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 There's an interesting bit in Malcom Gladwell's latest book Revenge of the Tipping Point:

 "In the Depression, bank robbers became celebrities: Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd. But in the years after the Second World War, the crime seemed to be fading. But then came an epidemic. In a single year, from 1969 to 1970, the number of bank robberies nearly doubled, then rose again in 1971 and once more in 1972. In 1974, 3,517 banks were robbed. In 1976 the number was 4,565. By the beginning of the 1980s, there were five times more bank robberies than there had been at the end of the 1960s. It was a crime wave without precedent. And it was just getting started. In 1991, the FBI fielded a 2-11 call from a bank somewhere in the United States 9,388 times. And the center of this astonishing surge was the city of Los Angeles. A quarter of all bank robberies in the United States in those years happened in Los Angeles." (15)

[Philip Esformes, who had owned Florida nursing homes, was convicted at trial in 2019 of 20 criminal counts related to what the Department of Justice at the time said was the largest health-care fraud scheme ever prosecuted by the department. The DOJ said that Esformes and co-conspirators for more than two decades cycled thousands of Medicare and Medicaid patients through a network of nursing and assisted living facilities despite the fact they did not qualify for such care. Trump commuted Esformes’ prison sentence in late 2020, which led to his immediate release from custody]

"Someone, someday, will make a great movie out of the Phillip Esformes case. It had everything Hollywood would ever want. First there is Esformes himself — tanned and moviestar handsome, a dead ringer for Paul Newman. He drove a $1.6 million Ferrari Aperta, wore a $36,000 Swiss watch, and flew from coast to coast in a private jet. The jury was told about the many beautiful women he met in luxury hotel rooms, his screaming fits, his predawn phone calls, his insistence on referring to cash as “fettuccine.” He was described as “obsessive” and “probably bipolar,” a man “who calls all day and all night, and you have to drive around, who drives people crazy, who pushes them as hard as he can, who complains about everything that happens.” (38)



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