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1-1-1988

White Collar Crimes and Criminals

Stanton Wheeler
Yale Law School

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Wheeler, Stanton, "White Collar Crimes and Criminals" (1988). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 4127.
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 WHITE COLLAR CRIMES AND CRIMINALS*

Stanton Wheeler,** David Weisburd,t Elin Waring, tt Nancy Bodettt

The commission of wrongs through fraud as well as through force is as old
as human society. Although the concept of white collar crime did not come into
use in our own society until Sutherland' coined it some fifty years ago, sociolo-
gists in the early twentieth century recognized a type of criminal who "picks
pockets with a railway rebate, . . . cheats with a company prospectus instead of
a deck of cards, or scuttles his town instead of his ship .. *"2 Thus, Ameri-
cans' current attention to white collar crime-either in its garden variety forms
or in the more special forms associated with the abuse of political power in the
nation's capital, or abuse of financial power in the nation's largest city-is a
return to long-standing problems and issues in our society.
In this Article, we develop some central themes that emerge from our inquiry
into the nature of those convicted of a selected set of federal white collar offen-
ses. How different is white collar crime from "common" crime, either in the
nature of the offense or the offender? Is it reasonable to speak, as the concept
implies, of a unitary phenomenon of white collar crime, or does the concept
itself conceal a variety of different types? Given the extraordinary range of defi-
nitions of white collar illegality, which dimensions of white collar crime should
we regard as most salient? Is it, for exanple, something about the nature of the
offender, such as is implied by his white collar status? Or is it something about
the position his background allows him to occupy? Or must we see the offender
as inescapably bound to the offense, as the dancer to the dance?
We provide tentative answers to these questions, not by theory or conceptuali-
zation, but through the close examination of a special body of data gathered on
convicted federal offenders. We believe these data to be especially valuable as a
descriptive resource and as an aid in developing more refined ideas about white
collar crime. We have pursued some of these issues in other publications, both

* This study is part of a larger program of research on white-collar crime supported by

Grant #78-NI-AX-0017 from the National Institute of Justice, United States Department of Justice.
Opinions in this document are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official
position or policies of the Department of Justice.
** Professor of Law and Social Sciences, Yale University and Yale University Law School;
Ph.D. (1958), M.A. (1956), University of Washington; B.A., Pomona College (1952).
t Assistant Professor, School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University; Ph.D. (1985), M. Phil.
(1980), M.A. (1978), Yale University; B.A., Brandeis University (1976).
tt Doctoral Candidate, Department of Sociology, Yale University; M.A., Yale University
(1983); B.A., Swarthmore College (1981).
ttt Assistant Attorney General, State of Minnesota Attorney General's Office; J.D., Yale Uni-
versity Law School (1981); B.A., University of Wisconsin (1975).
1. E.H. SUTrHERLAND, WIrrE COLLAR Canm 3-13 (1949).
2. E.A. Ross, SIN AND SOCIETY 7 (1907).

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 AMERICAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

past and in process,3 but in this Article we will focus specifically on the descrip-
tive questions raised above. As any investigator knows, the answers obtained
depend in important part on what crimes and what offenders we select for
study. We begin, therefore, with an extended discussion of the sample of offen-
ders and offenses that form the basis for our study and of the data available to
us about them.

I. THE STUDY DESIGN

The evolution of the concept of white collar crime has been marked by
changes in meaning that often preserve rather than reduce fundamental ambigui-
ties. To some, the term still denotes crimes committed by individuals of high
status. To others, it refers to illegal actions by organizations or by persons in
certain occupations. Some observers concentrate on the nature of the offense,
others on its consequences. We sought to develop a sample of white collar of-
fenders broad enough to allow us to explore critically each of these underlying
4
themes in the study of white collar crime.
Our practical problem was to identify convicted offenders who had been pros-
ecuted for crimes that would be identified by most scholars and laypersons as
fitting within a broad definition of white collar crime. With this in mind, we
selected eight specific statutory offenses for our study that we believed would be
included in almost every major conceptualization of white collar criminal con-
duct.' The most obvious choices were those that virtually anyone would regard
as quintessential white collar crimes. Criminal violations of securities and anti-
trust laws certainly fall within this category. The Securities Exchange Act de-
clares it "unlawful to use or employ, in connection with the purchase or sale of
any security ... any manipulative or deceptive device or contrivance.' '6 The

3. Wheeler, Weisburd & Bode, Sentencing the White Collar Offender: Rhetoric and Reality,
47 AM. Soc. REv. 641-59 (1982); Wheeler & Rothman, The Organization as Weapon in White
Collar Crime, 80 MICH. L. REV. 1403 (1982). A more detailed and extended treatment of the
issues raised in the present Article will appear in a forthcoming book. WEISBURD, WHEELER, BODE
& WARING, THE NATURE AND SANCTIONING OF WHITE COLLAR CRIME.
4. See Wheeler, White Collar Crime: History of an Idea, in 4 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CRIME AND
JUSTICE 1652-56 (S. Kadish ed. 1983) (providing more detailed discussion of definitions of white
collar crime).
5. We selected these from the hundreds of sections of the United States Code. The vast ma-
jority of offenses were eliminated from consideration on facial inspection. These include various
forms of homicide, robbery, assault, burglary, auto theft, and sex offenses. We also ruled out
those statutes primarily designed to control organized crime, such as, the Hobbs Act and RICO.
We did not include categories -which are mainly political, although many of these offenses also
have an economic dimension, such as nationality laws, immigration laws, civil rights statutes, the
Selective Service Act and other acts designed to protect national defense. Finally, we eliminated a
number of miscellaneous categories with crimes of white collar character since the conduct itself
was rare or exotic and the nature of the acts were mixed at best. This category included specific
statutes governing the importation of injurious animals and birds, the transportation of strike
breakers, and other maritime and shipping offenses.
6. 15 U.S.C. § 77 (1982). Provisions of the Securities Act of 1933 forbid those offering or
selling securities through interstate commerce or the mail from using "any device, scheme, or
artifice to defraud" or engaging in practices that would operate as fraud or deceit upon the stock
purchaser. Id.

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19881 WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS

Sherman Antitrust Act prohibits businessmen and women from conspiring to fix
and control the prices for goods and materials in the marketplace."
Collusive activity is also found in another of our offenses: bribery. The prin-
cipal bribery statute proscribes giving, offering, or promising to give anything of
value with the intent to influence a public official.8 Bribery cases thus include a
number of elements associated with white collar crime, including the abuse of
public trust.
A fourth offense that is generally described as a white collar crime is bank
embezzlement. The federal bank embezzlement statute involves people, such as
officers, directors, agents or employees who commit a crime against the banks
that employ them. 9 Both the special occupation and the abuse of financial trust
clearly put bank embezzlement in the white collar crime category.
Of all federal crime categories that identify white collar offenses, our fifth
section, mail fraud, covers the widest range of wrongs. The mail fraud statute 0
may be used to prosecute any crime in which the postal service or other feder-
ally regulated communication system is used to defraud individuals or organiza-
tions. Since many of the most important financial transactions require the use
of the mail or wire communications, almost any fraudulent transaction can be-
come a case of mail fraud.
In addition to these five statutory categories, we examined three other viola-
tions of federal law which involve fraud or misrepresentation: tax fraud, false
claims and statements, and credit fraud. The Internal Revenue Code is one of
the most broadly applicable criminal statutes since every income-earning person
is subject to its provisions, as is every organization that withholds taxes for its
employees." Because people in the highest income brackets have the most to
gain from tax fraud, such offenses are often thought of as especially frequent
in the white collar and professional population. Thus, this offense also captures
elements of high status that are central to many definitions of white collar
crime.
As federal programs have expanded over a wide range of activities, the fed-
eral government has become the source of financing for an extraordinary variety
of purposes. This has led to the use of government programs as the locus for
the commission of financial fraud. As a result, many sections of the federal
criminal code, particularly sections concerning false claims upon or against the
United States, or departments or agencies thereof, and the making of false, fic-

7. 15 U.S.C. § 1 (1982).
8. 18 U.S.C. § 201 (1982).
9. 18 U.S.C. § 656.
10. 18 U.S.C. § 1341.
11. Violations of the Internal Revenue Code are most often prosecuted under 26 U.S.C. §
7201 (1982) (tax evasion), 26 U.S.C. § 7203 (Supp. II 1984) (failure to file, maintain required
records or pay taxes), and 26 U.S.C. § 7206 (1982) (false or fraudulent statement to the Internal
Revenue Service).

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2
titious or fraudulent statements, are employed to address these crimes.' Typi-
cally, cases arising under these statutes involve offenders who lie to the
government to obtain unwarranted disbursements or reimbursements. The most
frequent victims are large government agencies like the Department of Housing
and Urban Development, the Veterans Administration, and the Social Security
Administration. Offenses may involve individuals acting on their own or on be-
half of organizations. Patterns include professionals using Medicaid programs,
individuals defrauding mortgage insurance programs, and many cases of fraudu-
lent misrepresentation.
Our final category is credit or lending institution fraud: knowingly making a
3
false statement on loan and credit applications to financial institutions. In this
society that runs on credit, it seems natural that fraudulent application for loans
from federally insured banks figures importantly as a form of nonviolent eco-
nomic crime. Like false claims and statements, these crimes involve fraudulent
submissions to organizations. Those prosecuted for credit and lending institution
violations are usually either individual applicants or organizations designed for
fraud. In a pattern again similar to the false claims and statements cases, these
offenders may work through insiders (bank or agency employees) who know-
ingly process and approve false or fraudulent applications.
These eight crime categories-securities fraud, antitrust violations, bribery, tax
offenses, bank embezzlement, postal and wire fraud, false claims and .state-
ments, and credit and lending institution fraud-comprise our selection of white
collar crimes. We make no claim that they are representative of the total body
of white collar crime. However, we are convinced, within the limits to be dis-
cussed, that these eight categories provide a broad and heterogeneous view of
the white collar criminal activity that is prosecuted in the federal judiciary.
How well have we distinguished presumptive white collar from "common
crime" cases? From one point of view, all the categories fit at least one defini-
tion of white collar crime. But with the possible exception of securities and an-
titrust cases, it would be dangerous to infer the "white collarness" of an
offense from its statutory category alone. We think our selection produces a
sample that is high in its "yield" of true white collar cases, though it is by no
means pure in that respect. But were we really successful in that endeavor? The
only way to tell is to compare our sample with the closest we can come to a
sample of nonviolent economic offenses of the non-white collar, or what we call
the common crime type. Our effort to do so is complicated by the nature of
federal crime. Most common crimes, such as the ordinary burglaries, larcenies,
and other offenses that make up the bulk of felony criminal activity in the
United States, are governed by state rather than federal law. For example, prop-

12. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 287 (Supp. IV 1986) (imposes imprisonment and fines for mailing
false, fictitious or fraudulent claims against United States or agency or department thereof); 18
U.S.C. § 1001 (1982) (criminal sanctions for knowingly and willfully falsifying, devising or mailing
false, fictitious or fraudulent statements or representations in any matter within jurisdiction of a
U.S. department or agency).
13. 18 U.S.C. § 1014 (1982).

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19881 WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS

erty theft is a federal crime only if federal property is stolen. The very traits
that make the federal system an ideal hunting ground for white collar crime
make it a difficult place to locate a sample of traditional common crime defen-
dants. 14
For the purpose of comparison we wanted a nonviolent, financially oriented
property crime that was likely to be general and frequent enough to be spread
throughout the federal districts. Further, the probability must be low that the
crime's offenders were of white collar social status. Our solution was to choose
two related forms of theft-postal theft and postal forgery. Postal theft cases
are primarily thefts of government-issued checks for welfare or social security
benefits. The thefts are often from mail boxes, on the day the checks arrive.
The primary distinction between postal theft and postal forgery is simply
whether the defendant is caught at the time of the theft or when he or she tries
to cash the check by forging the endorsement of the recipient. Both offenses are
very common within the federal system. 5
The specific information about these white collar and common crime offen-
ders is drawn from presentence investigation reports ("PSI's") made out on al-
most all federal offenders by probation officers to assist judges in making
sentencing decisions.' 6 Varying in length, from as few as three to as may as
twenty pages, PSI's describe the offense of which the defendant was convicted,
usually in the words of both the defendant and the prosecutor. PSI's include
essential material on the background of the case, a detailed description of the
defendant's educational, medical, employment, family, and criminal histories,
and an overall evaluative summary by the probation officer suggesting a particu-
lar sentence. It was the availability of these presentence investigation reports,
not normally accessible to researchers, that shaped this exploration of the phe-
nomenon of white collar crime.
Like other matters of systematic criminal record keeping, the presentence in-
vestigation reports are routinely made out for those who pass a certain thresh-
old in the criminal justice system: conviction in a federal court. Unlike the
"face-sheet" reports that are the basis of most empirical studies, PSI's are

14. We considered theft of United States property as a common crime control category, for
example, but found that nearly two thirds of the cases so prosecuted in our seven districts came
from the Central District of California (Los Angeles). These cases presumably involved theft from
military and veterans institutions in the area and seemed likely to be an unrepresentative sample
of common crime cases. Similarly, we considered theft in interstate commerce, but those offenses
seemed to be connected with organized crime.
15. Although the two cases are similar, and distinctly common crime types of cases, there are
small but systematic differences between them in the direction one might expect. The forgery of-
fenders are slightly less likely to be unemployed and to have a prior criminal record and are
generally more educated. This is not surprising, since forgery has a rudimentary element of fraud
and misrepresentation that is lacking in garden variety thefts. In any event, differences between
our common crime sample and our white collar crime sample would be even greater if the com-
mon crime sample consisted solely of postal theft cases.
16. There are exceptions, such as when the judge may accept a defendant's very infrequent
request that the PSI not be completed.

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 AMERIcAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

based on hours of collection of detailed information from the prosecution, the

defendant, and, often, from social agencies. The narrative accounts of offenses
are sometimes as brief as a sentence or two, but they often run to two or three
pages of rich detail on the underlying conduct. Even the routine material on the
defendant goes beneath the surface in its description of employment history,
family background, and prior criminal record. PSI's also allow a unique glimpse
into an offender's view of the offense and the effects of being processed as a
defendant. Taken together, these materials provide an analysis of the individuals
and their crimes that approximates the richness of some case studies, but that
can be carried out for the vast majority of convicted defendants.' 7
We drew our sample of offenders from seven judicial districts during fiscal
years 1976, 1977 and 1978.18 The districts were chosen in part to provide geo-
graphic diversity. The areas were also selected because they were being examined
in other studies and were known to have a substantial number of white collar
cases. The districts (and their central cities) are: Central California (Los An-
geles), Northern Georgia (Atlanta), Northern Illinois (Chicago), Maryland (Balti-
more), Southern New York (Manhattan and The Bronx), Northern Texas
(Dallas), and Western Washington (Seattle).
To allow a detailed analysis of each presentence investigation report, as well
as to avoid having one or two offenses dominate our study, we chose to exam-
ine a random sample of thirty cases for each offense category in each of the
seven districts. Because securities fraud and antitrust cases have generated so
much scholarly interest and public concern (and they occur so infrequently in
individual districts), we studied all offenders convicted of these two crimes in all
of the federal districts during the three fiscal years we examined. The resulting
sample thus contains more antitrust and securities fraud offenders, and fewer
postal fraud, IRS fraud and bank embezzlement offenders, than would a ran-
dom sample. But it offers a broad sampling of white collar defendants con-
victed in the federal courts. Our common crime control sample consists of thirty
cases for each of our seven districts, fifteen each of postal theft and postal
forgery.
We think the sample of cases resulting from these procedures is appropriate
for the investigation of white collar illegality, but we want to point to some
specific characteristics of the sample which might be viewed as deficient. First,
not all federal white collar crimes were included. Perjury, bankruptcy fraud and
conspiracy are three offenses that arguably might have been included in our

17. Our access to federal PSI's was facilitated by a congressional request for more information
about the sentencing of white collar offenders. We are indebted to Don Chambers and his staff at
the Federal Probation Office for their assistance and cooperation. Access to PSI's are granted
only under conditions of extraordinary confidentiality. See Wheeler, Weisburd & Bode, supra note
3 (for further details about coding of PSI's and other questions of method).
18. The sample was selected from data maintained by the Administrative Office of the United
States Courts. The data contains all defendants convicted in the federal courts and their corre-
sponding offense classification. We wish to thank Mr. James A. McCafferty, Chief of the Statisti-
cal Analysis and Reports Division, Criminal Section, for providing the necessary data.

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19881 WitE COLLAR CRIMINALS

study. Conspiracy does, in fact, appear, since it often accompanies the charge
for a specific substantive offense.
Another group of omitted offenses includes violations of civil or administra-
tive regulations that are often thought of as white collar offenses. These include
many environmental offenses, where felony prosecutions were rare at the time
we gathered our data, but are more frequent now. Another limitation of our
study is that it examines the crimes of individuals rather than of organizations.
As with conspiracy, there are many instances in our sample in which organiza-
tions as well as persons are charged, but our focus here is limited to individual
defendants.
Finally, our analysis is limited to convicted defendants. The problem is hardly
a new one for analysts of crime. We are convinced that much of what we have
learned about convicted defendants will apply as well to those who are indicted
but not convicted and perhaps to a lesser degree to violators who are never
apprehended. One of the companion studies in our program of research on
white collar crime gives us some reassurance in this regard. Kenneth Mann, who
studied white collar crime defense, feels that the principal difference between
those who are convicted and those who are not lies mainly in the vagaries of
the evidential traces that are left behind, rather than in the underlying patterns
of fraud or collusion that constitute the offense in question. 9 In any event, we
remain convinced that a great deal can be learned about the nature of white
collar crime from a close analysis of this sample.

11. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WHITE COLLAR AND

COMMON CRIMES AND CRIMINALS

White collar and common crimes differ in the obvious but trivial sense that
they involve violations of different statutes. Our common crimes are those of
postal theft and forgery, while our white collar crimes range across eight statu-
tory categories. Here we ask whether there are any other differences. Although
the different offenses might be described by a wide variety of attributes, we are
particularly interested in two specific qualities. One concerns the consequences
of the crime for its victims, or put differently, who is hurt and how badly. We
call this the nature of victimization. The second centers on the nature of the
offenses themselves, specifically whether white collar crimes have a distinctive
complexity that might differentiate them from common crimes, at least by de-
gree.
We present the results for selected indicators of victimization in Table 1.20 For
purposes of this table, we have combined results for the various white collar
crimes in order to highlight the difference between ordinary, if you will, garden

19. Suggested in personal communication with authors. See generally K. MANN. DEFENDINC
WHITE COLLAR CRIME (1985) (providing detailed description of control of potentially inculpatory
evidence by defense counsel).
20. The data in this and other Tables is based on actual cases as reported in Presentence
Investigations.

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 AMERICAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

variety nonviolent economic crimes of a common crime nature, and garden

variety nonviolent economic crimes of a white collar nature.

TABLE I
DIFFERENCES IN VICTIMIZATION BETWEEN NONVIOLENT COMMON CRIME AND
WHITE COLLAR CRIME

Nonviolent Common White Collar

Crimes (Base N)* Crimes (Base N)
Involving National or
International Scope 1.007a (195) 16.2% (1243)
Involving 100 or More Victims 1.9% (209) 17.7076 (1269)

Involving Taking of More Than

$100,000 2.1% (146) 29.7% (887)
Involving Victimization of
Organizations** 28.9076 (194) 88.307o (1200)
* Base N is the total number of offenses on which the percentage figure is
based.
** Includes all defendants who had individual as well as organizational victims.
The results are instructive. While roughly two percent of the common crimes
yield as much as $100,000 or more, nearly thirty percent of the white collar
crimes do so. The common crimes are virtually always confined to a state or
local level, and although that is true of the bulk of white collar crimes as well,
sixteen percent of them reach across state and regional borders and can be re-
garded as crimes of national or international scope. While it is rare for the
common crimes to reach a large number of victims, many white collar crimes
do.
The biggest difference, in raw percentage terms, concerns the nature of the
victim. Most common crimes victimize individuals. In contrast, the majority of
federal white collar offenses involves victimization of organizations. Admittedly,
the organization most frequently victimized "belongs" to the taxpayer in the
form of his federal government, although banks and other federally insured
lending institutions are also targets. But it is infrequent, in federal white collar
crimes, for the victim to be a single individual. Separating white collar from
nonviolent common crimes necessitates distinguishing between two very different
pools of victims.
We reach similar conclusions when we focus on the nature of the offense,
and on other variables that might be regarded as crude indicators of the com-
plexity of the criminal activity. As Table II shows, just as white collar crimes
are likely to victimize organizations, they are also likely to use an organizational
form for their commission. Fully forty percent of the white collar crimes in our
sample are committed through the use of a formal organization, whether it be a
small business, a large corporation, or something in between. The common
crimes, in contrast, are almost always conducted either by lone individuals or by

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offenders in loosely structured small groups. Only about nineteen percent of the
common crimes involve five or more persons in addition to the defendant, while
more than one-third of the white collar offenses have as many participants.

TABLE II
DIFFERENCES IN COMPLEXITY BETWEEN NONVIOLENT COMMON CRIME AND WHITE
COLLAR CRnI

Nonviolent Common White Collar

Crimes (Base N) Crimes (Base N)
Exhibiting a Pattern to the Crime 23.9% (209) 65.1% (1329)
Involving Crimes Lasting More
than a Year 7.0% (196) 50.9% (1239)
Involving Use of an Organization 2.4% (210) 40.2% (1334)
Involving Five or More
Additional Persons 18.9% (206) 35.7% (1288)

Those who coded the PSI's were asked to discern whether there was a clearly
defined pattern to the crimes, and as Table II shows, such a pattern is evident
in nearly two-thirds of the white collar offenses and about one-fourth of the
common crimes. Perhaps because of the relative success of patterned crimes us-
ing organizations, the biggest difference in the nature of the offenses lies in
their duration: only seven percent of the common crimes lasted more than one
year, while nearly two-thirds of the white collar crimes lasted at least that long.
We are aware, of course, that had we been studying other types of federally
convicted offenders in our common crime category, these results might look dif-
2
ferent. For example, drug offenses and offenses prosecuted under the RICO '
statutes are likely to have organized crime components and therefore often a
pattern, a duration, a number of offenders and an organizational form similar
to some of the more complex white collar crimes. We nevertheless think it im-
portant that limiting the nature of the criminal activity to economic transactions
with a heavy presumption of nonviolence demonstrates that common crimes are
conducted differently from white collar crimes.
We shift now from the nature of the offense to the nature of the offender,
and examine some of the pertinent occupational, educational and other demo-
graphic characteristics of common criminals and white collar criminals. Table III
examines employment and education. It is probably not surprising to learn that
of our white collar offenders, less than six percent were unemployed when they
committed their crimes, since the commission of so many of their crimes de-
pended on the offender's occupational position. The general unemployment rate
for this period in the seven districts we examined was 5.9 percent. So our white
collar criminals were doing slightly better than the general public. This is in

21. 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-1963 (1982).

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 AMERICAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

stark contrast to the common crime defendants, whose unemployment rate was
well over fifty percent.

TABLE III
DIFFERENCES IN EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT BETWEEN COMMON AND WITE
COLLAR CRIMINALS

Nonviolent White
Common Collar
Crimes Crimes General
(Base N) (Base N) Public*
Education
High School
Graduates 45.5% (209) 79.3% (1330) 69.0%
College
Graduates 3.9% (209) 27.1% (1330) 19.0%
Employment
Unemployed 56.7% (178) 5.7% (1225) 5.9%
Steadily
Employed 12.7% (166) 58.4% (1229) n/a
* These figures refer to the population of the seven districts sampled. FEDERAL
JUDICIAL CENTER, JUDICIAL DISTRICT DATA BOOK, 1983 (1983) (companion com-
puter tape available from the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social
Research). Neither the Federal Judicial Center nor the Consortium are responsi-
ble for analyses herein.

What may not have been so obvious is that less than sixty percent of the white
collar defendants can be regarded as steadily employed.Y We do not have a
similar figure for the districts as a whole, but this at least suggests that a large
part of the white collar criminal population cannot depend on steady and stable
employment at the time of their crimes.
With regard to education, the white collar crime offenders are better educated
than the general public, while the common crime offenders occupy a relatively
disadvantaged position. More than seventy-eight percent of the white collar of-
fenders are high school graduates in contrast to sixty-nine percent of the general
public. Among the common crime defendants, fewer than half had graduated
from high school. Whereas only 3.9 percent of the common crime defendants
were college graduates, 27.1 percent of the white collar defendants had obtained
college degrees. Over seventy percent of the white collar defendants, however,
had not completed a college education and thus lack one of those badges of
"high social status" that Sutherland and others sometimes identify with white

22. We defined "steady employment" as uninterrupted employment during the five-year period
preceding conviction.

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19881 WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS

collar offenders. 23 Still, the 27.1 percent graduation rate exceeds that of the gen-
eral population, whose rate is roughly nineteen percent.
Other demographic characteristics, appearing in Table IV, are worthy of at
least a brief review. It is well known that crime is largely a male phenomenon
and that is surely true of white collar crime as well. Over eighty-five percent of
the offenders in our eight white collar categories are male. The surprise is that
so many of the common crime defendants in our sample are female. In most
studies of sex differences in arrest or conviction rates, eighty-five to ninety per-
cent of offenders are male. The federal crimes of postal theft and postal for-
gery, in contrast, would appear to draw a substantial number of female
offenders.

TABLE IV
DIFERENCES IN DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS BETWEEN
COMMON AND WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS

Nonviolent White
Common Collar
Criminals Criminals General
(Base N) (Base N) Public
Sex (Male) 68.6% (210) 85.5% (1342) 48.607o*
Race (White) 34.3% (210) 81.7%o (1340) 76.8%**
Age (Mean Age) 30 (210) 40 (1342) 30*
Religion
Protestant 59.6% (171) 50.7% (1073) 70.1%***
Jewish 2.9% (171) 15.2% (1073) 2.0%***
Catholic 23.5% (171) 23.4% (1073) 25.00 ***
* UNITED STATES BUREAU OF THE CENSUS, STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE

UNITED STATES 25, 28 (106th ed. 1986) (referring to general American popula-
tion).
* * This figure refers to the population of the seven federal districts in our sam-
ple. FEDERAL JUDICIAL CENTER, JUDICIAL DISTRICT DATA BOOK, 1983 (1983)
(companion computer tape available from Interuniversity Consortium for Politi-
cal and Social Research). Neither the Federal Judicial Center nor the Consor-
tium are responsible for the analysis herein.
*** These are national figures as reported in Public Opinion, Nov.-Dec. 1978,
at 33. Our best estimate of corresponding figures for the seven districts is 64%,
80 and 25%/o.

The racial composition of white collar and common crime reflects at least in
part the racial composition of the job market: over eighty percent of our white

23. SUTHERLAND, supra note 1, at 9 (defining white collar crime as "a crime committed by a
person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation").

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 A mRICAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

collar offenders are white, in contrast to slightly over one-third of the common
crime defendants in our sample. Although crime is usually presumed to be a
young man's game, the average white collar offender in our sample is forty
years old, and his common crime counterpart is far beyond late adolescence, at
an average age of thirty. That puts the common crime offenders at roughly the
average age of the general population and the white collar offenders ten years
beyond it.
With respect to religion, there is one clear finding. Although many in both
white collar and common crime categories do not claim a particular religious
faith, the Catholics who do so are distributed similarly between common crime
and white collar crime, at roughly twenty-three percent each, closely paralleling
the percentage of Catholics (twenty-five percent) in the adult population of our
districts. In contrast, Jews, although roughly eight percent of the population of
our districts, make up only three percent of our common crime sample, but
fifteen percent of our white collar sample?" It would be a fair summary of our.
data to say that, demographically speaking, white collar offenders are predomi-
nantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews. In contrast,
the common crime defendants are mainly non-white males-although women
make up a substantial minority-who are younger than the typical white collar
offenders.
These data do not exhaust the differences between white collar and common
crime defendants. For example, although white collar offenders have what some
may regard as a surprisingly high number of prior arrests and convictions
(forty-six and thirty-four percent respectively), they are still distinguished in this
respect from the common crime defendants, virtually all of whom have prior
involvement with the criminal justice system. While home ownership is not a
sure sign of social stability, it is noteworthy that forty-six percent of our white
collar offenders own their own homes, in contrast to only six percent of the
common crime defendants.
It seems well established, then, that whatever else may be true of the distinc-
tion between white collar and common crime offenses and offenders, they defi-
nitely do draw from distinctively different sectors of the population, and they
have distinguishable patterns of both offense and victimization.

III. ON Tm DIVERsITY WITHIN WHITE COLLAR CRIm: TiE HIERARCHY OF

WHITE COLLAR OF'FNDING
A close look at the actual cases prosecuted under the various white collar
crime statutes shows what diversity the category contains. Initially, we examine
the eight separate offense categories to see if they cluster into meaningful types.
A helpful analysis considers whether the same variables that distinguish between
white collar and common crimes, namely their complexity and the nature of

24. Fisher, The National Gallup Polls & American Jewish Demography, in AMERICAN JEwISH
YEARBOOK, 1983, at 111-26 & App. 130-39, 175-82 (1982).

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19881 WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS

their victimization, serve also to make meaningful distinctions within the white
collar crime category itself.
Table V suggests the utility of this approach. The eight offense categories di-
vide reasonably comfortably into three types, forming a rough hierarchy of of-
fense complexity. At the top of the hierarchy are antitrust and securities fraud
offenses, where the crimes are patterned and repetitive, and involve several peo-
ple in an organized conspiracy. Although the two offenses differ in their basic
mode of commission, with antitrust depending upon collusion and securities
fraud upon systematic deception, they are similar in that both require a good
deal of planning and organization.
TABLE V
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WHITE COLLAR CRIMES: COMPLEXITY

Five or More Duration of

Pattern to Organization Other Persons One Year or
Offense the Crime Used Involved More
Categories (Base N) (Base N) (Base N) (Base N)

Antitrust 99.1% 100.0% 88.4% 88.8%

(116) (114) (112) (107)
Securities
Fraud 95.0% 85.3% 63.1% 70.8%
(211) (224) (214) (212)
Moderate
Mail Fraud 81.4% 33.5% 26.8% 48.8%
(188) (188) (186) (182)
False Claims 61.5% 28.007o 18.2% 50.6%
(156) (157) (154) (146)
Credit Fraud 48.1%qo 24.4% 14.1% 28.307o
(158) (157) (155) (145)
Bribery 48.801o 37.3% 39.8% 33.80o
(82) (83) (83) (77)
Low
Tax Fraud 46.2% 17.6% 3.40o 84.1%
(208) (210) (210) (202)
Bank
Embezzlement 39.2% 9.00%0 7.501o 24.106
(199) (201) (200) (187)

There exist substantial differences between the categories on a number of

issues. Virtually all of the antitrust and securities fraud crimes involve pat-
terned activities and the use of a formal organization. Fewer than half of the

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 AMERICAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

tax fraud and bank embezzlement cases are patterned, and fewer than a fifth
use an organization for their commission. They also differ enormously in the
number of people involved. By noting the vast variation within white collar
crimes, we sense the danger of referring to white collar crimes as a general
category. Mail fraud, false claims and statements, credit fraud and bribery
tend to be in an intermediate category, while tax fraud and bank embezzle-
ment are at the low end of the complexity scale,
A similar conclusion is warranted by our examination of the nature of vic-
timization. Table VI provides data on the dollar amount of the illegal gain,
the number of victims, and the geographic scope of victimization. Again anti-
trust and securities fraud occupy a very clear and distinctive position in all
three measures of victimization. The victims of antitrust offenses tend to be
vast in number, but the monetary amount associated with each victim so small
that it is often unnoticed, as in the typical consumer price fixing scheme that
drives up the price of consumer goods by a few pennies. The two offenses
also differ, of course, in who benefits. The profits from most antitrust offen-
ses return to the corporation, while the profits of security frauds go more
directly to the individuals who commit the crimes. Despite these differences,
the two crimes do share distinctive positions at the top of many indicators of
white collar illegality.

TABLE VI
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WHITE COLLAR CRIMES: VICTIMIZATION

100 or more $100,000 or Statewide or

Offense Victims More Taken Wider Scope
Categories (Base N) (Base N) (Base N)
High
Antitrust 85.0070 (144) 100.0% (116) 82.0% (111)
Securities Fraud 61.9% (160) 86.8% (144) 80.5% (128)
Moderate
Mail Fraud 10.70o (187) 33.6% (140) 36.0% (169)
Low
False Claims 1.3% (157) 13.4% (97) 8.4% (155)
Credit Fraud 2.006 (158) 21.407 (117) 5.8% (155)
Bribery 1.2% (82) 5.1% (59) 8.707 (81)
Tax Fraud 1.4% (210) 12.9% (132) 1.5% (208)
Bank
Embezzlement 0.0% (201) 9.9% (182) 6.507 (201)

In contrasL to ne results uiier our .. ,plexity analysis, the victimization

measures put bank embezzlement and tax -together with false claims,
.caud

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1988] WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS

credit fraud and bribery-at the bottom of the hierarchy of white collar offen-
ses. Although there is a good deal of variation within these categories, partic-
ularly in the magnitude of the offense, they share a pattern of harming only
one victim (typically a large public or private organization) yielding, on the
average, a relatively small profit, and they are largely local in their commis-
sion and impact. Postal and wire fraud fall at an intermediate level, with
more victims, more money taken and a greater geographic scope.
When we turn from examining the nature of the crimes to the nature of the
offenders, we see some interesting similarities and differences. Table VII pres-
ents twelve background characteristics indicating who commits each type of
white collar crime in what kind of social situations.

TABLE VII
SOCIAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERITICS OF WHITE COLLAR OFFENDERS By
STATUTORY OFFENSE

Securities Credit False Mail Bank

Antitrust Fraud Tax Bribery Fraud Claims Fraud Embezzle.
Race (White) 99.1% 99.6% 87.1% 83.3% 71.5% 61.8% 76.8% 74.1%
Sex (Male) 99.1% 97.80o 94.1% 95.2% 84.8% 84.7% 82.1% 54.8%
Age (Mean Age) 53 44 47 45 38 39 38 31
Employment
Steadily
Employed 96.6% 59.4% 80.6% 68.4% 42.2% 46.7% 48.0% 36.8%
Mean Socioeconomic
Status* 61.1 67.4 56.2 59.9 57.3 52.6 55.7 57.3
Unemployed 0.000 0.0% 11.5% 17.8% 24.207 24.8% 25.4% 3.0%
Owners or
Officers 69.2% 74.1% 33.3% 36.8% 31.807 16.4% 28.007o 15.90o
Financial Standing
Median Assets $650,000 $59,000 $49,500 $45,000 $7,000 $4,000 $2,000 $2,000
Median
Liabilities $81,000 $55,000 $23,500 $19,000 $7,000 $5,000 $3,500 $3,000
Education
College
Graduates 40.007o 43.0% 27.0% 27.00% 18.0% 29.0% 23.007o 13.007
Home Ownership
Home Owners 87.8% 62.1% 57.7% 57.0% 44.8% 42.106 33.50o 31.0%
Criminal Background
Prior Convictions 7.7% 27.6% 43.2% 25.0% 48.707 48.70o 48.4% 24.4%
N of Cases" 117 225 210 84 158 157 190 201
* The source for these figures is described at note 25, infra.

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 AMERICAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

** This is the maximum number of cases used. Specific statistics may have been
calculated on a smaller number of valid cases.

The eight categories can be meaningfully reduced to four groups. These

groups also (with one exception) seem to form a hierarchy. At the top again
are antitrust and securities fraud offenders: middle-aged white males with sta-
ble employment in white collar jobs, more often than not owners or officers
in their companies, who are well above the average for the nation in their
socio-economic positions.25 Of the two categories, the antitrust offenders tend
to be richer and are less likely to have had prior convictions, though they are
slightly less educated and rank slightly lower on measures of social standing.
The perpetrators in the tax and bribery cases are also predominantly white
males, although a little more often unemployed, a little less educated, and
somewhat more likely to have prior criminal convictions than their antitrust
and securities fraud counterparts. They are generally steadily employed in
white collar jobs with decent financial standing, and at least a third are own-
ers or officers in their businesses. At the lower end of the spectrum are the
credit fraud, false claim and mail fraud offenders. Fewer than half are stead-
ily employed, and a quarter of each were unemployed at the time of their
offenses. Although their social standing as measured by the Duncan socioeco-
nomic index does not distinguish them from the categories above them, .they
are far less likely to have substantial financial assets, or college degrees, or to
own their own homes, and nearly half have prior criminal convictions. These
offenders are younger on the average than the others, and they are more
likely to be female or non-white, although white males continue to be by far
the modal category. Finally, we have bank embezzlers, who cannot easily be
subsumed under one of these other three categories. They are far younger on
the average than the others, and are nearly as likely to be female as male.
They are like the latter of our three categories in financial assets, but they are
far less likely than the latter category to be either unemployed or to have a
prior criminal record.
Thus, the heterogeneity that we observed with respect to the nature of white
collar offenses is repeated when we examine the social backgrounds of the
perpetrators. But with the exception of the uniformly high social position oc-
cupied by our antitrust offenders, the two features of offense and background
are not highly correlated. Mail fraud offenders, for example, tend to lie higher
up in the hierarchy of organization and victimization than might be predicted
from their social backgrounds alone. By contrast, those convicted of tax fraud
tend to have higher social and professional standing than might have been
presumed from knowledge of the apparently low complexity of their offenses.

25. We assess socioeconomic statr-s using the Duncan index, which is based upon average pres-
tige, income and educational attainment associated with certain types of jobs. See A. REISS, OC-
CUPATIONS AND ,UCIAL STANDING -$9-.- (1961) (di, -ing Duncan index). For orientation, the
mean Duncan score for employed men in 1972 was " i.5. R. HAUSER & D. FEATHERMAN, THE
.K'ROCESS OF STRATIFICATION: TRENDS AND ANALYSFS !18 \New York: Academic Press 1977).

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19881 WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS

We will be in a better position to explore the interrelationship of offenses and

offenders after we examine specific crimes in more detail.
Despite the wide variation within white collar offenses, even those at the
bottom of the hierarchy remain clearly distinct, as a quantitative matter, from
the nonviolent common crime sample. A comparison of Table VII with Table
III shows, for example, that embezzlers, the least likely among white collar
offenders to be college graduates or to be stably employed, are three times
higher in these categories than nonviolent common crime offenders. So the
notion of a fairly clear hierarchy of white collar offenders does not obliterate
the distinction between white collar and common criminality.

IV. DIVERSITY WITHIN STATUTORY CATEGORIES

There is more reason to expect homogeneity within white collar crime sta-
tutes than across them. Although some white collar criminal statutes are nar-
row in scope, most are designed to cover a wide range of conduct. Without
going into each statute in detail, a close look at the cases successfully prose-
cuted under two of them, the mail fraud and bank embezzlement statutes,
should serve to make the point.
The mail fraud statute is notoriously broad:
Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or arti-
fice to defraud ... for the purpose of executing such scheme or
artifice or attempting so to do, places in any post office or author-
ized depository for mail matter, any matter or thing whatever to be
sent or delivered by the Postal Service, or takes or receives there-
from any such matter or thing, or knowingly causes to be delivered
by mail . . . any such matter or thing, shall be fined not more than
$1000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both .... 26
With the use of the mail or electronic media as the only criteria holding these
crimes in common, we should not be surprised to find an extraordinary vari-
ety of acts prosecuted under the mail fraud statute. Our sample2 7 has a large
number of "something for nothing" mail frauds where the purchaser or inves-
tor is solicited through magazine advertising or direct mail campaigns to buy
land, oil, or bags of rare coins only to discover that the product does not
exist. Cases range from simple one-shot schemes to complicated, fraudulent
land deals netting millions of dollars. For example, in one case, defendants
placed misleading advertisements in European periodicals, seeking investors for
oil and gas wells in the United States. Over a thousand individuals bought
securities through the mail. They sent funds estimated to be in the millions of
dollars. But the money was used to pay prior investors the income that they
were led to believe their wells were producing. In fact, the wells were produc-

26. 18 U.S.C. § 1341 (1982).

27. Information referred to in the following discussion was obtained from confidential PSI
reports. Citations, therefore, are omitted to preserve confidentiality.

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 AMERICAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

ing only a small fraction of the reported income. Organizations are also typi-
cally victims of such schemes as phony applications for credit cards or
government benefits. The mail and wire statute is also used when the fraud is
being committed, in effect, on the mail or wire itself. This happens when peo-
ple are detected using illegal mechanisms to make unpaid long distance phone
calls. 28 In still other cases (about fifteen percent of the total) the fraud was
committed directly against the government by government employees obtaining
kickbacks for acceptance of low bids for government work.
The bank embezzlement statute, on the other hand, seems narrow by com-
parison with mail fraud:
Whoever, being an officer, director, agent, or employee of, or con-
nected in any capacity with any Federal Reserve bank, member
bank, national bank or insured bank ... embezzles, abstracts, pur-
loins, or willfully misapplies any of the moneys, funds or credits of
such bank or any moneys, funds, assets or securities intrusted to
the custody or care of such bank, or to the custody or care of any
such agent, officer, director, employee or receiver, shall be fined
not more than $5000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or
both .... 29

Under this statute, the defendants all share the quality of being somehow
"connected" with a bank-but there the similarity ends. Although, as our ear-
lier analysis showed, these cases are uniquely different from the other statu-
tory categories, major differences are apparent even within the bank
embezzlement category. Many of the violations are committed by employees
who hold a special, trusted position within a business: tellers and clerks, who
have a legitimate access to cash, simply take some. These are "hand in the
till" cases, and they are found in our sample with some frequency. Lower
echelon defendants are likely to be young, usually with only a high school
education, and are often female and black. Although the median embezzle-
ment is in the five to ten thousand dollar range, many of these defendants
take much less. Similar cases also occur with those higher up in the hierarchy,
such as when a loan officer makes a loan to a nonexistent loan applicant. For
example, the vice president of one important commercial bank in New York
City made a series of large loans to foreign ship owners even though he knew
that their collateral was overvalued and the loans would not be repaid. Be-
cause of this misapplication of funds, the bank lost between thirty and sixty
million dollars. The two examples of mail fraud and bank embezzlement are
enough to suggest how unlikely it is that we will be able to define a homoge-
neous group of offenders based upon their statute of conviction.

28. One defenc' it -, prosecute, fo -naking $182 worth of such calls, and for supplying his
laughter with the same type of device fron which shc n; .de approximately $1200 in calls.
29. 18 U.S.C. § 656 (1982).

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19881 WHITE COLLAR CRIMINALS

V. GARDEN VARIETY WHITE COLLAR OFFENDING

At the risk of seeming blatantly inconsistent (having just established the ex-
traordinary range and variety of white collar offenses-both across and within
statutory categories), we now assert a generalization about the category of
white collar offending. We do so because of our concern over the recent re-
turn of interest in white collar crime which has been accompanied by a stri-
dency, verging on romanticism, that we think may lead to a fundamental
misconception of the kind of problem that white collar crime represents. A
distinction between "crime in the streets" and "crime in the suites," with a
vision of high-placed business executives gone wrong, is a typical part of em-
pirical reality, and there are many such cases in the current news (especially
with the SEC's current focus on insider trading). These cases may be symboli-
cally important for what they convey about the nation's business and financial
leadership, and they are surely the stuff of which novels and popular movies
are made.
As important as these cases are, individually, they nevertheless comprise
only a tiny portion of the white collar cases processed by the federal court
system. This is true whether one examines all the types of white collar crime
we have reviewed here, or restricts oneself to the top of the hierarchy. In
either case, after reading hundreds of presentence investigation reports'describ-
ing such offenses, one emerges with a strong sense of the banal, mundane
quality of the vast majority of white collar offenses. Perhaps if we had been
studying the smaller federal districts, rather than the metropolitan centers, we
would have a stronger sense of the cleverness, creativity and resourcefulness of
white collar offenders, but we rather doubt it. Although we did find a few
cases in each of our crime categories of highly placed officials gone wrong
and of marvelously complex schemes, they are overwhelmed by the everyday
quality of most white collar offenses.
Consider what some would regard as the most elite form of white collar
crime, namely antitrust offenses. Although there are instances like the famed
General Electric case of 1926,30 the vast majority of cases in our sample are
characterized by low-level, local or narrowly regional offenses that are hardly
of major significance. Here is one such case taken from our project files:
Five linen companies and four individuals from the Miami area were in-
dicted for their participation in a scheme to allocate accounts and to refrain
from competing for each other's customers. Under the agreement reached by
the parties, which was in effect from 1964 to 1974, newly formed businesses
or firms without previous linen service might be solicited by all comers; those
having established relationships with one of the defendants could not be ap-
proached. Apparently, both meetings and telephone conversations were used to
keep the agreement going.
Although a number of strategies were employed to discourage the dissatis-

30. United States v. General Elec. Co., 272 U.S. 476 (1926).

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 AiMRicAN CRIMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

fied customers of one conspirator from switching to another, accounts did oc-
casionally change hands. Sometimes businesses were so unhappy they could
not be dissuaded; in other cases, overzealous salespeople would, intentionally
or not, sign one of their competitors' firms. Records of such events would be
maintained, and periodic accountings between companies would be made. The
defendant to whom business was owed might be referred to a displeased cus-
tomer of the party that was ahead, or it might be agreed that one firm would
take a certain amount of business from the other.
Organizations and municipalities requesting bids on linen service were treated
in like manner. The first bid was wide-open, but the company that had been
successful initially would be allowed to win all subsequent bids. The defendant
handling the account would notify competitors of its intended bid, permitting
the others to submit higher, or what are called complementary, bids or to not
bid at all.
One of the indicated individuals, the president of three of the defendant.
corporations, was considered the leader of the conspiracy by the prosecution.
The corporate defendants were primarily family-owned businesses. As in so
many of these cases, it is not clear how the government discovered the con-
spiracy. The Justice Department's investigation of a very similar agreement in
the uniform rental industry in Miami (which involved one of the companies
indicted in this case) began when a small company complained of harassment
by coconspirators because it was soliciting their customers."
We cannot say that this case is typical in every respect, but it is certainly
not an unusual one. Many similar arrangements occur, most often in connec-
tion with the construction industry but ranging across a wide variety of busi-
nesses.3 2 Our point, therefore, is not that these are inconsequential offenses,33
only that they are common, for the most part requiring little sophistication.
And if that is true for antitrust, it is surely true of many offenses in our
sample. Most of our false claims cases, for example, involve small amounts of
money claimed illegally against a wide variety of government agencies:3 4 the
Veteran's Administration, the IRS, even the U.S. Air Force and the U.S.
Marshall's office. Similarly, although the bribery statute occasionally nets a
very prominent government official, more typical defendants include a housing
appraiser for the Veterans Administration, a federally supported nursing home

31. We are indebted to Mitchell Rothman, who provided this description of the case which
was based on our project files. M. RoTHmAN, THE CRIBMNALOm REVISITED 71-72 (May, 1982) (un-
published dissertation, Yale University).
32. Another case, for example, involved a handful of real estate brokers in the Baltimore area
who agreed, in conversations taking place at a nearby country club, that they should raise the
price of real-estate sales commissions by one percent.
33. These offenses clearly have significant consequences for their victims. In the linen cases,
for example, customers obviously had to pay more than they would have otherwise over a period
of many years.
34. One case in our sample involves a federal empi. yee who was convicted for filing a travel
oucher inflated by $204.

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1988] WHITE COLLAR CRBGMAIS

operator receiving kickbacks from a drug company, and the owner of a small
business attempting to bribe an IRS agent.
The same banality is prevalent in most tax fraud cases in our sample. Con-
victions for willful failure to report legal income are common, for the fraudu-
lent component might include simply reporting an inflated number of
exemptions. Employers prosecuted under the tax statutes often failed to remit
taxes lawfully withheld from employee paychecks. These offenses require only
a simple misrepresentation on forms submitted to the IRS.
These cases admittedly have an undramatic quality, and we think it well to
remember that they form the bulk of the white collar crime cases in our ma-
jor federal districts. Perhaps this should not be surprising, since the simplest
cases are often the easiest to detect: rare is the prosecutor's office who has
the time and staff to develop more than a handful of complex white collar
cases. Undoubtedly there is some truth to the notion that successful prosecu-
tion of such cases may have a deterrent effect on the business community."
But just as a carefully planned and intricate bank robbery or safe job lends
color to the much more frequent convenience store stick-up, such cases only
lend color and drama to the more mundane forms of white collar offending.

VI. JoINmNO oF OFFENSE AND OFFENDER: THE ROLE OF STATUS AND PRESTIGE
Earlier we noted that the general differences in status and background be-
tween the white collar offenders in our survey did not necessarily correspond
to the differences in the nature and consequences of their crimes. We are thus
compelled to ask how offense and offender fit together. As we step back from
the data as organized by statutory category, we can begin to discern how
characteristics inherent in the offense and the offender combine to explain why
some instances of white collar crime produce offenses of great magnitude
while most do not. We will draw from an earlier analysis 36 and from the find-
ings reported above to at least suggest one way in which the qvalities of both
offense and offender may combine to produce the greatest amount of damage.
The most consequential white collar crimes-in terms of their scope, impact
and cost in dollars-require for their commission, as a rule, that their perpe-
trators operate in an environment in which they have access to both money
and the organizations through which money moves. The status or prestige of
the organization or of the individual who inhabits it is only a common inci-
dental feature, for the key factor is location in the organization where money
is to be found."7

35. See WHEELER, MAhNN & SARAT, Srrro iN JUDGEMENT: TEE SENTENCiNO OF WMTE COLLAR
CRnaNALs (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press 1988) (stating that judges consider deterrence at sentenc-
ing).
36. Wheeler & Rothman, supra note 3.
37. There are many such organizations that are otherwise unremarkable: state and federal
agencies with multimillion dollar budgets; private companies with huge cash flow businesses; or-
ganizations whose clients may not be individually wealthy but who are worth many millions in the
aggregate.

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 AMERICAN CRIMIaNAL LAW REvIEW [Vol. 25:331

Of course, merely working in an organization does not, of itself, provide

access to the institution's resources. Those who have positions as managers or
officers are, for example, better situated to commit white collar offenses than
are lower level employees. A crucial way in which offender characteristics such
as high social status and education are linked to the degree of white collar
victimization is that such background characteristics provide more opportunity
to occupy organizational positions with the greatest potential for large-scale
offenses. Thus, officers, who tend to commit more large-scale crimes, also
tend to be well-educated and of high social status. Where high echelon posi-
tions can be occupied without passing hurdles of education or professional-
ism-through promotions from within the agency or company, for example-
we should find, correspondingly, individuals of lower social status committing
a greater number of large-scale offenses. Many individuals promoted from
within an organization may have loyalties that will make cheating their own
companies or customers difficult. A potential offender of this kind may,
therefore, be more likely to steal for the company, as in most antitrust viola-
tions, rather than from it.
Status and prestige may also have value beyond their role in providing op-
portunity-they may lend the appearance of legitimacy, and thus make it eas-
ier for white collar offenders to obtain money from unsuspecting victims.38 It
may also be that offenses are detected less readily when those who commit
them are in high status positions. We suspect, however, that the duration of
an offense, like its financial magnitude, is more often a result of the offen-
der's ability, through power and control, to shape the audit and accounting
processes to avoid detection.
If we are right, this should mean that high status in society should some-
times aid in the commission of crimes of the largest magnitude, but it will
seldom be enough by itself. The power or position conferred by status em-
powers the offender rather than status itself. Accordingly, persons in key posi-
tions (with access to the flow of money), whether of high status or not, have
a greater potential for major white collar offenses. That potential is limited,
however, for those outside of such positions, even when their status in society
and their occupational prestige is very high.
Consider the following two not-so-hypothetical cases:
A. A medical doctor, with his own individual practice, keeps fraudulent
books on his practice and commits income tax fraud.
B. A middle-manager in a government hierarchy has approval powers on a
major government program and takes kickbacks for processing fraudulent
claims.
The former has the prestige we associate with the medical profession-the lat-
ter, a relatively nondescript administrative position. Which has the greater po-

38. See R. GAN Oss'. BAD BusIN. J: MaOPM SC. NDAL AND TiE SEDUCTON OF THE ESTAB-
I.SHMENT (1985) (describing case of Myron and Mordy, a-tributing this belief to those who-go to
p .;t trouble to create positive impression by moving offices to a prestigious address).

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tential to commit financial frauds of significant magnitude? The answer will

depend in part on the kinds of accounting and surveillance mechanisms in
place in the two cases, but, in many instances, it will not be the one with
greater status in society.19

VII. JOINING OFFENSE AND OFFENDER: TI ROLE OF AGE, RACE AND SEX
What about other social background characteristics like age, race and sex?
Most criminals are young, but not those who commit higher-level white collar
crimes. As with status, we think that the link between age and white collar
offending is largely due to opportunity. It takes time, and therefore age, to
achieve the kind of position that facilitates most large-scale white collar crime.
Bank trust officers are older than bank tellers, and their crimes are more lu-
crative. Most antitrust offenses can be carried out only by those who have
advanced fairly far up the corporate ladder. Thus, like status and prestige, age
is most likely to affect the severity of the offense not directly, but through the
opportunities it confers.
What then of race and sex? It is certainly possible that the prejudicial effect
of race is great enough that even when blacks achieve "positional" equality
(and therefore, presumably, equality of opportunity for crime), they will re-
main handicapped in their search for equal dollars from that opportunity. Mi-
norities in our sample (most of whom were black) consistently had lower
illegal gains than whites, and there is some evidence that the difference is not
simply due to their concentration in the lower levels of the white collar crime
hierarchy.40
The situation of women offenders is also clear from our data. We take it as
no accident, but a powerful statement regarding sex discrimination in employ-
ment, that women offenders surveyed are concentrated in both bank embezzle-
ment and to a lesser extent in the lower level frauds. Although they comprise
about 15 percent of the sample, they account for less than 2 percent of the
highest tier of white collar offenders-those who are convicted of antitrust or
securities fraud crimes.
On almost every measure available, women offenders tend to exhibit charac-
teristics closer to those of nonviolent common crime offenders than their male
counterparts. They are younger, less likely to be college educated, less "well-
placed" occupationally, less well-off financially, and less likely to be white.
Their crimes net significantly less, in part because they are less often in organ-
izational positions that provide opportunity for large-scale crimes. Their offen-
ses tend also to be less sophisticated and of shorter duration than those of
male white collar offenders. The only area where they are less like common-

39. This is especially true if we value the offense not in dollars gained by our two hypothetical
offenders, but by the dollars lost to the government in the two cases.
40. A regression analysis to explore levels of victimization yields a significant negative coeffi-
cient for race, even after the considerable effects of organization and social class variables have
been accounted for.

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 AimRICAN CRtMINAL LAW REVIEW [Vol. 25:331

crime defendants than males is in prior record; women are less likely to have
prior convictions than are men. In virtually all other respects, however, they
could be regarded as being one degree closer to common-crime offenders than
those males who commit white collar crimes.
A closer look within particular categories of offenses would probably reveal
important additional differences between men and women both in offense style
and in the role the offenses play in their own lives. It would be consistent
with the generally lower economic position of women offenders if the re-
sources from their crimes more often went toward family support, for exam-
ple. We showed earlier that given statutory categories include a great diversity
of offenses, and it would be surprising if some of that diversity were not at-
4
tributable to gender. 1
On the future of women's white collar criminality, we remain struck by the
fact that the strongest correlates of major white collar victimization are attrib-
utes of positions, rather than of persons. Our analysis suggests that women.
who achieve status and authority in organizations are offered opportunities in
white collar crime similar to those offered to men. But so long as women are
under-represented in those types of positions, they may be under-represented in
the higher tiers of white collar crime and will continue to be drawn dispropor-
tionately from the ranks of banktellers, secretaries and bookkeepers.

VIII. DIscussioN
Among a variety of issues deserving further commentary and discussion, we
would like to address just one: what do our empirical conclusions suggest with
regard to efforts to explain white collar crime? Recent theorizing joins the is-
sue: Is white collar crime a special phenomenon requiring an explanation dif-
ferent from that required of common crime? More specifically, with respect to
our own findings, do the crimes occurring at different levels in the hierarchy
of white collar criminality each require a separate explanation?4 2 Or are Hir-
schi and Gottfredson right in their attack on the value of white collar crime
as a concept, and in their insistence that we search for an underlying theory
that will explain all crime? 43 This is not the place to consider these issues in
detail, but it might be useful to offer some observations based on our quanti-
tative data and on a reading of the cases on which these data are based.
Hirschi and Gottfredson define crimes as events in which force or fraud are
used to satisfy self-interest, which for them is simply "the enhancement of
pleasure and the avoidance of pain."" They assume that if events are to be

41. See K. DALY, GENDER AND Wsrrn-CoLLR CR (Nov. 1986) (manuscript prepared for
meeting of American Society of Criminology) (pursuing more detailed examination of gender dif-
ferences in white collar crime using this body of data).
42. Clarke & Cornish, Modelling Offenders' Decisions: A Framework for Research and Policy,
6 CRamA AND JusTCE (NI. Tonry & N- M ris ed. 1985).
43. Hirschi & Gottfredson, Causes of WIhite Collar tL >'ne, 25 CRII NOLOGY, 949-74 (1987).
44. Id. at 959.

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198] SWHTE COLLAR CRIMINALS 355"

maximally pleasurable, they should have a certain immediacy, as well as cer-

tainty of outcome, and should require minimal effort. With this conception of
crime, it follows that
[c]riminality is the tendency of individuals to pursue short-term
gratification in the most direct way with little consideration for the
long-term consequences of their acts . . . [P]eople high on this ten-
dency are relatively unable or unwilling to delay gratifications; they
are relatively indifferent to punishment and to the interests of oth-
ers. As a consequence, they tend to be impulsive, active, and risk
45
taking .
Whether this view of crime and criminality will turn out to have heuristic
value remains to be seen, but it does lead Hirschi and Gottfredson to one
conclusion we share, that white collar occupations tend to require traits like
educational persistence, stability of employment, willingness to delay gratifica-
tion and to work within structures requiring deference to others. They draw
the natural inference, therefore, that the rate of offending among those in
white collar positions ought to be relatively low-probably lower than that as-
sociated with other kinds of work. It would follow from their analysis that
when people do commit white collar crime, they should be operating from the
same short-term gratifications and indifference to punishment as the common-
crime offender: The securities fraud offender should have been a youthful
mugger but missed the boat. How else do we explain why the average age of
a white collar offender is close to forty, and why most of them are first of-
fenders? In any event, although we admire the ambition to create a general
theory of criminality, and recognize that such an ambition is in the spirit of
Sutherland, we doubt that it is the wisest path to understanding.
Part of our concern is with the breadth of the concept of crime and crimi-
nality itself. Although much criminality is hedonistic, our criminal statutes
criminalize acts that could hardly be said to be motivated by immediate and
short term self-interest. In our own sample, in addition to tax cheats we have
tax protestors-persons who chose to express their unhappiness with our gov-
ernment by withholding the monies they owe. They, along with political ter-
rorists or vigilantes, would be hard to explain in the simple terms put forth by
a theory of immediate ego gratification.-
But suppose we limit our inquiry to the category of "nonviolent crimes en-
gaged in for financial gain." Might we then have an explanation that would
be applicable to all such cases? Perhaps-at the most general level. The one
thing the lowliest con man and the highest white collar offender would seem
to share is salesmanship-the capacity to convince others that the person in
question is worthy of their trust and their money. The same salesmanship that

45. Id. at 959-60.

46. D. WEISBURD, JEWISH SEITLER VIOLENCE IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL: DEVuNcE AS SOCIL
REACTION (University Park: Penn. State Univ. Press, in press).

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leads some persons to be chosen as "Man of the Year" by their companies

can also be used for illegitimate purposes. The capacity for concealment or
manipulation, for saying things without meaning them, unites virtually all
forms of nonviolent, financially motivated frauds. What then differentiates
those in the lower reaches of nonviolent offending from those at or near the
top of the white collar crime hierarchy? Even if we agreed with Hirschi and
Gottfredson that the proportion of cheats at the higher level ought to be
smaller (both for the reasons stated earlier and because being at or near the
top does, after all, provide a good living) when it does occur, how do we
explain it?
We might speculate that there are two paths that lead to crime at that level.
On the one hand there are those who learned early how to use salesmanship,
guile, and associated techniques to become financially successful within a legit-
imate occupational structure. Their hard work and salesmanship paid off as
they moved up the ladder. But since the ladder is shaped like a pyramid,
competition gets stiffer the further up one goes, and these individuals sooner
or later find that they can no longer make the same headway without bending
or breaking the rules. They therefore slip over the boundary of legality. These
are the high-risk ego gratifiers that Hirshi and Gottfredson analyzed.
The second path represents an important variant. Criminals of this type also
achieve success through patience and hard work, although acquiring in the
process habits of spending great amounts of money. They then find themselves
in situations where they or their companies are under great financial pressure,
and where they risk losing the life-style that they have achieved. They may
perceive this situation as a short-term threat that can be met through short-
term fraud-a temporary taking to be restored as soon as business fortunes
turn around. The motivation for their crime is not selfish ego gratification,
but rather the fear of failing-of losing what they have worked so hard to
gain. It leads them, however, to the same kinds of illegal activity as the for-
mer type. But those who follow this path, we speculate, are far more likely to
feel the social pain of their conduct when it becomes known and may also
feel some genuine remorse for their offenses.
Looked at from afar, these may seem like two very minor variations on the
central theme of success and ambition carried to extremes. We believe, how-
ever, that when criminality is better understood, both general and specific mo-
tivations will play an important part. To assume that each offense must have
its own unique understanding is unwarranted; but going to the other extreme
of searching for a single explanation is to ignore the most important lessons
that the detailed study of particular kinds of crime can teach us.

IX. CONCLUSION
When Edwin H. Sutherland coined the term "white collar crime," he gave
voice to an interest that has teen pursued more in political and rhetorical
terms than tiaougn sustainet ei .pirical re- .rch. Fortunately, this condition is
zhanging. Braithwaite's recent review leaves the strong impression that more

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has been learned in the past five to ten years than in the previous thirty.4 7 We
hope that our own work, although limited to the study of convicted indivi-
duals, can help extend this new-found knowledge. For us, the factors that
most clearly differentiate white collar from common crimes are the complexity
and the degree of victimization, and especially for those offenses of greatest
magnitude, the positions occupied by those who commit them. Within the gen-
eral category of federal white collar crime, there is a hierarchy with most anti-
trust and securities fraud offenses at the top, and most false claims, credit
fraud and bank embezzlement at the bottom. Finally, we are struck by the
inadequacy of efforts to shed light on white collar crime by concentrating ei-
ther on the social background of the offender, or on the nature of the crime,
without exploring closely how these two critical ingredients fit together.

47. Braithwaite, White Collar Crime, II ANNUAL REviEw OF SOCIOLOGY 1-25 (1985). Braith-
waite's review includes citations to the most important works in the past decade, including that of
Clinard and Yeager, Coffee, Fisse, Geis and Goff, Hagen, Meier and Short, Nagel, Reiss, and
Braithwaite himself-to name just a few of those not cited elsewhere in the present Article.

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