Ever wonder what the Gambinos and Goldman Sachs have in common?
In response to a question about "organized crime" last year at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Former Attorney General Eliot Spitzer had this to say:
"We’ve gone through what I call the white collarization of organized crime. The smart organized crime figures realized the people who really make money are the folks who get together, create a monopoly, take over an industry, increase prices by 10 or 15 percent, and do very nicely.
"That beats by a long margin running a loan sharking operation on the street corner beating somebody over the head with a baseball bat, because when you hit somebody over the head with a baseball bat, the cop comes and arrests you.
"When you create a monopoly, it looks like white collar crime, and they say, eh, we don’t fuss with that.
"And so that’s what happened. In the case I prosecuted involving the Gambino family, trucking, and the garment district, they'd formed a clever cartel. And we prosecuted them under the New York State anti-trust law, which actually preceded the Sherman Act. That’s what we did.
"So what we call traditional organized crime - the sort of organized crime you’d see in the Godfather movies - really went through that transformation. But let’s not kid ourselves. Organized crime is there, it moves in terms of ethnicity, it moves in terms of geography, it moves in terms of subject matter, it will always be there, but there really was what I call this white collar-ization."
Editor's note: I'd like to make very clear that Spitzer did not state in any way that Lloyd Blankfein was a member of any organized crime cartel. He simply pointed out that organized crime does not necessarily look like what we expect it to look like. And Spitzer had other, far more interesting things to say about Goldman Sachs that evening. Specifically he talked about his efforts to make all the emails between AIG and its counterparties (including Goldman Sachs) available to the public. But more on that in another post.
Editor's note: I'd like to make very clear that Spitzer did not state in any way that Lloyd Blankfein was a member of any organized crime cartel. He simply pointed out that organized crime does not necessarily look like what we expect it to look like. And Spitzer had other, far more interesting things to say about Goldman Sachs that evening. Specifically he talked about his efforts to make all the emails between AIG and its counterparties (including Goldman Sachs) available to the public. But more on that in another post.
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