For all the murder and mayhem that eventually turned ordinary citizens against him, the investigators who finally got Al Capone out of Chicago and through the doors of the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta were experts in bookkeeping. Forget the violence, the murders, and broken lives. He was put away because of tax evasion. It was not Prohibition Agent Eliot Ness who got the head gangster. It was Accountant Frank Wilson.
Don Blankenship was, through his contempt for safety standards, complicit in the deaths of 29 miners. His shoddy storage of hazardous materials resulted in multiple instances of cancer, kidney failure, and birth defects among his neighbors. He was convicted only of the misdemeanor offense of conspiracy to dodge government regulations.
Imperfect as were these convictions, they were an exercise of a sort of tertiary justice. They were related, within a couple of degrees of separation, to the actual malfeasance for which these criminals ought to have been imprisoned.
Al Capone’s tax evasion was very much a part, although a minor part, of his ongoing criminal empire. If there had been no criminality of the first instance, there would have been little opportunity for the criminality that could be proven in court.
The proven crimes of Don Blankenship was more directly related to his more cosmic wrongdoing. If he had not been guilty of the crime for which he was convicted, if he had not conspired to undermine mining safety regulations, an electrician would not have been ordered to disconnect equipment designed to detect excessive levels of methane. The methane ignition would not have occurred. The fire would not have reached free floating coal dust.
The chain reaction that became a massive explosion would not have ended the lives of 29 miners.
In a more perfect world, Al Capone would have been executed for multiple murders, including the mass murder on Valentines Day in 1931 that wiped out members of a rival bootlegging gang.
In a more just world, Don Blankenship would have been imprisoned for manslaughter. His reckless disregard for human life was documented enough for common sense, if not up to the requisite legal standard of proof.
Martin Shkreli may be the most despised man in America. He purchased a pharmaceutical company then focused on just one of its many products, a pill produced mostly for public relations. A few dollars a month brought life-saving treatment to many AIDS patients and others who suffered from parasitic and malaria related illnesses. He jacked up the price to a level beyond the reach of ordinary mortals.
There was no competitor.
It was the accidental exercise of a depression era practice. Large corporations would offer a few products at prices way, way below cost. Huge businesses could afford the loss for long enough to force out smaller competitors. Once competition was out of the way and the producer had become a monopoly, prices would go through the stratosphere.
For many things people need, like food or medicine, the practice was outlawed in many places. Wisconsin remains one, at least for the present.
To some of us, Shkreli became the perfect illustration of free enterprise at its most abusive. Even diehard believers in unregulated capitalism grew pale and weak kneed at the odious reality of their cause-come-to-life.
The capture and arrest of this unpopular malefactor of great wealth filled the air with glee. And this is what deserves a second look.
None of the charges, none of what led to the hoodied perp walk, has anything to do with the medical extortion the evil young man had engineered. Was he targeted for his unpopularity?
It gives us pause, but no more than pause. One second look is enough.
The pattern of alleged misconduct is breathtakingly aggressive. The fellow who would steal his grandmother’s medicine, and that of her friends had fallen into the deep, deep hole of chargeable offense. Ponzi schemes, fraud, secretive maneuvers calculated to assuage investors, the list goes on and on. The investigations have been ongoing long before he became a painful speck in the public eye.
This is more, much more, O.J. than Sacco or Vanzetti.
Justice still eludes.
This was not Capone, where tax evasion was the essential outgrowth of a criminal enterprise. It was not Don Blankenship, where the careless killing of miners came from criminal acts of conspiracy.
This was a long and winding series of charges quite unrelated to the act of classic capitalism, an extreme and heartless form of traditional price gouging. The flaws in an economic system that allows such attacks on the helpless remain.
We have poetic justice.
And an awareness that poetic justice is no justice at all.
There are some things that escape the justice that mankind can contrive.
But we do have a demonstration that God sometimes is willing to bless America.
Getting Shkreli for anything at any remove, however distant, from price-gouging over life-saving pills, would have endangered the corporations that do that on the grand scale as their basic business model. They had to get him on crimes completely extraneous to his real crimes against society.