RUSSELL MOKHIBER: ...We're treating [corporate crime] with double standards with these special deals. And the result is -- I think the press is doing a good job in exposing these crimes, but the public impression still is that street crime inflicts far more damage than corporate crime and violence, and we have to change that. If you ask the average person to give -- if you say “looting” to the average person, the first thing that comes to their mind are the black kids in New Orleans stealing the DVDs and wading through the water, not Conrad Black, who looted a Hollinger International Corporation of millions of dollars and currently being prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, just released his report yesterday, “Crime Without Conviction.” The report details 34 special deals with major corporations. Can you talk about how this idea of deferred prosecution, what is it modeled on?
RUSSELL MOKHIBER: Well, it was started to -- I mean, even the U.S. Attorneys -- it was started for juvenile delinquents. It was started for minor cases. The idea was the federal courts are flooded with these minor cases, so if it’s not a serious -- I mean, a minor crime was committed; if it’s not a serious crime, say to the individual, ‘Okay, you made a mistake here. We’re going to charge you with a crime. But if you agree that over two years to be clean, to not engage in any other criminal activity, if you do that, if you agree to do what we tell you to do, that is, don't engage in other criminal activity, pay a fine, whatever, then after two years we’ll drop the charge, you won't have a record.’ And the U.S. Attorney's manual said -- makes it explicit that that’s its purpose.
It’s not for major multimillion dollar crimes. And so, but creative corporate defense attorneys and prosecutors took this and said, ‘Hey, here’s a way where we can settle these cases quickly, where we can give the corporation what it wants, which is no criminal prosecution, and where we can get out of these cases and not spend a lot of time on them.’ Well, there's another way to do it. Another way to do it is to criminally prosecute – and the other thing was the prosecutors want to go after the individual executive, so if you have the corporate attorney working with the prosecutor to go after the executives, you’re more likely to get a lot of individual convictions.
This is what happened, for example, in the HealthSouth case. HealthSouth was a major corporation in Alabama, nationwide corporation, healthcare corporation. And the defense attorney for the company called up the prosecutor, Alice Martin, who’s the U.S. Attorney in Alabama, and said, ‘Here’s my cell phone number. I’ll give you whatever you want on these executives, just leave our corporation alone, because we’re starting new.’ And she got like 16 convictions, and I think 15 of them got home detention. The C.E.O. of the company, you know, did the idiot C.E.O. defense, went the to trial and got off. That’s what Ken Lay is doing. He’s doing the idiot C.E.O. defense, saying, ‘Andy Fastow did it, I didn’t know anything about it, even though I was the C.E.O.’ And sometimes the idiot C.E.O. defense works, as it worked for Scrushy in the HealthSouth case. But that’s what’s happening.
Ten years ago, it was the company protecting the individual executives and pleading the company guilty. And so what would happen is you get a guilty plea against the company, the executives would get off, and the company would pay a fine. And there was a stigma against the company. I think that had real – a general deterrence. Now what you have is the corporate attorneys and the prosecutors working together to turn on the executives. To me, the ideal case is you prosecute both the corporation and the executives, and you put the company on corporate probation. .....
AMY GOODMAN: Russell, can you talk about the contrast of the actual cost of street crime versus corporate crime?
RUSSELL MOKHIBER: Well, I think there’s -- one of the problems is the F.B.I. doesn't have a corporate crime database. You can go to the F.B.I. and get detailed information on robbery and burglary and murder and homicide and rape and so forth, but when you go to the F.B.I. and ask them “Do you have statistics on white collar and corporate crime?” they have very little. They have no comprehensive database on corporate and white collar crime.
And one of the things that should happen is we should have a federal law, and it would be real easy to implement -- you wouldn't need a federal law. The S.E.C. could do it. Require all public companies to report on a yearly basis their criminal and wrongful activity to the S.E.C., and that could be easily compiled in a public database. Right now, it’s really hard to get a handle on, but every corporate criminologist, every criminologist who looks at this says there's absolutely no question, corporate crime and violence inflicts far more -- in fact some of these individual crimes inflict far more damage on shareholders and employees than all the burglaries and robberies in America in one year. So it’s just slam dunk, no question that this is the most serious kind of crime, and there should be a laser focus on how to bring this under control...
This is an excerpt from an interview, on Democracy Now!, with Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter where Mokhiber details "34 Special Deals with Major Corporations".
