White Collar Crime
Rod Blagojevich was caught on FBI wiretaps calling Obama's Senate seat "a fucking valuable thing" he wasn't giving away for free — convicted on 17 counts and sentenced to 14 years in the fourth such Illinois gubernatorial corruption case in 50 years.
White Collar Crime
FBI agents posed as a fake Arab sheikh's representatives and caught one senator and six House members on videotape accepting cash bribes — the most successful congressional corruption sting in American history.
White Collar Crime
Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall stole between $30 million and $200 million from New York City through padded contractor invoices — a sum that today exceeds $4 billion — and ran the city while doing it.
White Collar Crime
From fake cancer diagnoses to prosperity gospel to $95 billion in annual Medicare fraud — the common thread is institutions that exploit the trust people place in medicine and faith.
White Collar Crime
Jim Bakker raised $1 billion from TV viewers and sold 68000 lifetime hotel partnerships for accommodations that didn't exist — convicted of 24 counts of fraud while Robert Tilton threw away the prayer letters and kept the cash.
White Collar Crime
Prosperity gospel tells struggling believers their poverty reflects insufficient faith — and the solution is to donate money they can't afford to pastors who fly private jets and own ministry campuses.
White Collar Crime
Four cancer charities raised $187 million and returned less than 3% to cancer patients — the rest went to cruise vacations and family salaries before the FTC and all 50 attorneys general shut them down.
White Collar Crime
Dr. Farid Fata falsely diagnosed hundreds of patients with cancer and administered chemotherapy they didn't need — collecting $34 million in Medicare fraud and causing permanent physical damage.
White Collar Crime
Americans pay two to ten times what other wealthy countries pay for the same drugs — not because of research costs but because the U.S. is the only wealthy country that doesn't negotiate drug prices.
White Collar Crime
Medicare and Medicaid fraud costs roughly $100 billion a year — more than all bank robbery and investment fraud combined — paid by taxpayers and the patients whose identities are used to file the claims.
White Collar Crime
Martin Shkreli raised Daraprim's price from $13.50 to $750 overnight — a legal move that cut off HIV patients from a decades-old drug — then went to prison for unrelated securities fraud.
Mass Violence
School shootings, historical bombings, public massacres: 14 articles tracking 100 years of American mass violence — the warning signs that were seen, the systems that failed, and what followed.