Two Crimes

This is old news, but I’d like to call your attention to two men who committed crimes and were sentenced back at the beginning of 2009.

The first is Roy Brown, a homeless man from Shreveport Louisiana. He walked into a local bank, put his hand under his coat to mimic a gun, and demanded money. He rejected the pile of cash the teller offered him and took one $100 bill, saying that he was hungry and needed money for a place to sleep. He then turned himself in the next day, saying that his mother didn’t raise him that way. He was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The second is Christian Milton, an executive at American International Group, the international insurance firm that we bailed out with our tax money. Mr. Milton engaged in a back-room scheme that defrauded AIG stockholders out of $500 million. Milton, a company vice president, committed securities fraud when he cut a secret deal with General Re Corp. to falsely inflate the asset value of AIG. He then lied about it to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The judge agreed with the prosecutor that Milton had known that the deal was a scam and had shown no remorse. Milton was sentenced to…wait for it…4 years in prison.

Homeless, hungry, ashamed, and honest: $100 gets you 15 years

Rich, sleazy, brazen, and dishonest: $500 million gets you 4 years

For many bank executives, fraud to the tune of $500 billion gets you a pat on the back and a million dollar bonus. Roy Brown’s story is enough to make me weep all by itself, but set next to the crimes of the financial elite it makes me smoldering angry.

One of the themes of the financial crisis has been accountability. One entity after another fobbed off the risk of bad mortgages to the next buyer down the line. Once it all went crash, the banks responsible got bailed out by their former employees in the Bush administration. The bankers responsible kept their jobs, received bonuses, and avoided prosecution in all but a handful of cases. Like those periodic harsh buzzing noises on the radio that herald a test of the emergency broadcast system, this is a test of the American justice system. So far, it is failing.

“Laws are like cobwebs, for if any trifling or powerless thing fall into them they hold it fast; while if it were something weightier it would break through them and be off”

Solon (Athenian Statesman, 636?-558? BCE), as quoted by Diogenes Laertius