From Belfort to the crypto-bros: institutional anomie and the white-collar crime we admire

There's a scene almost everyone remembers from The Wolf of Wall Street (Scorsese, 2013): not one of excess, but the accumulated sense that the protagonist never doubts. Jordan Belfort builds a brokerage that inflates the price of junk stocks to sell them to the gullible and then crashes them —the classic pump and dump—, and he does it without the slightest moral crisis, with the energy of a preacher. The film doesn't punish him with conscience. It punishes him, if at all, with the law, and late. And yet we leave the theater with an uncomfortable twinge: part of us admired him.

That twinge is the subject of this article. First, the house's guiding principle: to explain is not to excuse. The fact that the environment pushes toward fraud does not dilute the responsibility of the one who defrauds; Belfort chose, and his victims were real people who lost real savings. But if we stop at "he was a greedy guy," we understand nothing. Individual greed doesn't explain why financial fraud recurs in waves, generation after generation, with new faces and the same script. For that you have to look higher: at the system that produces it.

// The theorymessner and rosenfeld: when the economy devours everything else

In 1994, criminologists Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld published Crime and the American Dream and formulated the theory of institutional anomie. They start from Robert Merton, who back in 1938 had already described the underlying tension: a culture that promises material success to everyone but distributes the legitimate means to achieve it unequally. When the goal ("succeed, win, be rich") presses far harder than the rules about how to achieve it, some people take the shortcut. Merton called this anomie.

Messner and Rosenfeld gave it a sociological twist. The problem, they say, is not only cultural: it is institutional. In a healthy society, the economy coexists with other institutions —family, school, politics, community— that counterbalance it and impose on it values that are not profit. But when the economy colonizes the rest, everything is measured in money: school trains profitable workers, family is subordinated to the career, politics serves the market. Those institutions, weakened, stop restraining. And without a brake, the pursuit of money by any means stops being deviance: it becomes the norm.

Here's the idea that stings: in an environment like that, Belfort's fraud is not a breakdown. It's the system doing exactly what it rewards. When the only audible commandment is "win," whoever wins best —even by lying— is the model to imitate, not the villain to expel. Let's mark the theory's limit: institutional anomie explains rates and patterns at the scale of society, not the concrete decision of an individual. Most of those who work in finance don't defraud. The theory sketches the environmental pressure, not an individual destiny.

// Sutherland's inventionthe respectable crime: invisible and, on top of that, imitated

To name this class of offender, a prejudice had to be broken. Well into the 20th century, criminology mostly studied the poor: the thief, the thug, the social margin. In 1939, Edwin Sutherland banged on the table and coined the term white-collar crime: the crime committed by people of high respectability and status in the course of their profession. Accounting fraud, pyramid schemes, market manipulation. Crimes in a suit, committed from an office, that cause enormous economic harm and yet we barely associate with the word "crime."

Sutherland's contribution was twofold. First, to prove that crime is not a matter of the lower classes: the powerful offend more than criminal statistics acknowledge, only their crime is invisible, diffuse and hard to prosecute. Second, and crucially, that these crimes are learned like any other: inside organizations where defrauding is the custom, one absorbs the techniques and —above all— the justifications. This is differential association: on the floor of a fraudulent brokerage, the rookie doesn't learn to steal; he learns that this isn't called stealing.

// The presentfrom the boiler room to the timeline: the same script

Change the set and the mechanism holds intact. Where Belfort had a boiler room with telephones, today there are screens: Ponzi schemes with the aesthetics of innovation, tokens that inflate and collapse like those junk stocks, and finfluencers who sell the dream of quick riches to a mobile-phone audience. I'm not talking about specific people or accusing anyone by name: I'm talking about the phenomenon. The logic of the pump and dump hasn't died; it has been democratized and accelerated. Now anyone can set up the boiler room from their living room.

Institutional anomie explains why the ground is so fertile. In a culture that sacralizes "get rich" and distrusts any institution that dares to counterbalance it —the regulator is "a brake on innovation," the tax "a robbery," prudence "a loser's thing"—, the moral brakes arrive weakened from the factory. And techniques of neutralization do the rest: "I didn't force anyone to buy," "that's how the market is," "if I don't do it, someone else will." The harm dissolves into financial abstraction precisely when it is most real for whoever loses their savings.

Fiction has been warning for decades, and the KRIMINIS gallery documents it. The Gordon Gekko file turned "greed is good" into the creed of an era; that of Bobby Axelrod portrays finance as war without rules; that of Sherman McCoy shows the fall of the master of the universe; that of Logan Roy, the empire where affection is also traded; and that of Frank Abagnale, fraud as the art of impersonation. All of them, alongside the Belfort file, tell the same story in a different suit: the market turned into the only god that gets heard.

Michael Benson and Sally Simpson, in their opportunity approach, add the practical ingredient: white-collar crime flourishes where a motivation (the pressure to win), an available rationalization and, above all, a structural opportunity with little oversight coincide. Reduce supervision, exalt "win however you can" and multiply the channels to operate, and you don't need exceptional villains: ordinary people in a system that has switched off its brakes are enough. Understanding this doesn't absolve Belfort or his imitators. On the contrary: it forces us to also look at the stage that applauds them.