About a decade ago, Eugene Soltes was watching a late-night television show in which prisoners explained why they’d committed violent crimes. An associate professor at Harvard Business School, Soltes was interested in the mindset of a different kind of criminal. He sat down and wrote letters to business titans whose careers had crash-landed in prison cells. He wanted to know what had motivated them.
He’d nearly forgotten about the letters a month later when he started getting back responses. He turned his communications with one man into a case study. Over time he communicated with more than four dozen former executives. Some, like Bernie Madoff, are virtual celebrities. Others, like financier Allen Stanford and former ImClone founder Sam Waksal, are equally (in)famous in the world of white-collar crime. Many found their way into Soltes’ new book, “Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal.” We talked to him about what he learned. The interview was edited for clarity and space.
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