You probably don’t remember Marc Dreier, and that’s a loss to the annals of white collar crime lore. A once-prominent New York lawyer sentenced in 2009 to 20 years in prison, Dreier ripped off a bunch of hedge funds and wealthy investors to the tune of $700 million. Not too shabby, until you compare it with the tens of billions taken by convicted Ponzi king Bernard Madoff, whose near-simultaneous and even more spectacular implosion eclipsed Dreier’s. The New York tabloids added insult to injury, nicknaming Dreier “mini-Madoff.” Now, though, Dreier can claw back some notoriety by dint of the fact that the remnants of his prosecution have produced one of the great lines in modern American jurisprudence. “Fraud is the dysentery of crime,” U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff wrote in a recent decision (pdf) disposing of Dreier’s $33 million personal art collection. “Even after the infection is contained, the unpleasant after-effects linger interminably.” More on Bloomberg BusinessWeek here.
