Many of us who have watched the movie “Silence of the Lambs”, featuring Anthony Hopkins as the infamous serial killer Hannibal Lecter , were introduced to the FBI’s elite Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). This is the unit that specializes in helping local police track down real life serial killers. However, the BAU is now appliying their expertise in behavioral profiling to target white collar criminals such as the likes of Bernard Madoff. The hope is that the BAU will in a matter of speaking get into the minds’ of fraudsters and see what makes them tick.
Why is the BAU taking on this new approach? It’s all part of the FBI’s aggressive new approach to financial crimes in response to facing widespread criticism over the lack of criminal cases initiated from the financial crisis. The FBI and federal prosecutors are eager to prove to the public that they take white collar crime seriously.
With that being said, the FBI has decided to “embed” one of its agents inside the Securities and Exchange Commission’s main office in Washington, D.C. The agent began working a year ago with the SEC’s new market intelligence unit, examining early tips that the regulatory agency gets about potential scams and frauds from the public.
The question of the day though is can the FBI’s BAU unit succeed in this new venture? Nicole Piquero, an associate professor of criminology at Florida State University, poses the challenge to this approach stating that her research on white collar offenders has found that many are extremely controlling in the workplace, almost obsessively so. With that said, the problem profilers may encounter is that the same characteristics that make a successful businessman, especially on Wall Street, are often the same characteristics posssessed by white collar crime offenders. With this observation in mind, some of the critics of the FBI’s new approach has described their new investigative tacts as being a little bit like “voodoo law enforcement”.
To that point, listen to what convicted felon Sam Antar, former CFO of the now long gone king of retail electronics, Crazy Eddie has to say on profiling of white collar crime offenders…. Reuters Interview of Sam Antar
