White Collar Crime

The way most white-collar crime works is by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. Financial crime seems horribly complicated, but there are only so many ways you can con someone out of what’s theirs.

When the federal government catches hotshot financial adviser Louis Martin “Marty” Blazer defrauding his NFL-player clients, it’s time to come clean. He has no reasonable defense. What he has is a bigger story to spill to the feds—that of a multibillion-dollar conspiracy that exploits the most talented college athletes and implicates one of the most popular entertainment industries in the nation. The DOJ is listening, and the truth could literally set Marty free. All he has to do is prove that the NCAA is a vast ongoing scam.

On a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the Killing Fields. In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. But how did this once thriving, diverse, family neighborhood fall into such ruin?

While investigating financial crimes for CNN Money, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken were intrigued by reports that elderly Americans were giving away thousands of dollars to mail-in schemes. With a little digging, they soon discovered a shocking true story. Victims received personalized letters from a woman who, claiming amazing psychic powers, convinced them to send money in return for riches, good health, and good fortune. The predatory scam has continued unabated for decades, raking in more than $200 million in the United States and Canada alone - with investigators from all over the world unable to stop it.

By all accounts, Thomas Gilbert Jr. led a charmed life. The son of a wealthy hedge fund manager and a financier, he grew up surrounded by a loving family and all the luxury an Upper East Side childhood could provide: education at the elite Buckley School and Deerfield Academy, summers in a sprawling seaside mansion in the Hamptons. He was strikingly handsome, moving with ease through glittering social circles and following in his father's footsteps to Princeton. But Tommy always felt different, and the cracks in his façade began to show.

Michael has been called into action once more. He must take on a mission of legendary magnitude to silence the ghosts of his past and serve justice to those who have wronged. Tristan Duke is is an infamous thirty year old billionaire that took Wall Street by storm. Living a life of power and extravagance Duke was unmatched in his lust for greed and power. But when it all came crashing down around him his power and riches are now his only defense, a man with all the resource to jet set across the world on the run and stay there. But what he wasn't expecting was Michael to be on his tail. ...

Blackwater is one of the most misunderstood companies of our time. As Erik Prince, its founder and former CEO, writes: "Hundreds of American citizens employed by private military contractors, or PMCs, would lose their lives helping our government wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to have their memory tarnished by the unfair and/or ignorant depiction of PMCs as profiteers, jackbooted thugs, or worse."

There's the world wide web - the internet we all know that connects us via news, email, forums, shopping, and social media. Then there's the dark web - the parallel internet accessed by only a select few. Eileen Ormsby has spent the past five years exploring every corner of the dark web. She has shopped on darknet markets, contributed to forums, waited in red rooms, and been threatened by hitmen on murder-for-hire sites.

From a famous actor and an experienced journalist, a wildly entertaining debunking of cryptocurrency, one of the greatest frauds in history and on course for a spectacular crash.

From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing—and one of the most decorated journalists of our time—twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue.

In his intimate diary, Jerome Mayne personally shares his life-saving lessons of ethics, morality, trust, and humility, with wit and passion. He was an aspiring finance professional on his way to the top. With his new family and his sights set for success, the world was his oyster. Lured by the prospect of big business, his career derailed when he joined forces with his future co-conspirators in a real estate finance scandal. The nightmare begins with a hurricane of FBI investigations, criminal court, and prison.

Rarely does a week go by without a well-known executive being indicted for engaging in a white-collar crime. Perplexed as to what drives successful, wealthy people to risk it all, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes spent seven years in the company of the men behind the largest corporate crimes in history - from the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the Ponzi schemers Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford.

Say the name 'Enron' and most people believe they've heard all about the story that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever. But in the hands of Kurt Eichenwald, the players we think we know and the business practices we think have been exposed are transformed into entirely new, and entirely gripping, material.

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy. The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents.

The Microsoft File: The Secret Case Against Bill Gates, originally published by Random House in 1998, is a fly-on-the-wall account of Microsoft's and Bill Gates' predatory practices, and the struggles of the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice as they try to develop a strategy to counter one of the most serious charges of market manipulation since John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. The book is based on the author's interviews with Microsoft executives, Bill Gates himself (in person and in a direct email correspondence), federal sources, and scores of witnesses to the ...

In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year globe-spanning quest.

2015 saw the worst American maritime disaster in decades. The captain of the SS El Faro commanded his crew to sail straight into a hurricane. The ship sank and all 33 crew members died. The sinking raised troubling questions: Why did the captain choose to sail into the hurricane? Why did no one on board or on shore stop him? And why was such an old and heavily loaded ship even allowed on the water?

It was a time when anything seemed possible, instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury, and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors' money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam to an art form and raked in millions at his office in downtown Boston.

One night, in a small North Carolina town, a down-on-his-luck guard at Loomis Fargo manages to steal $17 million - literally more than one ton of cash. Despite being caught on camera wheeling the money from the vault to the getaway van, David Ghantt makes off to Mexico before the FBI can blink. There's just one hitch: Ghantt has entrusted the money to an oddball crew of accomplices who had wooed him into committing this massive theft in the first place - and who, he soon learns, are trying to take him out.

Based on extensive insider interviews and participation, acclaimed author Ben Mezrich's Straight Flush tells the captivating rags-to-riches tale of a group of University of Montana frat brothers who turned a weekly poker game in the basement of a local dive bar into AbsolutePoker.com, one of the largest online companies in the world. But then the U.S. Department of Justice placed a bull's-eye on Absolute Poker. Did they fold - or double down and ride their hot hand?