Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis.

• Author: Davis, L.J.

For a variety of reasons, Big Money Crime by academics Kitty Calavita, Henry N. Pontell, and Robert H. Tillman is a curious book. For one thing, it brings to mind another scholarly tome from a few years past, in which the authors concluded that Hitler might, just might -- we must be careful here, we are scientists -- have been crazy. In similarly cautious prose, Calavita et al. have discovered that the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s was, at bottom, the largest financial fraud in American history. They say this several times, rather as though they were reminding us that Lake Michigan is long, the moon is round, the Great Pyramid is big, and President Clinton talks too much. In the 1980s, the nation's S&Ls were a den of thieves. Duh.

Calavita and her colleagues are never so happy as when they are counting things. Specifically, they make an effort to count the number of S&L crooks, the number of S&L crooks who were brought to book, and the time the convicted crooks actually spent in the cooler. It does not occur to them that much of their database -- the one provided by the Resolution Trust Corporation -- is laughably flawed. Moreover, given the affectless tone of the prose, the resulting unedifying spectacle resembles a seminar of earnest graduate students trying to remember the periodic table in the middle of a bombing raid.

Finally, Calavita and company have missed every" of importance. For instance, in examining the origins of the S&L fiasco, it should be borne in mind that sex, stupidity, and money explain all of human history. There was a certain amount of sex attached to the S&L scandal, but not in a way that was important to anyone but the participants. There re" however, stupidity and money, both of which were present in abundance. When confronted with the thrift industry and its subsequent $500 billion (or $750 billion or $1.1 trillion) fiasco, the members of the Reagan administration and their legislative allies resembled turkeys and boxcars: There wasn't a brain in a mile of them.

In their examination of these characters, the authors have also done no original work, instead relying on the usual sources: Pizzo, Fricker, and Muolo's Inside Job; O'Shea's The Dairy Chain, and others. Considering the speed with which these books were written, many of the authors did an astoundingly good job, but they did not have the luxury of time and reflection, supposedly one of the perks of the scholarly trade. The Big Money Crime team, with...