Keith Slotter on The FBI and Crime

What I like about your FiveBooks is that you have picked different aspects of crime. Let’s start with your first one, Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald.

Conspiracy of Fools is one of my favourite books. It came out shortly after the Enron debacle and it actually doesn’t follow the case all the way through. It really ends when the FBI is just starting to get involved, rather than with the prosecution. I like the way the book tells the story from the inside of Enron. I think it is a book that really opened a lot of people’s eyes. Before reading this it was hard to fathom that corruption and greed could be this rampant in any corporation, let alone a Fortune Top 25 Corporation.

You work for the FBI, so you must have seen a lot of different types of crime. Was there not even a suspicion that kind of thing was going on in businesses like that?

There was suspicion, but I can tell you, although we investigated cases like this, there is no question that the Enron case was the biggest white-collar crime case in FBI history. We had upwards of 200 agent analysts working on the case at one time. Normally you would have about ten agents working on a case, so that gives you some idea of the scale of it. This book is great on details. It describes the many different facets and the incredible number of ways, seemingly complex at first, that the executives found to unjustly enrich themselves. And what it all came down to is greed.

Do you think there has been a rise in white-collar crime?

Yes, I think there has been a rise in white-collar crime in this country recently. Part of it is because of the economy. When the economy takes a down-turn fraud rises. There is this unfortunate side of life where people who commit fraud find that when people are more desperate in a poor economy it is easier to de-fraud them. 

But the Enron case was during an economic boom.

It was, but that was a different story in that there was a lot of greed and wealth going on at the time. In fairness to the people who work in these kinds of corporations, in the US in particular, there was an incredible escalation, especially in the 1990s boom period when outstanding results exceeding expectation of Wall Street broadcasts were commonly expected – and if you didn’t exceed those forecasts you were considered a loser. And the feeling was you probably shouldn’t be running the company any more. So there was extreme pressure to perform, to be able to show results at all costs.

With your next book, Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough, you say it is better to read the book than see the movie. I have seen the movie and I loved it, so why should I bother reading the book?

Well, I have nothing against the movie – it was great. But it really just focuses on the arch villain John Dillinger and the FBI man Melvin Purvis dynamic with very little else. And they are great characters so it makes sense to do it that way. But the book really accomplishes, better than any other book or movie I have seen, a good look at that violent fantastic gangster era in the 1930s. And the book doesn’t just focus on Dillinger, but on all the players: Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde. It was a really, really Wild West period for the United States, mainly out in the mid west in places like Chicago. 

A big part of the book is the birth of the FBI – how did that come about?

Banks were being robbed, people were being killed, there was a lot of violence. The people in the US finally said, who is going to stop it. The State Police couldn’t because once the gangsters moved across their state lines they have no jurisdiction. So the FBI finally came to the forefront and took control of the situation. And after, frankly, a lot of failures and shoot-outs and problems the bureau finally came into its own.

How did they manage that?

Well, when that era started, FBI agents didn’t even carry guns so it was very difficult to go up against the fire power that these gangs had. So they had to be trained in weaponry. Their mentality had to change and the bureau had to transform itself from working run-of-the-mill, low-level violence cases to dealing with what the most violent criminals that the country had to offer at that time.

What kind of a legacy did they leave for the modern-day FBI?

Everyone has a special appreciation for that era. Everyone knows those gangsters by name. It’s when the bureau gelled and became an institution that really had to be reckoned with. Where we train new recruits for the FBI in Virginia, we have an area called Hogan’s Alley. It is like a fake town where our agents can train and be somewhere that is as close to real life as possible before they go out on the street. In part of that town there is a movie theatre which is the one copied in the Public Enemies film when Dillinger gets killed at the end coming out of the movie theatre.