Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives by Je

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Chickenshit Club

by Jesse Eisinger

Winner of the 2018 Excellence in Financial Journalism Award

From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jesse Eisinger, "a fast moving, fly-on-the-wall, disheartening look at the deterioration of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission...It is a book of superheroes" (San Francisco Review of Books).

Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed "Too Big to Fail" to almost every large corporation in America-to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club-an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs-explains why in "an absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism...a first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy" (Bloomberg Businessweek).

Jesse Eisinger begins the story in the 1970s, when the government pioneered the notion that top corporate executives, not just seedy crooks, could commit heinous crimes and go to prison. He brings us to trading desks on Wall Street, to corporate boardrooms and the offices of prosecutors and FBI agents. These revealing looks provide context for the evolution of the Justice Department's approach to pursuing corporate criminals through the early 2000s and into the Justice Department of today, including the prosecutorial fiascos, corporate lobbying, trial losses, and culture shifts that have stripped the government of the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives.

"Brave and elegant...a fearless reporter...Eisinger's important and profound book takes no prisoners" (The Washington Post). Exposing one of the most important scandals of our time, The Chickenshit Club provides a clear, detailed explanation as to how our Justice Department has come to avoid, bungle, and mismanage the fight to bring these alleged criminals to justice. "This book is a wakeup call...a chilling read, and a needed one" (NPR.org).

FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Author Biography

Jesse Eisinger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning senior reporter at ProPublica. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Previously, he was the Wall Street Editor of Conde Nast Portfolio and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering markets and finance. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their daughters.

Review

"The Chickenshit Club is a fast moving, fly on the wall, disheartening look at the deterioration of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, written sympathetically, thoroughly, but mostly-engagingly. It is a book of superheroes."-The San Francisco Review of Books "Jesse Eisinger takes us inside the world of federal prosecution with the same detail and doggedness as in his Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. He carefully tracks the decline in capacity, will, and guts among prosecutors. If you want to see, hear, and understand why no senior executives did jail time after the financial crisis, read this book."-Frank Partnoy, George E. Barrett Professor of Law and Finance and Director of the Center on Corporate and Securities Law, University of San Diego "This magisterial work is vital reading for everyone concerned by the untrammeled influence of financial institutions and corporations on American society and the nation's political life. Its grim details form a picture of how a system to hold to account the titans of boardrooms has been rendered toothless. Eisinger writes with clarity and style, delivering a story that is by turns fascinating, disturbing, and-dare I say it?-hugely entertaining."-Zia Haider Rahman, author of In the Light of What We Know "In a spare, elegant and unrelenting narrative, Jesse Eisinger's The Chickenshit Club tackles one of the biggest remaining mysteries about the 2008 financial crisis: Why the American justice system failed miserably in its responsibility to hold Wall Street accountable for its unforgivable behavior in exacerbating the near-meltdown of the global banking system. It's a surprising story of cowardice and greed that will get your blood boiling all over again."-William D. Cohan, author of Why Wall Street Matters "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eisinger does a masterful job of assembling this riveting dossier of the legal scholars, jurists, and elected officials who played a role in turning the U.S. into a nation in which white-collar criminals are celebrated for their cunning instead of incarcerated for their offenses."-Booklist, Starred Review "Jesse Eisinger is a master journalist. Revelatory, maddening, and engrossing, the book draws on vivid characters and immersive narratives to chart the rise of the corruption and the inertia within the Justice Department."-Bryan Burrough, co-author of Barbarians at the Gate and author of Days of Rage "The book is as alarming as it is comprehensive, but it's also gripping. The unfolding of the financial crisis makes for thrilling drama in Eisinger's hands, heightened by the anxiety still felt by all who survived it. He's even able to make white-collar courtroom proceedings and investigations into tax shelters sparkle....This book is a wakeup call, delivered calmly yet with no shortage of well-reasoned urgency, to a nation whose democratic traditions are being undermined by backroom dealing, deregulation, and the consolidation of corporate power. It's a chilling read, and a needed one."-NPR.org "That the Wall Street titans who blew up the financial system suffered little more than slight reductions in their bonuses only reinforced the perception that the "system" is 'rigged'-with the consequences we know only too well. Many people simply want to live in a world that is fair. As Eisinger shows, this one isn't."-James Kwak, The New York Times Book Review "A well-reported tale..."-The Financial Times "Smart, deeply sourced, and full of insider tidbits about legal stars like Comey, judge Jed Rakoff, and former SEC chair Mary Jo White."-Fortune "An absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism... a first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy. It's also an expansive parable: of righteousness and compromise, overreach and underreach, excess, deceit, greed-the whole American show."-Bloomberg Businessweek "...brave and elegant...a fearless reporter...Eisinger's important and profound book takes no prisoners..."-The Washington Post

Review Quote

"This magisterial work is vital reading for everyone concerned by the untrammeled influence of financial institutions and corporations on American society and the nation's political life. Its grim details form a picture of how a system to hold to account the titans of boardrooms has been rendered toothless. Eisinger writes with clarity and style, delivering a story that is by turns fascinating, disturbing, and--dare I say it?--hugely entertaining." --Zia Haider Rahman, author of In the Light of What We Know

Excerpt from Book

The Chickenshit Club Chapter One "THERE IS NO CHRISTMAS" ON A GRIM DAY IN september 2003, with hurricane Isabel brewing off the East Coast, federal prosecutor Kathy Ruemmler prepared for the government''s third interview with an Enron witness. The investigation into the top officers at the collapsed energy giant was stalled. Ruemmler knew the prosecutors had to flip someone. She had just joined as the youngest member of the Enron Task Force, the special SWAT team the Justice Department had assembled to dig into what had been one of the richest and most admired companies in the world. Now it had been revealed to be one of the biggest frauds in American business history. At a passing glance, the thirty-two-year-old assistant US attorney looked fresh faced and friendly, with her shoulder-length blond hair and clothing that was a step up from the typical government servant''s. But she had a steeliness that she could wield at will. Her warm blue eyes hardened when she was deposing a witness. Her teammate in those days was Sam Buell. Before joining the task force, Buell, thirty-nine, had prosecuted Boston mob cases. He was tall and clean cut. His short, reddish hair framed a wide, gentle face that sat above broad shoulders. Buell, the son of schoolteachers, had grown up in Milton, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. Self-deprecating and easygoing, he looked like a favorite high school math teacher. Witnesses liked him in spite of themselves. Buell and the task force had been laboring over the case for months now. They were going after Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, Enron''s top officers. Ruemmler and Buell spent most of their time shuttling from DC to Houston, where the two of them would drive from their dingy government-rate hotel rooms to an abandoned space at the top of Houston''s run-down federal courthouse, a 1960s-era squat white cube in the middle of downtown Houston. They passed through building security unencumbered. Here it was already 2003, and they still didn''t even have BlackBerrys. Upstairs, their clunky computers balanced on cardboard boxes atop chipped metal desks. The whole place was so run-down that it was fodder for jokes. A defense attorney bringing a tony client for an interview once cracked, "It looks like an OSHA violation in here!" During the first winter, most of them had come down with miserable respiratory infections. Were the offices infecting them? Or was it just the pressure of their task? They had no document management system and no way even to email the FBI agents assigned to the investigation, who were just a few blocks away. With this pathetic setup, they were taking on an infernally complex company in the most important corporate fraud case in memory, against a legion of defense lawyers from the best firms in the world. The country had invaded Iraq six months earlier. Madonna kissed Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on the MTV Video Music Awards show. The American tennis star Andy Roddick won what would be the only major tournament of his career: the US Open championship. But Ruemmler barely noted outside events, significant or trivial. She had no time for anything but the case. During these eighteen-hour days, when she could only sneak in a frozen pizza and a shower, Ruemmler would sometimes marvel that she had ended up here. She had grown up in Richland, Washington, a rural corner of the Northwest, where both of her parents worked at the giant Hanford nuclear facility on the Columbia River, her father as a computer engineer and her mother in a toxicology lab. Unlike most of her Justice Department colleagues, Ruemmler hadn''t gone to an elite eastern college. She''d been thrilled to get into the local University of Washington, and before she left to attend Georgetown University Law Center, she had been out of the Northwest only three times. Yet Ruemmler had landed a plum job: assistant US attorney; a federal prosecutor in the DC office. She''d been handling violent crime and narcotics cases when Leslie Caldwell, head of the Enron Task Force, reached out. Ruemmler hadn''t had much experience prosecuting financial fraud. She''d been reading the papers and coming across the same phrase: if normal financial fraud was "algebra," the articles intoned, Enron was "advanced calculus." She felt intimidated. But Caldwell assured her the Enron Task Force would be only a six-month detail. * * * Twice, the Enron prosecutors had brought in one of their most promising witnesses, Dave Delainey, the head of Enron''s energy trading division. He''d stuck with his story, brushing aside questions from the prosecutors and the FBI agent assigned to this part of the investigation. They weren''t giving up, though, and that morning they felt certain they had discovered a dangling thread that might help them unravel his story. As Ruemmler and Buell went through the many emails Delainey had sent to his head trader, they found a huge gain the company had made trading in California''s energy markets in the late 1990s. Enron didn''t want to tell shareholders it was a volatile trading shop. Instead, the company line for Wall Street had been that Enron was a stable, fast-growing operation. CEO Jeff Skilling had downplayed Enron''s trading, once saying on CNBC that it was "just a small portion" of its business.1 Enron was just a "logistics" business, he''d say, meaning that Enron helped speculators but wasn''t one itself. A big trading gain, such as the one Ruemmler and Buell discovered, hinted at the reality. Speculation dominated the company''s culture and contributed an outsized portion of its profits. Once, after a trader had lost close to a half billion in one day, Skilling came down to the trading floor and exhorted the traders to "man up." Get back out there and make more trades. Win it back. Instead of having Enron disclose those trading profits, Delainey and his executives hid them. They stashed the millions of dollars of earnings and created a cover story: it was setting aside those profits for a possible legal settlement. Ruemmler and Buell had figured out that this reserve, this "cookie jar," was a lie. Poring over the company''s intentionally complicated and messy financial statements one more time, they''d noticed that a year after creating the reserve, Enron had lost millions in another division and dipped into that money--reserved for legal costs--to cover the losses and make it look like it had made money that quarter. That accounting hocus-pocus was illegal, and Delainey and his top trader had emailed about it. But they''d used a lot of trader jargon, and the emails were vague enough that a jury would need them decoded. The prosecutors understood how the scam had been pulled off but believed they couldn''t prove it yet. Delainey could explain that little scam, but that''s not why they needed to flip him. Complex white-collar investigations required finding "rabbis" to guide you through the transactions. Even the smartest outsiders couldn''t rely on the documents. They were conducting an old-fashioned investigation. They needed someone on the inside. If they could flip Delainey, they could take the prosecution all the way to the top. They could begin to build a case that Jeff Skilling had lied to investors and the public. ALL BULLSHIT That led them, in the middle of the hurricane, to haul Dave Delainey and his expensive lawyers into a windowless conference room in the Bond Building in Washington, DC, for a third time. Buell and Ruemmler and their expert FBI agent had new verve; they took command of the interview from the start. Buell had a hunch Delainey wanted to cooperate. Getting him over to their side, however, required breaking down his instinct to deny and minimize his culpability. Delainey had long been an Enron true believer. A clean-cut Canadian, he''d been awed by the testosterone-flooded Enron trading culture. Hard-charging, sure, but they weren''t--couldn''t be--criminals. Few corporate white-collar fraudsters--not egregious Ponzi schemers or boiler room operators but perpetrators at large, respectable companies--start out thinking they will commit a crime. As one academic study, "Why Do They Do It?: The Motives, Mores, and Character of White Collar Criminals" put it, most white-collar criminals are "individuals who find themselves involved in schemes that are initially small in scale, but over which they quickly lose control."2 They tell themselves, "I''ll just do it this quarter so we don''t miss the number, and then I''ll stop it and undo what I''ve done." They don''t think of themselves as crooks. It''s just a short-term fix. Then they use the device again and again until they have no choice but to keep up the charade. They start rationalizing what they''re doing. It may be aggressive, but it''s not wrong. It''s not theft. The bad guys aren''t lying just to prosecutors. They are lying to their shareholders, their colleagues, and their families. And they are lying to themselves. The prosecutor''s job is to crack through that self-justification and self-delusion. That''s what Ruemmler and Buell were going to do that morning, in that room, with Delainey. The two stuck with their plan to stay calm, to both be the good cops, and keep asking questions about the emails. They would reason with him, confronting him with the evidence, though selectively, to test his credibility. Their advantage was that Delainey didn''t know exactly which documents interested the prosecutors, as well as who e

Details ISBN1501121375 Author Jesse Eisinger Pages 400 Publisher Simon & Schuster Year 2018 ISBN-10 1501121375 ISBN-13 9781501121371 Format Paperback Media Book Imprint Simon & Schuster Subtitle Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States DEWEY 345.730268 Short Title The Chickenshit Club Language English Audience General/Trade NZ Release Date 2018-08-09 US Release Date 2018-08-09 UK Release Date 2018-08-09 AU Release Date 2018-07-31 Publication Date 2018-08-09

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TheNile_Item_ID:118492970;
  • Condition: Brand New
  • ISBN-13: 9781501121371
  • Publication Year: 2018
  • Type: Textbook
  • Format: Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Book Title: The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives
  • Item Height: 213mm
  • Author: Jesse Eisinger
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  • Topic: Economics, True Crime, Government, Finance, Politics, Criminology, Business
  • Item Width: 140mm
  • Item Weight: 322g
  • Number of Pages: 400 Pages

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