This is Alexandra Rogge. Welcome back to bribe, swindle, or steel. Today, I'm speaking with a professor of

business administration at Harvard Business School. His research focuses on corporate misconduct and

fraud and how organizations develop compliance systems to address

these. He's also the author of Why They Do It, Inside the Mind of the White Collar Criminal,

which is a fascinating study of why wealthy and successful executives engage in deception,

fraud, and ultimately theft. Eugene Saltus, thank you for joining me.

Thanks much for the invitation. So let's just dive in. To the extent that we can generalize, which is always a bit risky,

are white-collar criminals just ordinary criminals who've lost their way, or is something else going on?

I think there's something special about white-collar crime, but not necessarily the individuals

who engage in white-collar crime.

Let me clarify that.

White-collar crime's different than other offenses in that the harm associated with, whether

we're talking about fraud, embezzlement, or bribery, the victims are much more distant from

the actual perpetrators. And so this leads to a feeling that you're doing something harmful in many instances when people are actually engaging it.

So in that regard, white-collar crime is a quite special form of criminal activity.

We often hear people talk about corruption as difficult to address,

corruption is obviously one kind of white-collar crime, as difficult to address, corruption is obviously one kind of

white-collar crime, as difficult to address for exactly that reason. The impact is both distant and

diffused. But when you are an executive at a major multinational company, your shareholders and

your colleagues are all around you. Those people are around you, but in many instances, what's interesting, what I heard again and

again and I was doing these conversations with these former executives, which I should note

in most instances were just brilliant and by and large successful individuals throughout the

...