Book Review: Stolen Without a Gun

Stolen Without a Gun reads like an Anarchist's Cookbook of Corporate Crime and illustrates well how an international money laundering scheme works (including how to nest embezzled funds in a series of quasi-legal Cayman Island bank accounts) while telling the personal tale of Walter Pavlo, Jr., a convicted white-collar criminal who was busted for embezzling $6 million while working at MCI Telecommunications in the mid-1990s.

Pavlo, who served his time in jail and now gives lectures and advice on the subject of ethics and white-collar crime, is portrayed in the book as an everyman, without any particular bent to stealing money.

The narrative gives an inside perspective of how a business person could get wrangled into a high stakes game of money laundering. Pavlo, good at his job, notices the graft and corruption all around him and sees people hiding debt in accounts that he knows will never be repaid. Millions of dollars are being thrown away all around him. All the myths that he learned in business school, "The corporation as a community run by thoughtful innovators striving to do good while doing well," are shattered before him. As he is being groomed by his superiors in the company and his rise to power begins, he realizes the upper limits of just how much money he will make in his career at MCI. And it isn't enough. Plus, his company is being ripped off by delinquent customers everyday and he is the one responsible when they don't pay up. They are all getting away with it, why can't he?

The entire scheme is viewed by the perpetrators as nothing more than a college prank, they justify it by telling themselves that no one will miss the money, and for a while no one does. They get increasingly bold and sloppy with their methods and start to go after larger customers with higher levels of oversight. It is fun to watch the dizzying high come crashing down as Pavlo realizes that he cannot keep control of all of the accounts he has been siphoning, and he is running out of shells to shuffle money under.

The book does a good job of giving a frank perspective on how the culture of graft and corruption works. The demands to collect money from his clients are so unrealistically high that Pavlo has no choice but to bend the rules to make his quota. Corporate won't tell him explicitly to shirk regulations, but it is understood. Once he sees how easy it is to break the rules, and that everyone is doing it, there isn't much ground to cover for him and his buddies to come to the realization that he could be making money for himself instead of chucking it away into delinquent accounts.

Stolen Without a Gun is a "How-To" guide for students of the U.S Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and shows that too often a white collar criminal pushes externalities on their families and friends; Pavlo loses his wife and two children and his coworkers end up in jail. In the end the protagonist goes to jail, as the cover suggests, and presumably has a change of heart about his life of crime. But a quote from the last pages of the book suggests otherwise, "Bottom line, we are...getting what we deserve. We had our eyes wide open. Our only real regret is that we got caught. Case closed."