The Difference Between the Mob and Wall Street

The difference is basic. The Mob is honest with themselves and with us about who they are: criminals. They don't deny it to themselves, or to us, or the government.

Wall Street and other top execs have had many of their leading lights exposed as the worst kind of criminal manipulators. Vast frauds have been perpetrated. Wall Street denies everything. They just had a bad year as a result of poor business judgments.

Bernard Madoff was unusual in that he is a criminal who ran a decades long criminal enterprise, who admitted it when the games was up. It became clear that he decided to take the fall to protect his family/co-conspirators. To date, he has been successful. Much family property has been confiscated, but so far no one else has been charged.

They have one thing in common with the mob, though. When unwanted attention comes their way, they lawyer up.

You doubt me? Lets do a little mind experiment. Let's say the late gangster, Al Capone, is alive and well and doing business in Chicago. He made his mark as a bootlegger, selling illegal alcohol doing Prohibition.

Today alcohol is legal, but you can't keep an enterprising criminal down. So Al, were he alive and in his prime, would no doubt have found some lucrative illegal activity to enrich himself. Let us say he was involved in an real estate flipping scheme.

Let's stipulate that it's a huge scheme, hundreds of millions of dollars involved. What would Al Capone do today?

He would hire expensive criminal lawyers. But he would also hire pr people to deny strenuously that he did anything wrong. His people would launch a campaign to completely obfuscate the issues. He's say that a poor business decision is not a crime. Investors losing their money is not a crime. He's cry that he is being persecuted for policy differences. (I love that last one. Whoever coined that one deserves an Orwell Award) There's a good chance the government would just not even bother to go beyond a cursory investigation of Capone's scheme before deciding to let it dribble away.

Certainly this is what's happening now in real life. This country has been cleaned out in a three decade long crime spree. The Wall Street debacle of last year was just the most public manifestation of what has happened.

The government appears to have accepted the Wall Street mantra that there was nothing to see here. And Wall Street, having gotten away with it, has decided to resume business as usual. 2009, a rotten year for the country was a great year on The Street. Most of the bonuses came, as expected.

It's all just policy differences after all.