Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, window, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi. Today I'm speaking

with Jennifer Taub, legal scholar, law professor, and advocate, and the author of a new book,

Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime. Jennifer is also a co-author of corporate of white-collar crime.

Jennifer is also a co-author of corporate and white-collar crime and makes frequent media appearances to discuss the often breathtaking scale of corporate crime

that dwarfs the cost of other financial crimes while routinely triggering much less severe legal penalties.

Jennifer, thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's my pleasure. Your book provides a really sweeping analysis of white collar crime,

but I'd like to focus on the comparison of how we treat white collar as opposed to other financial

offenses, larceny, robbery, burglary. You make this distinction in the book, and I think it's compelling.

There is a huge distinction, and the minute we begin to discuss the disparate treatment between

white-collar criminals and street criminals, or even between the wealthy and well-connected

who commit white-collar crimes and those who are not,

people begin to kind of understand how unfair the system is and that there's real urgency to

fix that problem. So, I mean, just to give you one example, when we think about financial crime, we think about the CEO, perhaps, who leads a company off the cliff but still ends up walking away with a golden parachute worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

And there's so many examples of that.

But often people point to that and say, well, that was just someone being greedy and lucky. But in reality, we have

examples where a corporation is engaged in wide-scale criminality. And the CEO walks away with

that kind of very favored treatment. The most recent example of that was at Wells Fargo,

where the company admitted to being engaged in opening millions of bank accounts and credit card

accounts without customer authorization. And even when, again, when the company admitted to that, the CEO

was pushed out, but he was paid a very nice exit payment. He ended up after the firm, again,

...