Why they do it: inside the mind of the white-collar criminal

Prologue: Managing in the gray

Part I: The struggle to criminalize

"Not...bucket-shop operators, dead-beats, and fly-by-night swindlers" : pillars of the community

"Guys...don't drop out of windows for no reason" : creating the white-collar criminal

Part II: Nature or nurture? Reasoning or intuition?

"Inherently inferior organisms" : bad people making bad decisions

"I thought it was all going to pass" : a press release with consequences

"If you don't take it then you will regret it forever" : the triumph of reason

"I never once thought of the costs versus rewards" : intuitive decisions

"I never felt that I was doing anything wrong" : overlooking harm

"If there was something wrong with this transaction, wouldn't people have told me?" : the difficulty of being good

Part III: The business of malfeasance

"You can't make the argument that the public was harmed by anything I did" : misleading disclosure

"Unfortunately, the world is not black and white" : financial reporting fraud

"You go from just being on top of the world" : insider trading

"I thought we were freakin' geniuses" : deceptive financial structures

"You couldn't stop because you would wreck everything" : the Ponzi scheme

"When I look back, it wasn't as if I couldn't have said no" : Bernie Madoff

Conclusion: Toward greater humility.