Where the Evidence Leads by Dick Thornburgh

Author:Dick Thornburgh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822973881
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

THE MOST PRESSING challenge in the area of white-collar crime at the outset of the Bush administration was the savings and loan mess. Most Americans were as unaware as I was how this industry had changed during the go-go 1980s. (Pennsylvania, under Banking Secretary Ben McEnteer's sound leadership, had been able to avoid any major problems.) Our images were still of Jimmy Stewart's Bailey Building & Loan in the movie It's a Wonderful Life. Heavily lobbied congressional action and regulatory cupidity had, however, transformed the thrift business from a nurturer of the American dream of home ownership into a nightmare of excessive lending against vastly overvalued commercial and speculative properties from accounts now insured for up to $100,000. The Justice Department obviously needed to pursue those criminally responsible for the collapse of these institutions.

I convened a session of the government-wide Financial Institution Fraud Task Force to develop our plans. Given the obvious scope of the problem and the president's directive to make it a priority, a major new initiative was needed. We turned for our model to the Dallas Task Force, which coordinated all the relevant federal investigative agencies to tackle the large number of allegations regarding criminal activities in Texas savings and loans. Proposing to replicate this task force in twenty-seven cities across the country, we sought congressional authorization for about $50 million to fund 200 additional FBI agents, 100 new prosecutors and 30 additional attorneys. The White House lent its approval, and I presented our request to the Senate Banking Committee on February 9, 1989, just a month following President Bush's inauguration. We did not get the authority to hire our additional personnel until the beginning of 1990, but our redeployment strategy had already enabled us to jump-start the operation in many cities.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department and all others with responsibilities in this area were taking a heavy beating in Congress and the media for perceived previous inactivity. Part of this was bravado; the politicians and the press were obviously embarrassed over their own failure to spot the developing debacle in the thrift industry all through the 1980s. And some of it was plainly partisan, such as claims that we should have investigated and indicted Neil Bush, the president's son, for his involvement with a Denver savings and loan. In reality, those investigating the savings and loan cases never gave the department any evidence of criminal conduct on the part of Neil Bush, and we were not about to commence investigating him simply because he was related to the president.

Suzanne Garment's excellent book Scandal quotes Jerry Landauer of the Wall Street Journal on this process in general: “[I]n the capital these days a scandal isn't a scandal until important segments of the media ‘discover’ it. Once perceived, a scandalous situation is likely to dominate the news, for no newspaper editor or television executive wants to miss another Watergate. Then, as more newspeople pounce on the story, competitive pressures can overshadow fair play, resulting in overstated coverage that may not end until another ‘scandal’ comes along to divert the media's attention.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.