Elite Crime

ELITE CRIME includes acts committed by members of the upper classes, including these who head corporate and governmental organizations. The phrase perhaps best fits Edwin H. Sutherland's definition of white-collar cite as “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.”

Though the cases have been made that whitecollar crime encompasses more than just occupational malfeasance committed by persons of “high social status,” (note, for example, crimes committed by low-level employees), crimes committed by elite members of society may have the most damaging effect. Elite crimes may be committed for personal gain and/or for fostering the power, profitability, or influence of the organization.

White-collar crime is massively harmful financially, but also includes violence and reduction of civil liberties. 2002's big crime story was a long and complicated saga of corporate financial shenanigans that caused a significant drop in stock market prices. Although the economic losses were widespread, Fortune magazine notes: “The not-so-secret dirty secret of the crash is that even as investors were losing 70 percent, 90 percent, even in some cases all of their holdings, top officials of many of the companies that have crashed the hardest were getting immensely, extraordinarily, obscenely wealthy.”

At center stage was Enron Corporation, a multibillion-dollar energy-rights trading company, which declared one of the largest bankruptcies in history on December 2, 2001, with debts of over $31 billion. Enron was subsequently accused of having perpetrated a massive “disinformation” campaign, hiding the degree of its indebtedness from investors by treating loans as revenue, and hiding company losses by creating new firms with company capital, and then attributing losses to them rather than Enron. As Enron shares were taking a dive, Chief Executive Officer Ken Lay was e-mailing concerned employees, advising them to hold their shares and buy new ones.

Meanwhile, Lay cashed in $103 million of his own shares in the company. Enron executives unloaded nearly a billion dollars worth of stock while employees were locked out of selling the holdings in their pensions during much of the period in which the company's stock fell from $80 a share to $0.30. Enron investors collectively lost about $60 billion, which included many large pension plans and the retirement savings of up to 20,000 Enron employees.

Enron turned out not be an isolated incident and the list of companies touched by financial scandal soon included Tyco, Global Crossing, Quest, WorldCom, Xerox, Adelphia, MicroStrategy, Im-Clone, and homemaker Martha Stewart, AOL-Time Warner, K-Mart, and some major banks, such as Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase.

In terms of violence committed by the elite, environmental pollution, unsafe working conditions, and unsafe products have all produced scores of deaths and injuries. Thousand of workers die each year due to the acts of their employers, but rarely is their criminal liability. The felony is an exception. In September 1991, a fire destroyed a chicken-processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. When the 100 employees in the plant tried to escape, they found that the company executives had ordered the doors locked “to keep out insects and to keep employees from going outside for coffee breaks, or stealing chickens.” Twenty-five workers died in the fire; some were found burned to death at the doors they couldn't open. Another 50 were injured.

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