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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

Here's what I don't get: Why is everyone so unconcerned about making themselves complicit in crimes like this?

I can understand that you might be able to influence one or two people to become complicit. But it sounds like everyone was taking part in the scheme: everyone in the family, employees at every level, even the auditors contributed a part to the conspiracy.

I mean, dozens of people must have been involved in this scheme. Why didn't anybody of them say, hey, I'm not going to be a part of this? I'm going to report this?

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I can not overstate how broken the NYC culture was in the 1980's and how normal this all would have felt. You would be a sucker if you ran a business without an angle. The angle is what made business fun, it was the clever part, your moat. Also getting paid, especially at a young age, made you feel incredible (I was 14 when I started "Screwy Louie's" an electronic biz since I admired Crazy Eddie). In those days money === status. Status was more important than people. And being labeled a "snitch" or "rat" was a sure way to destroy your status.

If you ever find yourself in a bad culture, you simply need to leave, especially if you are young. Culture has a powerful momentum but that momentum reduces with each person who opts out.

Lou Prado is an excellent electronics store name though.

I can answer this from personal experience. Very relevant experience since the article notes in line 1: "...frauds in the subprime mortgage market, the AIG bailout..."

I worked at AIG's Credit Default Swap group in NYC in 2007/2008 and someone in IT noticed strange audit records showing Operations/Accounting users manually changing prices for no documented reason. The person in IT foolishly copied the logs into an email and emailed some managers inquiring why. You might recall the company was under investigation for massively over-marking their derivatives so any accusation around derivatives prices being manually overridden without an audit trail is quite damning.

Within 24 hours, he was accused by one of the Operations/Accounting users of assault (supposedly a mouse was thrown at her.) There were no eye-witnesses, a total he-said-she-said. Despite that, he was walked out of the office soon after. He had no prior HR records/demerits. He was on an H1 which meant he'd be sent back to China within two weeks if he didn't find another job.

Despite having a printout of the email which likely initiated this retaliatory accusation, HR was not interested in any email. They seemed to be more interested in squashing the original concerns than investigating it. HR did not interview anyone besides a few of the accusers. It seemed like a professional hit job (cover-up?)

The message to the overall group was clear and chilling -- keep you mouth shut and don't look where you should not. I tried to switch departments immediately, as did others. Luckily the entire group was re-org'd and much better and more fair management took over. Regardless, I never publicly mentioned the story (I am now posting it for the first time since many of the people involved are retired and I'm in a different industry.)

It was also puzzling me. I think a link posted below [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/magazine/14syrians-t.html] explains it. They are a closed ethnic community. Reporting it would be like betraying not just your employer, but also your people.

The article is really excellent. It is really a closed community. There is an religious edict that bans everyone who marry a non Syrian Jew.

From the article: "Seventy years after the promulgation of the Edict, it seems fair to say that, taken on its own terms, it has been an almost uniquely successful tool of social engineering. The enclave grows and thrives beyond the dreams of its founders. It offers a secure economic future and a sweet family life to those who remain within its confines."

BTW, is it offensive to use the word Jew? If so, how should I have called them?

More from the article about how they are a really closed community:

“Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” Kassin told me by phone, summarizing the message. “Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.”

non paywall protected link @NYT http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE3DE153DF...

great article, thx for link

> BTW, is it offensive to use the word Jew? If so, how should I have called them?

If the people you are referring to are indeed believers in Judaism, I can't see why you can't use the word "Jew".

You didn't read the article linked by GP. The Syran Jewish community was using it as a slur against the Ashkenazi

There's a couple of reasons. One is that it's a term with a history of being used in a pejorative manner. In cases like this, adjectival forms e.g. Jewish person are preferred over noun forms e.g. Jew.

Another problem is neither "Jew" nor "Jewish" is particularly precise. For instance, in America, it typically refers to someone of Ashkenazi extraction, not a believer in Judaism.

Are you saying that the Syrian "community" mentioned in this article are not followers of Judaism? I did not know that...I had assumed that the different "sects" of "Jews" were similar to the different sects of Islam or Christianity: in that they differed in certain beliefs, but still considered themselves as Muslim or Christians.

What I'm saying is that "Jewish" may refer to someone who is an atheist but celebrates Hanukkah. There's probably someone in their family who is practicing.

The problem being, "Jew" refers both to both a belief system and a racial characteristic, and without qualification it can be thoroughly unclear. This is even true of more precise terms e.g. "Hasidic". There's a very tight-knit ethnic group that share a bunch of religious practices, but the adjective refers to both things.

Aside: if you're not easily offended, watch Chanuka Honey on YouTube. It's an extended joke about American Jewish culture, but religion barely features.

The flip side of strong ethnic ties and ingroup preferences enabling fraud, is that they make it possible for, eg, Hasids to conduct an extemely high-value diamond trade on a handshake basis internally. https://www.algemeiner.com/2014/05/21/new-yorks-diamond-dist...

I don't think that's true; traders in the stock markets with no racial or familial ties regularly make such deals, especially in the days of open outcry markets.

Considering how unethical everything about the diamond business is, I don't see how this makes your point.

> BTW, is it offensive to use the word Jew? If so, how should I have called them?

This is one of those things where the delivery matters more than the word. It's fine in this context but could be used in an offensive way.

More on how closed this community is in Nathanial Popper's Digital Gold. IIRC, Charlie Shrem's parents would not pay his substantial bail unless he broke up with his GF who was not an SY Jew.

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Gold-Bitcoin-Millionaires-Rei...

In this particular case,

"Crazy Eddie was from Day One planned to be a criminal enterprise. We committed our crimes simply because we could," said Antar, whose cousin Eddie Antar founded the chain.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/17/investing/fraud-wall-street-...

I guess you hire people you trust..

Have you never been in a place where the culture stinks? If you go along with everyone, there is potential trouble in the future, but if you go against there is certain trouble now. A reasonable person with a choice will go along and bail as fast as they can (see what Susan Fowler did), but in a family business people don't have that luxury, and that's how the cart gets wedged in the mud.

Very simple: if you make waves, they fire you. Then you are damaged goods. No one will hire you. You know that you are the honest party, but someone who doesn't already know and trust you has no basis for deciding whether you are honest or if you are lying about your former employer's dishonesty because you have an axe to grind. Also, even honest employers don't really want to hire someone honest enough to blow the whistle because some day they might want to bend the rules a little bit too, and then they will want everyone to be a "team player."

Yeah, it's illegal. You're hurting people. It sucks, all around.

But you have to eat, your family does as well. You need a place to live (electricity, water, gas - all those things cost).

It comes down to "How do your ethics compare to underlying ability of yourself and family to live?

And then, it's even worse when your family == family business crooks. You have no out.

I think most people would distinguish between crimes of necessity, such as feeding and clothing yourself and your family, and generating another $20 million in income.

Now, people have an amazing ability to rationalize behavior, so it's entirely possible some of those people convinced themselves that they needed to continue because they would be out on the streets with now way to provide for their family because that's all they knew, but I think it's important to distinguish irrational thinking such as that and the reality of the situation when discussing it.

1: "Out on the streets" could very well have been well above the poverty line and quite comfortable given their likely assets and resources, but unfortunately it's all to often a relative assessment that is made, where relatively worse still may be quite comfortable on an absolute (or relative to the region) scale.

You're right. It is easy to rationalize this sort of behavior. But I think there's a few things going on, that mutate normal action/response.

1. Family. Doing this the "right way" would mean fessing up. And that means alienating and testifying against family. Unless they're Hannibal The Cannibal, or other absolutely horrible crimes against humanity, you're not going to want to destroy your family and the business.

2. Inertia. It was already done, we're just doing it how it was done before. (Insert "Cause everyone else does it").

Sure, I was referring more to the general case, which may or may not include family or friends (beyond co-worker friends). Family obviously makes it harder to report, but I don' t think it's in any way a requirement.

Inertia is a big one though, I think your're spot on there.

CS Lewis spoke on this very subject: http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php

(I'm a US immigrant, generalisations have issues) One thing I've noticed is that culture in the US seems to focus more on the getting caught side of things, versus the wrong doing in the first place.

The classic case is tax returns, where you tell the government how much you made, what you deduct, and hence how much you owe. Because a proportion of the information is self reported, it is (especially in the past) possible to cheat. Anecdata is that cheating, and getting away with it is somewhat common, and not frowned on by society.

Another is speeding on the roads, where ire is directed at the process of catching speeders versus the reason for the limits and their levels.

The US has a rather complex tax system, and one in which the default rates can be rather high but are offset by many different credits and deductions. This leads to a situation where if you aren't proactively trying to take all the legal deductions you can you may end up paying significantly more than you needed to.

It's my opinion that this leads to a perception that the government is out to take advantage of you unless you proactively protect yourself, and I think that may lead to people being far more willing to lie to reduce what they pay due to the feeling that government has taken advantage of them in the past, or at least tries to.

"Fairness" is a highly developed Human trait, and has even been shown in primates[1]. This is, of course, my pet theory regarding taxes and I'm not providing sources (but maybe some exist?), so take it for what it's worth.

1: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0917_030917_...

As an outsider your opinion does seem to be the case, but I've heard stories of people taking it quite a bit further (eg claiming dependants that in no way meet the criteria). It is probably easier to rationalise incremental steps away from what should be done over time as you get away with each previous one.

What originally perplexed me originally would be seeing signs like "do not walk on the grass" and in some places it seemed completely ignored, and others obeyed. Same with speed limits (one time I was the slowest driver on the New Jersey turnpike because the signs said go 45 due to roadwork, so I did). I think it is the chances of getting caught that define people's behaviour, not any reasons for the rules in the first place, and this seemed to be a very big American trait.

BTW Dunbar's number is also related to the fairness thing IMHO.

> I mean, dozens of people must have been involved in this scheme. Why didn't anybody of them say, hey, I'm not going to be a part of this? I'm going to report this?

It two completely different level of effort and involvement.

Saying "I'm not going to be a part of this" means you step away and brush your hands clean.

Saying "I'm going to report this" requires much more effort. If you personally know someone working there it's even more difficult as you'd be intentionally ratting out your friend/colleague/family.

Also, if you walk away and they get caught, it's likely they'll think it's you anyway.s

And nobody in your field will hire you anymore.

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