Swindlers by D.W. Buffa Read Free Book Online Page B

securities
case. I do simple things like murder.”
    Tommy tossed his head in silent laughter,
acknowledging the point, and then rested his elbows on the table
and pressed his fingers together. He became quite serious.
    “What he’s done is worse than murder, the
lives he helped ruin. Though to give him credit, he’s more honest
than most of them, or maybe just more immoral. He’s certainly more
interesting than the rest of that Wall Street crowd.”
    He thought about what he had just said, then
pushed back from the table and crossed one leg over the other. He
sat at an angle, with his arms folded and a pensive, almost
brooding expression on his mouth.
    “I used to love this country; I’m not sure I
do anymore. I used to think there was a clear line between right
and wrong, that those who broke the law got punished. I was not so
naïve to believe that everyone who broke the law got caught, but I
thought that even those who got away with something knew they had
something to hide. And that’s true, for ordinary criminals, the
guys that break into houses, who steal money at the point of a gun.
But these guys on Wall Street, guys who head up banks and
corporations, the whole New York financial crowd – they don’t give
a damn about anything except the money. Money is the only measure
and only fools and suckers care about the rules. They rigged the
markets, made billions doing it and thought themselves shrewd
investors instead of thieves. That’s what makes St. James so damn
interesting: He realized what America had become – what no one else
could see – not a country, but a system of organized theft. None of
the others understood what they were doing. They had no
self-awareness, if I can put it like that. They were just doing
what everyone else did: bend the rules a little, maybe even break
them once in a while, because the rules weren’t really that
important: technical stuff mainly, rules about insider trading,
that kind of thing, nothing serious. If you got caught you might
get a fine, might even, in the rare case, go off to prison for a
year or two, but even then it was still a civil matter, nothing
like what real criminals do. You know,” he said as a jaundiced grin
ran sideways across his lips, “murderers, rapists, and thieves –
least of all thieves. These guys could steal billions, cost
thousands of decent, hard working people – people who would never
cheat anyone out of anything – their life savings, but that didn’t
put them in the same category as some guy who instead of growing up
in Greenwich, Connecticut did not know his father, and instead of
going to Harvard did not finish the tenth grade, a guy desperate
for a few bucks grabs a woman’s purse and gets caught in the
attempt. That’s the real lesson about what kind of country we’ve
become: steal from one person, go to jail; steal from thousands,
hundreds of thousands, steal from millions – say you’re sorry and
start a charity.”
    Tommy’s eyes were solemn, remote, with a look
of grim remembrance etched deep within them. A rueful smile, the
silent echo of something he had once believed, a shattered faith,
twisted down the corners of his mouth.
    “It was hypocrisy, pure and simple,” he went
on. The words came more slowly now. He was trying to explain as
clearly as he could what he had been thinking about for months,
trying to summarize in a few short sentences what he had only begun
to understand. He narrowed his eyes and clenched his jaw, and began
to wag his finger back and forth, like someone determined to
correct the mistaken judgment, the false assumptions, not of other
people, but of himself. “Hypocrisy, but necessary to their own
sense of who they were; hypocrisy, but they never knew it: they
could not afford to know it, to admit it. They had to think they
deserved all the money; they had to believe that they were the ones
who made everything work, that without them the markets could not
function and the economy could not