"White-Collar" crimes are non-violent crimes,
involving real or potential financial gain to the people or companies
that commit them. Such crimes are generally committed using papers (letters
and documents), telephones, and computers, rather than by actual physical
appropriation of money or property.
Federal white-collar include health-care fraud, tax
fraud, wire fraud, and mail fraud, to name just a few. The heart of
a fraud prosecution is the allegation that a person has intentionally
obtained something of value by making false representations. For example,
in a telemarketing fraud case the government's allegation is often that
a person used a telephone to get people to send him money by promising
something that he did not intend to deliver. In a health-care fraud
case, the government might allege that a doctor or clinic billed an
insurance company for medical treatment that was not provided.
Allegations of white-collar crime are often accompanied
by accusations of money
laundering -- conducting financial transactions with the proceeds
of criminal activity, intending to promote the illegal activity. The
government has historically done this because the penalties for money
laundering are more severe than those for fraud; after the 2001 amendments
to the sentencing guidelines, which increased penalties for fraud, the
disparity between money laundering and fraud sentences diminished, but
the guidelines numbers for money laundering are still three or four
points higher than those for fraud. At the wrong point in the sentencing
table, these extra points could conceivably double a person's sentence.
White-collar crime cases are paperwork-intensive. The
government will often have many thousands of pages of documents to be
used as evidence against a person. Two things are particularly important
for a lawyer to do in such a case: first, to simplify -- to focus on
what he is trying to keep the government from proving (typically either
the act that is alleged or the fraudulent intent of that act); and second,
to organize -- to get the voluminous documents in a state that allows
him to retrieve any important piece of paper in an instant.
--
Mark.
