Crime in the Suites

By Charles P. Alexander.

The way things are going, FORTUNE may soon have to publish a 500 Most Wanted list. During the past few months the news has been filled with tales of business schemes and scandals, of corporate intrigue and downright crime. The offenses make up a catalog of chicanery: cheating on Government defense contracts, check-writing fraud, bogussecurities dealing, tax dodges, insider trading and money laundering. Among the culprits: General Electric, E.F. Hutton, Bank of Boston and General Dynamics. Once powerful and respected executives, including Jake Butcher, the Tennessee banker, and Paul Thayer, the former LTV chairman, are now facing the humbling prospect of spending several years in prison.

Business crime is at least as old as horse trading, of course, and has periodically flared up in new forms. Shady stock deals helped bring on the great Wall Street Crash of 1929, and Lockheed and ITT became enmeshed in bribery scandals during the 1970s. But rarely have so many big-name businessmen and corporations been accused of so much wrongdoing in so short a time. Several business trends, including financial deregulation, the growth of huge conglomerates and the rise of electronic funds transfers, seem to be multiplying the opportunities and temptations for businessmen to stray outside the law.

The latest revelations have cast a shadow of suspicion over the entire corporate community and are especially upsetting to the vast majority of businessmen who have spotless records and nothing to hide. "It's scary, isn't | it?" says David Ransburg, who owns a business in Peoria, Ill. "What I resent is that all of us who operate honestly and ethically get indicted in the broad sweep." Both businessmen and consumers are asking why the new outbreak of lawlessness is occurring, and the Reagan Administration is stepping up efforts to bring it under control. Says Stanton Wheeler, director of Yale University's studies on white-collar crime: "People are increasingly realizing that the whole economic system operates on the basis of trust. When that trust is repeatedly violated, the system itself begins to be in doubt."

No industry has drawn more fire than the defense business. General Electric, the sixth-largest U.S. military contractor, pleaded guilty last month to defrauding the Air Force of $800,000 in 1980 on a Minuteman missile project. The company agreed to pay fines and penalties of more than $2 million. The Navy two weeks ago canceled a pair of contracts with General Dynamics, the third-largest military supplier, and suspended the signing of new ones with two of the company's divisions, which build submarines and missiles. The Pentagon says that General Dynamics has overcharged the Government at least $75 million for overhead expenses that included country- club fees and personal travel for company executives. All together, 45 of the 100 largest U.S. military suppliers are under criminal investigation. Admits a vice president at a top defense contractor: "The public's impression is that everyone in this industry is a thief."

Another business that has fallen into disrepute is the Government securities industry. E.S.M., a small company in Fort Lauderdale, built a seemingly thriving business by dealing in Government bonds, notes and bills, but when it collapsed in March, investigators found that many of the securities the firm supposedly had in its portfolio had disappeared. The scandal led to the failure of Cincinnati's Home State Savings Bank, which had invested as much as $150 million in E.S.M. That in turn sparked a run on savings institutions across Ohio. A month after the E.S.M. fiasco came the collapse of several divisions of Bevill, Bresler & Schulman, a New Jersey firm that traded heavily in Government securities. Customers suffered losses of at least $198 million, and the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the company with fraud.

The failure of Home State highlighted the vulnerability of banks and savings institutions in the new era of financial deregulation. Freed from many Government restrictions, bankers have been taking greater risks, and many have misused depositors' money and juggled the books to cover up losses. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that 50% of the 79 bank failures that occurred last year resulted at least in part from criminal conduct. Among the casualties were the eleven banks in Tennessee and Kentucky controlled by Jake Butcher. He pleaded guilty last month to charges of misusing his banks' money to make illegal loans to himself and associates. Butcher is awaiting a sentence that could amount to 20 years in prison.

Even some of the most respected U.S. banks have run afoul of the law. Bank of Boston paid a $500,000 fine in February for failing to report $1.2 billion in shipments of cash to and from financial institutions overseas. That raised suspicions that the bank had become involved, perhaps unwittingly, in money laundering, an activity in which legitimate businesses help criminals exchange suspiciously large amounts of cash for easily negotiable checks or other financial instruments. The Treasury Department is now investigating 140 U.S. banks for not reporting all their large cash transactions.

Another major concern of law-enforcement officials is the surge of insider trading, in which company executives or employees use confidential information to help themselves or friends make killings in the stock market. In particular, the recent rash of mergers and acquisitions has created golden opportunities for investors who are tipped off to the deals ahead of time. Perhaps the most notorious episode involved Paul Thayer, the former businessman who became Deputy Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. While chairman of LTV and a member of the boards of Anheuser-Busch and Allied, Thayer passed to friends information about acquisitions that those companies were planning to make. Thayer later lied to SEC officials about his actions and last month received a four-year prison sentence for obstructing justice.

The Thayer case was fairly unusual in the annals of corporate crime because it resulted in a stiff penalty. Of the 9,900 white-collar offenders sentenced last year, 60% received no prison term. Those sent to jail typically serve one year or less. In contrast, an estimated 70% of defendants convicted of all kinds of felonies go to prison or jail. Prosecutors and critics of the courts maintain that business crime is on the rise because corporate crooks have received such lenient treatment.

In passing judgment on businessmen, the courts face what Yale's Wheeler calls a "paradox of leniency and severity." Says he: "Many whitecollar criminals are first-time offenders who have records of contributions to their community and have often led exemplary lives. From that point of view, they deserve a great deal of leniency. On the other hand, they occupy positions of power and trust, and their violation of the law is significant. Judges try to weigh one interest against the other, and it's often a difficult job."

Many law-enforcement officials contend that giving corporate criminals the benefit of a double standard is destructive to society. Asks Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has prosecuted some of the largest tax-fraud cases: "If executives who make healthy salaries can't abide by the law, how do we expect the disadvantaged not to break the law?" Says Anton Valukas, the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois: "I guess what bothers me is that we are talking about privileged people, people with the best educations who seem to have the basest motives -- get what they can and to hell with the rest of society."

In many cases, individual culprits are given immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony, and the corporations get off with small fines. The $2 million in penalties assessed against General Electric, for example, amounts to less than eight hours' worth of profits for the company. Daniel Fischel, director of the economics program at the University of Chicago law school, points out that the gains a company reaps from violating the law sometimes exceed the penalties, making it the most economically efficient thing to do.

The gentle treatment that E.F. Hutton got last month was especially controversial. Hutton pleaded guilty to a fraud that bilked some 400 banks out of at least $8 million between 1980 and 1982. In its settlement with the Government, Hutton agreed to pay a fine and court costs totaling $2.75 million and to repay banks the money they lost. No individuals, however, were prosecuted, even though the Justice Department admitted last week that two people were primarily responsible for the scheme "in a criminal sense." The department defended this act of amnesty by arguing that it wanted a fast settlement so that the banks could get their money back quickly. Said Assistant Attorney General Stephen Trott: "The notion that the Justice Department is being soft is ridiculous. E.F. Hutton will repay every red cent plus interest." But critics in Congress fumed. Democratic Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware said, "Respect for the law suffers immensely when the public reads that you have (the Hutton) scheme going on, and nobody is prosecuted. I think it is a travesty."

It remains unclear why the Hutton employees carried out the fraud. One possible reason is that Hutton managers are paid bonuses tied to the company's profits. But management experts doubt that greed is the full explanation. They point out that middle-level executives in many companies are constantly under stress to meet tough earnings targets. Says John Fleming, a professor at the University of Southern California Graduate School of Business Administration: "For middle managers, there is so much pressure to get a certain degree of performance that they sometimes feel they almost have to do something illegal to meet the goals set by upper management." Such pressures could have played a role in the General Electric and Bank of Boston cases, as well as at E.F. Hutton.

Fleming contends that top management must set moral standards and enforce them. "It really starts with the chief executive officers," he says. "They have to convince employees that they want ethical behavior." Other experts, however, doubt that employee actions can be controlled from the boardroom. Says Thomas Donaldson, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago who has studied business ethics: "What we're seeing, as corporations get larger and larger, is a breakdown in the lines of accountability. We've created some superstructures in business that are wild- ly complex, and we haven't tamed them yet."

At the moment the only solution seems to be stricter enforcement. That has become a primary goal of the Reagan Administration, despite its repu- tation of being cozy with Big Business. In 1983 the Justice Department set up the Economic Crime Council, made up of top law-enforcement officials, to "target, identify, prosecute and convict" people who commit financial crimes. The result has been a shift in priorities for Government crime busters. In 1970 only 8% of the criminal cases pursued by federal authorities involved white- collar offenses, but that figure rose to 24% in 1984. The Justice Department brought 20 cases last year against insider traders, in contrast to only five in 1982. Budget constraints, however, have hampered the fight against corporate crime. Says Assistant Attorney General Trott: "We could put three times the number of agents and prosecutors we now have to work tomorrow on significant cases."

Harsh penalties may be the most effective deterrent to executive-suite misdeeds. Says U.S. Attorney Giuliani: "Corporate crime is a crime of greed and fear. The best way to combat it is to raise the fear." Experts hope that the sentence given Thayer and the long prison term that Butcher is expected to receive will send a message to would-be business criminals about the consequences of getting caught.

With reporting by Anne Constable/Washington and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago