Our guest this episode is a finance professor at Harvard Business School and an author—meet Eugene Soltes.
Eugene has spent a fair chunk of time over the last eight years or so with major-league execs and professionals convicted of serious financial crimes, like; insider trading, creative accounting, fraud, and Ponzi schemes.
What started out as nothing more than a self-driven interest has transformed into a 464-page book, Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal (released in October of this year).
My interest piqued by the content of this new hardback, I reached out to Eugene to come onto the podcast. We got to talking about; some of the most notorious insider trading cases, how Bernie Madoff became the leader behind the biggest swindling scheme in US history, and ultimately why these guys do what they do.
What’s Covered in This Interview:
- Where Eugene’s fascination with white-collar crime stems from, how he accidentally became an author, and the way that he developed relationships with prisoners.
- Bernie Madoff’s ascent to the mastermind of the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, and Eugene’s observations of his character from several conversations.
- So how is insider trading actually defined? Eugene gives us the scoop; what is defined by the courts as illegal insider trading, if real victims exist, and a few fascinating case studies.
- Eugene’s theories on why the uber wealthy commit financial crimes and why he thinks a lot of people would also do these things, if they were in the same situation.
Links and Resources:
- Why They Do It [FREE Audiobook]
- Why They Do It [Hardcover Book]
- Eugene’s Harvard Business School Profile
- EugeneSoltes.com
- @EugeneSoltes
