Celebrities and White Collar Crime … Why?

Any celebrity news we run across these days, it’s usually scandal, and if it’s a crime being committed, most likely it’s a white collar crime. These people are chancing everything they’ve earned and won and throwing it out the window. It’s incredulous to the rest of us that would do anything to have the things these people are throwing away. The question we always ask is … why?

I recently got the chance to speak with an expert in the field. Ms. Wendy Feldman is an expert in the criminal justice process, specifically for white collar crime. She has a consulting service, Custodial Coaching, helping defendants and their families learn what to expect during this time of incarceration. Being based in L.A., she has an interest in the celebrity crime wave and has even represented some celebrities. Ms. Feldman has spent time being incarcerated as well, and knows the system inside out. She wants to take the myths out of spending time in prison.

There was no point messing around here; I got to the main question right away. Why do celebrities throw it all away? I’m looking at Adam “Baller” Jasinski, the Big Brother winner, who squandered his half million earnings buying thousands of oxycodone pills, then tried reselling them, making the mistake of trying to sell them to a government witness. He now faces twenty years in jail and a fine double the amount that he won a year and a half ago.

Ms. Feldman feels it’s different reasons between a reality show person and another wealthy person. She sees the reality TV stars as “quick fix junkies.” They get rich quickly and don’t know how to sustain it. They continue to do things unlike regular people trying to earn a living. She suggests maybe Adam was already a drug user on his own, and perhaps that’s why he decided to get into that, as you “don’t just decide to start selling pills.” I remember during the series he was sure this was going to make him into a star and get him lots of girls, so perhaps he felt let down there.

Switching away from celebrities, I asked about the subject of the movie The Informant, starring Matt Damon. Mark Whitacre had a six figure income, chanced it by blowing the whistle on his own company, then in the end was found to be stealing from the company all along. Ms. Feldman stated that that type of scenario actually happens a lot. “The person who blows the whistle is really the one behind it.” It happens often with the FBI with people trying to ingratiate themselves with them, giving themselves empowerment where it makes them do things they wouldn’t normally do, or makes them cover up things they’ve already done.

Either way, whether it’s celebrities or folks like Whitacre, they do it because they think either that they’re entitled to it or that they can get away with it. It’s “grandiosity.”

I wondered if celebrity status lead them to get more lenient sentences. Ms. Feldman recognizes that they have in the past, but believes it’s rapidly changing. Yet, she then saw Lindsay Lohan in court the other day and thought maybe it’s not changing as quickly as she thought, with Lohan getting another year of probation, having not fulfilled her original agreement to complete a substance abuse program. She hopes that if the celebrities start facing stiffer penalties, they’ll begin to curb their behavior, although that could take some time.

Looking at cases of people that throw everything away to bilk money out of celebrities, such as the Travolta and Letterman cases, Ms. Feldman thinks the Senator and ambulance driver trying to extort money from John Travolta was nothing more than greed, as there is no emotional attachment. However, in the Letterman case, the 48 Hours Mystery producer had emotion attached to it, since David Letterman had allegedly slept with a woman he was involved with, bringing back in the impulsivity factor.

We also discussed Survivor’s first winner, Richard Hatch. He neglected to declare his million dollar winnings, along with the money he earned in apperances after his win, and was sent to prison for tax fraud, then once he was let out under the guise of finishing up his sentence in home confinement, he granted interviews without checking with authorities first and was sent back to prison. I wanted to know how he and other celebrities can blend back into society once they’re released.

Ms. Feldman suggested Richard still didn’t seem to understand that he needed to follow the rules. She feels he and others will hard a hard time with a re-entry until they grasp why it is that they chose to do things they shouldn’t do in the first place. Yet, for a regular person, it’s even tougher, as they don’t have the celebrity to capitalize on to help them once they’re out. With Richard’s celebrity, he can go on TV and talk about what he did, making more money, but regular folks don’t have that advantage. So while he got in more trouble for talking to the media, it can help him out in the end.

I wanted to get away from the celebrity factor and talk about prisons in general, as this is Ms. Feldman’s particular area of expertise. I wondered if we even have the right impression of what the prison system is like from what we see on TV and in movies. Ms. Feldman thinks our impressions “are completely wrong.” The Federal system is different than the State system, then each state is different than the next. So there isn’t one overruling system for us to look at.

Federal prison is where the more high profile criminals go, such as Richard Hatch and Martha Stewart. These two were in camps where nothing was blocked, and while they have to stay in their own particular area during certain times, there are no bars. They’re more short term, though, as people wouldn’t stay in these types of places for years and years. If you commit a violent act, you’re going to be in a hardcore prison. Ms. Feldman knows people think that celebrities are sent to nicer places because of their celebrity status, but says the place you end up serving your time is based on criminal points, which does not take into account celebrity status.

However, if the particular inmate is so high profile that they can’t be mixed in with the general population, they might go into protective custody. No one wants to end up there, as they’re segregated from everyone else and have less privilege and not more. Robert Downey, Jr. and Martha Stewart weren’t in protective custody and were placed within the general population. It was actually a better choice for them, as then they wouldn’t have had the privilege they did have, as being in protective custody, there are less privileges than the general population.

These are many of the things Ms. Feldman helps people understand in her consulting business. She takes the myths out, as it’s not all about getting gang-raped and getting beaten up. It’s a great equalizer. The others in prison don’t care if you’re a doctor or lawyer on the outside. For some of those more hardened criminals, they view their situations by thinking if they had the things a doctor or lawyer had, they wouldn’t have needed to commit the crime in the first place, which may or not be true, but with the white collar criminals, they always had a choice in what they did or didn’t do.

This lead into a conversation of substance abuse and the people accused of providing Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith with the drugs that eventually killed them. I admitted that I grappled with laying fault in those situations. Like many people, I ask if these doctors hadn’t gotten the drugs for these celebrities, wouldn’t they have gotten them somewhere else anyway?

Ms. Feldman feels the doctors involved still need to be prosecuted, though. She feels they’re more at fault than the patients, as once you’re on drugs, you don’t think clearly. The doctors have a responsibility to protect people. Potentially she could have, and would have, gotten drugs elsewhere, but the doctors were contributing to and enabling Smith. “If you’re going to prosecute a drug dealer on the street, you have to prosecute a doctor.” Once I pointed out that a pharmacist testified that he told one of the doctors he advised against giving Smith the drug that eventually killed her, I noted he still filled the prescription anyway. Ms. Feldman blames it on the money, “because they get paid for it.”

The same goes for Michael Jackson. It appeared he was “doctor shopping,” looking for any doctor that would give him the drugs he wanted, and he probably was, yet she still blames the doctors for fulfilling this role for him. Again she doesn’t see the difference between a drug dealer on the street and a doctor prescribing drugs illegally. In fact, she sees the doctors doing it as worse, as the person can always say, “My doctor gave it to me.”

Knowing that Ms. Feldman understands the prison system so well, I wondered if there was anyone that she has worked with as a client that she thought should never get out, that they should just lock up and throw away the key. She replied she didn’t work with any violent criminals, so in that sense she thought they could all be rehabilitated. Yet, outside of her clients, some of the more violent criminals she does feel should never get out, as their acts are so violent and heinous, that they cannot integrate back into society.

After speaking with Ms. Feldman, I understand the “why” a little more. I don’t know if we’ll ever completely understand why these people decide to throw it all away, but I do certainly understand it more. And I do hope, as she does, that the celebrities will start facing tougher punishments and that maybe it will begin to curb their appetite for that quick fix.