In an interview 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.