Criminals in the CEO Suite, Jewelry Edition
We’ve all heard of CEOs who are convicted of felonies and go to jail. But it’s rarer to see the sequence reversed: convicted felons becoming CEOs. Is that the American Dream? In July 2004, Peter...
View ArticleTaking Credit Card Imprints: A Key Skill for Prostitutes
John Gapper finds the business angle in the Spitzer story: reading the official complaint, he concludes that "even this sort of business is just that – a business." My favorite bit is this: During the...
View ArticleHow Unleaded Gasoline Slashed the Violent Crime Rate
The paper, from the NBER, is 70 pages long, but the conclusion, from Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, is simple, and stunning: The main result of the paper is that changes in childhood lead exposure are...
View ArticleThe FBI and Mortgages
The LAT’s Richard Schmitt knows how to write a startling lede: WASHINGTON — Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if...
View ArticleThe World’s Biggest Ever Heist
I still can’t quite get my head around the enormity of the numbers in the Madoff case. For one thing, Madoff’s investment advisory business served between 11 and 25 clients and had a total of about...
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