidence and interpreting legal statutes and case histories that can run into the thousands of pages. Then they must prove intent and individual culpability—no easy task. High-ranking corporate officers often plead innocence on the grounds of “professional reliance": Because they depend upon the performance of a hierarchy of employees, accountants, and lawyers, they claim that they are immune from the charge of criminal intent.²⁰ The prosecutorial tasks of simply establishing strong grounds for indictment are labor intensive in the extreme. Equally daunting can be the job of convincing a jury of the case’s merits in the face of counterinterpretations of every last shred of mindnumbingly complex evidence.

In his book Infectious Greed, regulatory expert Frank Partnoy explains that before the big corporate scandals in 2001 and 2002, there had been plenty of major financial crimes during the 1990s—including one that led to the bankruptcy of Orange County in 1994. Most of these crimes went almost entirely unpunished. The cases were too complicated and, writes Partnoy, “the defendants had plausible arguments about why what they had done was legal or fell outside the scope of existing law. Prosecutors did not bring many criminal cases, and they lost when they did.”²¹

This pattern was repeated as the technology boom of the 1990s gathered steam. Despite a growing number of complaints alleging financial misfeasance by Silicon Valley companies, few new resources were added to combat the problem. By 1998, the Justice Department had exactly one assistant U.S. attorney working full-time in San Francisco on investment fraud, a profoundly beleaguered young prosecutor named Robert Crowe. Many criminal referrals from the SEC and FBI were not prosecuted. Crowe already had a huge backlog of Silicon Valley cases and was barely able to successfully bring to trial the few cases that he did go after. At one point, when he was preparing a securities fraud case against California Micro Devices, Crowe found himself deluged with 600,000 pages of documents and yet his office lacked a clerk to help sort and photocopy the materials. “There was no secretary, no paralegal, no resources I could count on from the office—nothing,” Crowe said later. Facing a trial against Cal Micro’s expensive team of lawyers and the army of paralegals at their disposal, Crowe simply was not able to go through all the documents. His plight reflected the fact that white-collar financial crimes were simply not a priority of a U.S. Justice Department that spent much of the 1990s worried about drugs, street crime, and terrorism.²²

A similar story played out on the other side of the country, where prosecutors charged with policing a booming Wall Street in the late ’90s were also outgunned.

The home of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force, Southern District of New York, is on the third floor of a federal building in lower Manhattan not far from Wall Street. It is the largest U.S. government law enforcement team focused exclusively on crimes related to the stock market, including insider trading, false earnings reports, and other kinds of deception. The office became famous in the 1980s, when it prosecuted the insider trading scandals involving Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

In 2002, as scandals engulfed corporate America, the task force had only twenty-five lawyers. Assistant U.S. attorneys did their own copying. Numerous cases were not pursued because of a lack of resources. “We’ve got too many crooks and not enough cops,” one federal regulator told Fortune magazine. “We could fill Riker’s Island if we had the resources.”²³

It is a testament to the office’s limitations that it fell to a then-obscure state official, New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer, to pursue the massive conflict-of-interest scams involving stock analysts at top Wall Street firms. The rotten ethics of Henry Blodget, Jack Grubman, and others were no secret to those on the Street; all that was needed to bust open the case was an investigative staff that had the resources, and interest, to sift through a few thousand subpoenaed e-mails. Spitzer stepped into history only because the Justice Department’s top watchdog on Wall Street was not up to the job.

In the end, Spitzer himself was not prepared to prosecute a hard-hitting securities fraud case against either the individual analysts who misled investors or the big investment banking firms. For all the tough talk that made him famous, Spitzer was smart enough to see that criminal prosecutions would have tied up his office for many years, and with uncertain results. Spitzer professed more interest in getting firms to change their internal practices than in getting convictions. His investigation led to investment banks adopting a host of new guidelines and paying a $1.4 billion settlement. Blodget and Grubman paid individual settlements that represented only a small percentage of their ill-gotten earnings. Blodget, who made $12 million in 2001 alone, only had to pay $4 million; Grubman, who made a reported $20 million a year hyping worthless telecom stocks, and whose reported severance at Salomon Smith Barney had been $32 million, glided by with a $15 million tab. Neither man had to admit any wrongdoing as part of their settlement.

The most prestigious firms on Wall Street, along with the industry’s most visible stock analysts, had lied to American investors on a massive scale. Hundreds of billions of dollars were lost on bad investments partly as a consequence of these multiple acts of securities fraud. Yet Spitzer’s high-profile investigation did not result in a single individual or firm formally accepting legal responsibility. Nobody faced a judge or jury. Nobody saw the inside of a prison. And the most prominent villains in the saga remain multimillionaires today.

Would Blodget and Grubman do the same thing all over again if they had the chance? It’s hard to see why not.

Eliot Spitzer was unusual in the entrepreneurial zeal that he brought to ferreting out wrongdoing in the securities industry. Prosecutors typically play a more passive role in policing Wall Street; most of their cases are generated by investigators at the SEC. While the Securities and Exchange Commission handles the lion’s share of investigation into such malfeasance as fraud and insider trading, the agency lacks the prosecutorial authority to go after individual offenders with criminal charges. SEC investigators have been repeatedly frustrated over the past decade by sending cases over to the Justice Department only to see no action taken. Many white-collar crooks who were squarely in the crosshairs of government prosecutors have lived to steal another day. All told, SEC investigators referred 609 criminal cases to the Justice Department between 1992 and 2001. Federal prosecutors only followed up on 36 percent of the cases, and achieved convictions in 76 percent of these cases. Sixty percent of those convicted spent some time in prison—or a grand total of 87 offenders out of over 600 cases.²⁴

There is a perverse irony in the idea that the SEC would overburden anyone with the results of its investigations, since the SEC itself is woefully understaffed. There are 17,000 publicly held companies in the United States and each must file earnings reports with the SEC, attesting under penalty of law that everything in these reports is true. An additional 9,000 mutual funds also regularly file reports with the SEC. At the same time, the SEC needs to worry about the behavior of 664,000 registered securities dealers working in roughly 5,300 brokerage firms with over 92,000 branch offices. These dealers work with as many as 50 million clients who are invested in a stock market where a billion shares of stocks and bonds change hands every day.

The SEC is responsible for ensuring the integrity of all of this activity and more. But its resources are paltry compared to its mandate. While the number of company reports filed with the SEC grew by 40 percent in the last half of the 1990s, staffing levels remained flat during this same period. In 2000, the SEC was only able to review 8 percent of financial statements filed by public companies—an alarming fact given that the agency knew that an epidemic of false earnings reports was under way. By some estimates, the SEC would need to quadruple the number of staff reviewing financial statements in order to review 30 to 35 percent of statements and achieve what it sees as an acceptable level of vigilance.²⁵

 

THE 1990S MAY HAVE BEEN a decade where the mantra of “personal responsibility” was chanted by politicians of every stripe, but it was not a decade in which those who stole with a briefcase had much to fear. While scores of companies were fined or paid settlements as the result of white-collar criminal probes during the 1990s, the overwhelming majority of cases concluded with no individuals facing indictment, even in cases where multiple felonies had clearly been committed. This was true in cases against Sears, Merrill Lynch, Arthur Andersen (pre–Enron scandal), Waste Management, Sunbeam, Salomon Smith Barney, Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, and numerous other firms. Most recently, as of this writing, the federal government slapped AstraZeneca with a $355 million settlement for an illegal scheme to market a prostatecancer drug. Yet while the company as a whole pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of health-care fraud, not a single individual was held responsible for what happened. Nor did the company bother sounding contrite about actions that defrauded taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars. “We disagree with the government on this, but to put it behind us, we are agreeing on a settlement today,” said a company spokesperson.²⁶

The rare white-collar criminals who actually did face a judge were invariably treated lightly. The zeal in the ’80s and ’90s to impose mandatory minimums and “three-strikes policies” never extended to white-collar crimes. For example, the executives at the agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland who orchestrated a global price-fixing conspiracy that cost consumers $500 million faced maximum prison terms of only three years when they were sentenced in 1999. Even then the judge went easy on them, praising them as family men and community leaders, and giving them only two years in prison. In another case, Bruce J. Kingdon, who confessed to committing serious fraud at Bankers Trust, was sentenced in 2000 to 450 hours of community service, mandatory weekly therapy, and was fined $180,500. Compare those sentences to the case of Chrissy Taylor, a thirty-year-old California woman who has already served ten years of a two-decade prison sentence imposed for purchasing legal chemicals that her boyfriend used to make drugs, or to the plight of Clarence Aaron, a nonviolent first-time offender who is now serving life without parole in an Atlanta prison for introducing two drug dealers to one another. Taylor was an impressionable nineteen-year-old whose main mistake in life was hooking up with the wrong guy; Aaron was a troubled senior at college in New Orleans when he committed his crime.

Or consider the disparities in sentences meted out to those who rob banks. Although the brazen looting of savings and loans in the ’80s cost taxpayers nearly $400 billion, very few savings and loan crooks were given prison time. Even the most infamous of the savings and loan cheaters, Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, managed to avoid the full penalty for crimes involving $3.8 billion dollars in losses: four-and-a-half years into Keating’s ten-year sentence, a federal court ruled that faulty instructions to the jury had tainted his trial and threw out the guilty verdict. Keating’s time served was about the same as the sentence given out recently to a twenty-one-year-old Boston man who made off with $1,000 from a bank. Though he had specifically informed bank tellers that he was unarmed, Coleman Nee’s crime earned him a fifty-seven-month sentence.²⁷

White-collar criminals have also benefited from the wide disparities in sentencing across the nation—an advantage not granted to drug offenders facing uniform mandatory minimums. States such as Wisconsin, which are home to fewer firms offering financial services and other complex transactions vulnerable to fraud, tend to mandate jail time in as much as 85 percent of the cases. In New Jersey, where prosecutors must make deals in order to keep caseloads at manageable levels, white-collar criminals got prison time in only 26 percent of cases.²⁸

The coddling of white-collar criminals extends into their prison terms. For fees ranging up to $50,000, you can hire a “postconviction placement specialist” who’ll help you get into the Club Fed of your choice. He’ll develop a glowing presentence investigation report that details your contributions to humanity and which may run for dozens of pages packed with superlatives and misty-eyed testimony from priests or scoutmasters you haven’t seen in thirty years. Then he’ll duke it out with the Bureau of Prisons to get you good prison choices. The options aren’t that bad for those in the know. Leafing through the Federal Prison Guidebook, an insider’s guide to Uncle Sam’s facilities, you may be reminded of your college dormitory days. Perhaps your first choice will be the Schuylkill federal prison camp in Pennsylvania, where fallen biotech enterpreneur Samuel Waksal now resides. This modern complex has a crafts center, outdoor sports teams, game room, and much more. Or, if you don’t like the cold and do like billiards, you may consider the popular Eglin Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola, Florida, with a top-notch exercise room, softball fields, pool tables, and big-name alums like E. Howard Hunt and Aldo Gucci. Then again, maybe those humid summers are too much for you, in which case you’ll be wise to consider the minimum-security camp in Lompoc, California, where Ivan Boesky did his soft time, as did the Watergate offenders.

Lompoc is an hour away from Santa Barbara and has perfect weather year-round. There is a baseball diamond and a volleyball court. The population of inmates at Lompoc has gotten rougher in recent years, but it’s still a great place to catch some sun and get in shape, although ultimately, like any of the prison camps, “it’s jail, not Yale.” No cell phones, no PalmPilots, no toupees, and no day trading from a laptop in your cell. Also, the food stinks.²⁹

Whether they go to prison or not, convicted white-collar criminals nearly always face fines and settlement penalties. These are impressive only to the untrained eye. The federal government’s dismal record of collecting fines assessed in white-collar crime cases illustrates another way that wealthy felons evade serious consequences. As the number of white-collar prosecutions increased in the late 1990s, the amount of criminal debt demanded for restitution and compensation has grown significantly, from $5.6 billion in 1995 to more than $13 billion in 2002. But the government’s unwillingness or inability to collect those debts has rendered the increase largely irrelevant. The Justice Department lacks any systematic method for evaluating forfeitable assets, establishing payment schedules, or monitoring compliance after prison and probation. The result has been a massive flouting of fines.³⁰

Edwin McBirney II of Dallas, for example, was fined $7.46 million for his role in looting Sunbelt Savings in the 1980s. As of 2002, according to US News & World Report, McBirney had paid only $32,910 of his debt, even as he enjoyed the amenities of a $1 million home and a limousine and driver. Larry Vineyard of Englewood, Colorado—another savings and loan scoundrel—paid $1 million of his $5 million fine in 1996, when prosecutors threatened to bring charges against members of his family. Since that time, he has not met any of his $50 monthly installments. “There just seemed better things to do with the money,” explained Vineyard, whose driveway in Dallas is crowded with four late-model SUVs for his personal use. A California man has not paid a cent of the $1.2 million fine imposed for his role in a 1987 golf course scam—even as he has maintained homes in California and Mexico, a yacht, and two private airplanes. Neil Bush, George W. Bush’s younger brother, tarnished his family’s reputation over a decade ago when he was named in a $200 million suit by the FDIC for his role in the failure of the Silverado Savings and Loan. But the episode didn’t compromise the family fortune: Bush settled with the FDIC for only $50,000.³¹

Ivan Boesky had the best laugh of all at the expense of prosecutors. Boesky took advantage of a loophole to claim a substantial tax benefit as a result of his punishment for massive insider trading. By classifying his $100 million fine as a business expense, Boesky was able to deduct $50 million from his federal income tax in 1986. Merrill Lynch scored a similar tax windfall by writing off a third of the $100 million settlement imposed by Spitzer. Also, depending on their tax rates, many corporations that set up funds to compensate the victims of financial crimes can deduct up to 40 percent of these costs.³²

White-collar criminals also hold on to their assets in other ways. The increasingly common practice of incorporating businesses offshore, as well as moving personal assets into offshore accounts or into complex overseas investment shelters, offers legal protection to savvy wrongdoers. Pensions and personal homes are protected from seizure in some states and have become additional vehicles for shielding wealth from the ever shorter arm of the law. The civil case against O. J. Simpson drew attention to the ways in which personal retirement funds are protected against seizure and can shelter tremendous wealth. Despite losing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Nicole Brown’s family, Simpson is living well on $25,000 a month in pension income that the civil judgment can’t touch. If Simpson had been a resident of Florida or Texas, the law would not have been able to touch his home, either. These states have generous “homestead exemption” laws that prevent creditors or law enforcement agencies from seizing personal homes. The homestead exemption in Texas has made it possible for Enron’s Ken Lay to hold on to his 13,000-square-foot, $7.1 million home in Houston. In Florida, the Sotheby’s price-fixer Diana Brooks does not have to worry about the seizure of the $4 million waterfront home that she and her husband purchased after the government investigation of Sotheby’s was under way. Scott Sullivan’s palatial mansion under construction in Boca Raton also probably won’t be touchable, however large the fines or settlements that result from his role in WorldCom’s $11 billion fraud.³³

 

ECONOMISTS ENDLESSLY ARGUE that human actions are shaped by rational calculations about costs and benefits. This generalization doesn’t always hold—witness the irrational influences of religion, love, or rage—but it is largely true.

The lax treatment of cheaters at the highest levels of our society inevitably shapes the calculus of anyone who contemplates cutting corners. It is just too easy in this society for cheaters to float seamlessly upward, seeing few downsides along the way. There would be nothing extraordinary today about someone who cheats academically in high school to help himself get into a good college where he continues cheating with few consequences, even if he is caught red-handed. Later, with the help of a résumé that includes fictional elements that go unchecked, he could land a job in business. Every year he could help himself out financially by cheating on his taxes with very little risk that the IRS will audit him and, should the IRS do so, that the government would be able to do anything more than order him to pay back taxes. Meanwhile, at the office, should he enrich himself through a sophisticated scheme to defraud clients or investors, he’ll have little fear that his actions will result in either legal or financial penalties.

In an absolute worst-case scenario—if he really steals a lot of money and the evidence against him is overwhelming—the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed by Congress in 2002 might ensure that he does some time in a federal prison camp. (Then again, maybe not. While the new law has been hailed as tough because it raised the maximum prison sentence for securities fraud to twenty-five years, prosecutors have wide discretion in how they classify crimes and judges have discretion at sentencing.) If he does do time, his friends and family will be appalled, and he’ll be mortified about his downfall. But, according to research on white-collar criminals, he’s likely to bounce back quickly once he gets out of prison.³⁴ He’ll emerge from Club Fed twenty pounds lighter and in the best shape of his life. Thanks to prison rules, he’ll have lost the silly toupee that he used to wear back in his days as a wheeler and dealer. If he had half a brain when he was making money, there’ll be plenty still stashed away to help him adjust to his life as an ex-con. He’ll have a large nest egg in a bank in Grand Cayman, or some such place, an invulnerable pension, and maybe a house in Florida. Assets wisely transferred earlier to his wife and kids will be untouched. There will be an outstanding fine or settlement against him, but he needn’t worry about that. He can focus on getting on with the quintessential American job of creating a second act—maybe one even loftier than the first.

The first few years will be hard, especially those days when he must report to his probation officer. But eventually his crimes will be forgotten, or explained away as a consequence of heavy-handed government regulators run amuck—an excuse that will find much sympathy at the club where he plays golf. Pretty soon he’ll be back on his feet with a new career. Generous donations to the right charities will help lubricate his reentry into respectable society and, in time, he will no longer be shadowed by his past.

Michael Milken stands as the most encouraging role model. Milken was sentenced to ten years for his role in the massive frauds on Wall Street in the ’80s, but served less than two years. Despite a huge government fine he emerged from prison with hundreds of millions of dollars in family assets. A wave of “Milken revisionism” emerged in influential quarters during the 1990s. Even Milken’s former critics proved susceptible to the financier’s multifaceted public relations campaign, which featured Milken’s role as a cancer survivor and activist, his extensive philanthropy, and the achievements of his California-based think tank, the Milken Institute. (By 2000, the work of the Milken Institute was funded mainly by the founder’s annual contribution of $5 million.) Though the terms of his sentence expressly prohibited his participation in financial enterprises, Milken earned nearly $100 million in consulting fees for financial transactions between 1993 and 1996. This work included television acquisitions for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the 1996 purchase of Turner Broadcasting Service by Time Warner, Inc.³⁵

As Bill Clinton prepared to leave office, the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream publications called on the president to pardon Milken and clear his name. Presidential pardons represent the mountaintop of rehabilitation these days. Yet for those pardon seekers who have no redeeming characteristics, this mountaintop can only be reached via mammoth lobbying expeditions financed by campaign contributions. Milken evidently didn’t make the investment. Denise Rich did make that investment, pledging $450,000 to the Clinton library, and her ex-husband, Marc Rich—a brazen swindler in his day—got the magic signature from Clinton. (Even before Rich was pardoned, his Switzerlandbased commodities firm had won $65 million in U.S. grain-export subsidies as well as a $20 million contract to sell metals to the U.S. mint. Rich’s coziness with the U.S. government, it should be said, was not unusual. The federal government has a long history of awarding contracts to corrupt companies and entrepreneurs who have repeatedly broken the law and been heavily fined. Getting on Uncle Sam’s bad side is yet another negative that cheating business leaders needn’t worry about.)³⁶

Milken’s afterlife has been more lustrous than that of his former partners in crime, but they have done well, too. Ivan Boesky emerged from prison as a fitness nut, with a deep tan and bulging biceps. Boesky’s personal secretary, among others, reported that the financier enjoyed lavish accommodations and decadent amusements in the months after his release from Lompoc Federal Prison Camp. Visiting his mountaintop retreat, said Janice Rheel, the secretary, “makes me feel dirty. There’s stuff going on that I just don’t feel comfortable with. It’s the young girls, other stuff I can’t talk about.” While much of his personal fortune was lost to government fines and restitution charges, Boesky retains his grip on the good life by virtue of a divorce settlement that required his wife to pay $20 million in cash and $180,000 a year in alimony. Boesky also was granted ownership of the couple’s $2.5 million home in La Jolla, California.³⁷

Dennis Levine, the banker whose initial arrest led prosecutors to Boesky and finally to Milken, is also doing well. He resumed his career in finance after his release from prison in 1991. As the president of Adasar Group, Inc., Levine earned enough to afford an elaborately appointed 2,200-square-foot Manhattan apartment.³⁸

By far the most successful of Milken’s former pals is Gary Winnick, who worked closely with the junk bond king at Drexel. Winnick narrowly escaped prosecution for his involvement in Milken’s crimes by agreeing to testify against his former boss. Winnick was never called to the witness stand and he went on to have a glorious new life on the shady side of the telecom industry. By 2000, Winnick was chairman of Global Crossing, a company worth over $50 billion, at least on paper. Winnick cashed in over $700 million worth of Global Crossing stock before the company went bankrupt in 2002. He used his new fortune to buy, among other things, a private jet and a California estate valued at over $90 million. Although Winnick has been accused of a wide variety of misdeeds, the federal government chose not to pursue a criminal case against him. Winnick is only in his mid-fifties and has plenty of time for a third act. Generous charity donations through the Winnick Family Foundation are sure to help people forget all about Global Crossing.

Other culprits in the big scandals of the ’80s and early ’90s are also prospering. Bill Walters, notorious for his role in the Silverado Savings and Loan collapse, lives in high style. Walters managed to avoid paying $280 million to his creditors (including a $106 million fine assessed by the government) by declaring bankruptcy in 1993. Thanks to complex arrangements that had transferred millions of dollars in assets to his wife, he retains a good chunk of his ill-gotten fortune.³⁹ Walters’s old associate from the Silverado days, Neil Bush, rebounded even more admirably from his brush with the law and financial ruin in the late 1980s. By 2002, Bush was CEO of an education software company that had raised more than $20 million in investment capital. He and his wife appeared regularly in Houston papers as the hosts of high-profile charity events, while his daughter Lauren Bush, an up-and-coming fashion model, engaged in a publicized romance with Great Britain’s Prince William. And, of course, there were always visits to the White House—which his brother won in 2000 in an election characterized by far-reaching chicanery among partisan Florida election officials.⁴⁰

High-profile cheaters outside the business world also do well after their fall. Sandra Baldwin, disgraced by a faked résumé, returned to the real estate business in her hometown of Phoenix after her resignation from the U.S. Olympic Committee. Her contacts and drive enabled her to quickly become the top company producer for Coldwell Banker Success Realty. George O’Leary, another person with an invented past, was also nearly instantly back on his feet after being forced out as Notre Dame coach. O’Leary now has a lucrative job as an assistant coach for the Minnesota Vikings.⁴¹

When it was recently revealed that disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair had landed a book deal worth a mid-six figure, many people were dismayed that Blair was profiting from his lies. But then Blair was simply following the lead of Stephen Glass, the New Republic writer who resigned in 1998 after admitting that he concocted some of his stories. Glass landed a six-figure book deal from Simon & Schuster, and the publisher mounted a major push to promote The Fabulist, Glass’s fictional account of his odyssey, which provided a sympathetic self-portrait of an ambitious young man who makes some understandable mistakes. Glass was featured on 60 Minutes, in the New York Times, and other venues that most authors can only dream of. Given the nature of American culture, Glass’s ability to profit handsomely from his bad behavior was hardly surprising; perhaps more surprising was that Glass was actually admitted to Georgetown law school after his journalism career dissolved. A history of lying, the admissions office apparently concluded, prepared Glass perfectly for a career in law.

Even Tonya Harding has done all right for herself. While the men who smashed Nancy Kerrigan’s knee received prison sentences, Tonya Harding got off with a slap on the wrist. Her sentence included $160,000 in fines and 500 hours of community service. This modest downside was balanced by a considerable upside. Harding received a reported $600,000 in exchange for her confession on Inside Edition.

One year after the attack on Kerrigan, Harding was already enjoying a rehabilitation in her public image. Both People and Esquire placed her on their annual lists of favorite celebrities for 1995 and respondents in one survey listed Tonya Harding as among the twenty athletes they admired the most. Harding had fine company on the list: alleged murderer O. J. Simpson and convicted rapist Mike Tyson. Harding went on to launch a new career not only as a professional boxer, but also as a “celebrity boxer.” In March 2002, Fox Television paid Harding $50,000 to duke it out on national television with Clinton-scandal star Paula Jones. (Harding trounced her.) The show attracted 15.5 million viewers and was one of the highest-rated shows in Fox’s season. Recent years have also seen Harding invited by ESPN to a skating contest, featured on Entertainment Tonight, given an acting part in an HBO comedy, invited to host programs on TNN during “Bad Boys Week,” asked to appear on the TV game show The Weakest Link, interviewed twice by Larry King on CNN, and—of course—signed up to write her autobiography.⁴²

That’s the way it often goes in an America that loves second acts. Fame and money lead to more of the same—while past sins are conveniently forgotten.