It’s Crime Now, Crying Later for White-Collar Thieves

In “Midnight Run,” Robert DeNiro plays a modern-day bounty hunter and Charles Grodin an embezzler. DeNiro is transporting Grodin cross-country to stand trial when they stop at the home of DeNiro’s estranged wife and daughter.

Seeing Grodin handcuffed, the young girl says, “You don’t look like a criminal.”

In an earnest, almost reassuring tone, Grodin replies, “I’m a white-collar criminal.”

Perhaps it’s understandable in a world of home invasions, carjackings and street muggings that we can’t seem to generate the same level of contempt for a pencil-pusher gone bad. Someone goes into a convenience store with a gun, makes off with $32 and we all tremble a bit and decry the movement toward anarchy. We begin hearing talk about the breakdown of family values.

But let someone with material possessions, a responsible job, a family, a good wardrobe and a nice haircut take us to the cleaners for millions of dollars and we whistle and say, “Gee, I wonder how he could pull that off.”

Worse yet, we start feeling sorry for the guy. We see the standard shot of the forlorn, broken shell of a man standing in the dock and lament the wonderful life he has thrown away.

The latest local example is Stephen Wagner, the ousted Newport-Mesa school district official accused of embezzling at least $3 million. He is pleading not guilty while simultaneously promising to make restitution to the district. Wagner’s attorney said his client’s desire to make restitution “is a bigger priority for Mr. Wagner than his own welfare.”

That priority developed after Mr. Wagner was found out, not before.

Why is it that the white-collar guys always talk about how bad they feel? They’re the ones who tell everyone how sorry they are and how devastating their actions have been to their families. Think about politicians for a moment in this same context: How many times have you seen one caught in some foul deed and right from the get-go they start playing on our sympathies by mentioning the horrific impact all the publicity has on their families.

You never see the convenience store robber or the home invasion burglar say stuff like that.

I asked Peter Huelsenbeck, a deputy district attorney who oversees the D.A.’s major-fraud section, why white-collar types always seem more contrite. I thought it might have something to do with their heightened sense of shame or something profoundly psychological like that.

“It’s like anything else,” Huelsenbeck said, “if you saw one of these (white-collar cases) in your life and weren’t used to handling them, you might see a bigger distinction between the average burglar and robber and the white-collar criminal. But when you handle them daily, and you get used to the same stories and excuses and see a steady stream of people who have been victimized. . . . There’s nothing that’s that much different between these guys and the guys who commit the more common (street) crimes.”

The public contrition that seems a staple of the white-collar criminal is just as likely to be part of the continuing scenario, said Huelsenbeck, who was not specifically addressing the Wagner case.

“It seems that if there’s one thing they seem to have in common it’s that there’s always an excuse,” Huelsenbeck said. “It seems to me that they’re always attempting, at least we find it to be so, to either manipulate the judge, the court, the district attorney, the victim--so they never lose control, because they’re really into power. That’s the ultimate power--to fool people and manipulate the system.”

People convicted of fraud often have swindled those whom they’ve either taken into their confidence or with whom they’ve established personal or business relationships. As a result, Huelsenbeck said, it’s surprising “how supportive the victims are of the defendant and how they want to give them a break because they’ve taken them into an emotional relationship of some type where they’re using these people to continue their scam.”

For the sake of our social order, we need to be just as harsh on white-collar crime as other thuggery. But I think I caught Huelsenbeck himself in a moment of human-nature weakness when I described the charges against Wagner.

Huelsenbeck said he wasn’t familiar with the case but after hearing the allegations said that if they’re true: “Can you imagine the sophistication and planning it must have taken over a long time to steal that money?”

Indeed. Until you stop yourself from thinking such thoughts, it almost makes you marvel.