d.: Cal.E. is filling in for her youngest son, Ralph, while he tours with Beauty and the Glow fish, so I’m flying solo today. My first order of business is to congratulate the Texas Rangers for their first ever World Series championship. I look forward to a heated I-45 rivalry between two talented organizations for years to come. I would also like to congratulate Bruce Bochy for his fourth World Series championship.
Bochy is sixty-eight and had to be talked out of retirement to manage the Rangers to their first championship. Dusty Baker was seventy-three when he won his first World Series as a manager, although he did have a World Series ring when he played for the Los Angeles Dodgers. These two are successful “older gentlemen,” which brings me to my point.
As I was scanning the newspaper today, I noticed that former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried had been convicted of fraud. He was ten billion dollars in debt and didn’t realize it, and he’s not a politician. That means he’ll spend time in prison. Good. I work at a prison for “non-violent” offenders. Sure, there are murderers at my place of work, but they aren’t violent. At least, not anymore.
What Bankman-Freid did with his crypto-currency business, in my opinion, though, is just as bad as some of the murderers. To be clear, some of these “murderers” were vigilantes protecting family members, or gang associates, or both. Anyway, Bankman-Freid’s actions call to my mind one of the inhabitants of the “pre-release facility” who was there for twenty years. His transgression was a “non-violent” one; he orchestrated a Ponzi scheme online and stole millions of dollars. At least one of his clients was so distraught that he committed suicide. That’s why the inmate was given a twenty-year sentence: because he refused to return the money to the family.
In July, I crossed the threshold for it to be considered “elder abuse” if this happens to me, but the criminal must first be caught. In addition to the two spry gentlemen I mentioned in the first two paragraphs, another elderly man comes to mind. The last time I ran the Houston Marathon, the winner in the sixty-seventy-year-old division was a seventy-year-old man who ran the 26.2 mile course in three hours! In the time it takes to watch a movie in this century, this seventy-year-old man ran 26.2 miles. Think about that. How many people can run a marathon at the age of seventy, and how many people can run a three hour marathon at any age? My guess: not many.
The Bankman-Freid case also brings to mind the whole Enron scandal. When I was working in the service industry, I remember seeing sheriff’s officers at a house close to one of my customer’s houses in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Sugar Land. This is the place in Greater Houston where most people with money desire to live. I didn’t know why the sheriff’s officers were at this house, until I saw the news report. This man, who had a large mortgage and a family to support, learned that all his stock he had been accumulating since he worked for Enron was worthless. Upon learning this, he went to his car, took out a pistol and blew his brains out. His wife had no clue that any of this was happening until after the fact. The questions I must ask, then are these: is fraud really a nonviolent crime, and why is it so much worse for it to happen to someone who is sixty years old or more?
The latter person I mentioned was probably in his late thirties or early forties, and he, along with many other people, fell for the scheme that the Enron executives orchestrated. He was probably well-educated, and obviously came from a monied family. Many people who aren’t sixty fall for these schemes. Law enforcement officials feel they have more pressing issues, so this usually falls under the category of “buyer beware.” But, if deaths occur because of these crimes, how can they be labeled unimportant or nonviolent?
When I was in college in the nineteen eighties, my eighty-four-year-old economics professor warned that, in the next century, no one would try to steal cash, but people’s identities and their banking information instead. This man also said that, in this century, every nine-year-old would possess a hand-held computer that could be used as a phone. I really wish that I had asked this gentleman which stocks he thought would do well in the long run!
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