Wall Street Crimes | 60 Minutes Full Episodes
In a Nutshell
Three former Wall Street figures exploited the system’s trust and lax oversight: Dennis Lavine, after serving prison for insider trading, recommended convicted conmen and fraudulent companies to clients without due diligence; Daniel Taibbo ran a billion-dollar “free-ride” treasury scam by forging documents and using fake identities to trade with major brokerages; and 16-year-old Jonathan Leed executed a classic “pump-and-dump” scheme by hyping penny stocks on the internet. Meanwhile, Harry Markopolos repeatedly warned the SEC about Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme years before its collapse, but the agency failed to act. The core takeaway is that post-conviction recidivism, technological loopholes, and regulatory inaction allow sophisticated fraud to persist until the damage is done.
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The secret life of Dennis Lavine is about to become an open secret. No, not what he did that sent him to Lewisburg Penitentiary for insider trading on Wall Street. Everybody knows about that. He's even written a book about it. But what he's been up to since he got out of Lewisburg. This man who told us he'd never do anything illegal or unethical again.
First, let's go back to Lavine's high living days when he was making millions illegally sharing inside information and trading on it. Sometimes using a private phone line in his office at Drexel Burnham Lambert.
What was it like when that phone rang? It was like a cash register going off.
Like the day in 1985, Lavine traded on inside information in Nabisco stock. No sooner did the stock open than my phone lit up like a Christmas tree and each of the people involved called to say, "How do we do?" It was this incredible feeling of invulnerability of a rush that in pushing a button and making two phone calls, I made close to $3 million. And that's what drove it. That was the insanity of it all. It wasn't that hard. It was so easy that in just 5 years, Lavine stashed away $12.6 million in a secret Bahamian bank account.
You get bolder and bolder and bolder and it gets easier and you make more money and more money and it feeds upon itself. And looking back, looking back, I realized that that I was sick, that it became an addiction, that I lived for the high of making those trades, of doing the next deal, making the bigger deal.
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