102: Eugene Soltes – Unraveling a $65-billion Ponzi scheme and notorious cases of insider trading

Eugene Soltes is an author and finance professor at Harvard Business School.

Over the past eight years, give or take, he’s spent a lot of time with many big-time executives and professionals who have been convicted of major financial crimes, such as; cooking the books, fraud, Ponzi schemes, and insider trading.

What initially began as nothing other than self-interest has materialized into a 464-page hardcover book, which was released in October this year (2016). The book is titled, Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal.

Intrigued by the subject matter, I invited Eugene onto the podcast and we got talking about; how Bernie Madoff became the mastermind behind the biggest fraudulent scheme in US history—sucking billions of dollars from unsuspecting investors, some of the notorious insider trading cases, and ultimately, why they do it.