Book Review: Stolen Without a Gun

By Ian Elwood

Stolen Without a Gun reads like an Anarchist's Cookbook of Corporate
Crime and illustrates well how an international money laundering scheme
works (including how to nest embezzled funds in a series of quazi-legal
Cayman Island bank accounts) while telling the personal tale of Walter
Pavlo, Jr., a convicted white-collar criminal who was busted for
embezzling $6 million while working at MCI Telecommunications in the
mid-1990s.

Pavlo, who served his time is jail and now gives lectures and advice on
the subject of ethics and white-collar crime, is portrayed in the book
as an everyman, without any particular bent to stealing money.

The narrative gives an inside perspective of how a business person could
get wrangled into a high stakes game of money laundering. Pavlo, good at
his job, notices the graft and corruption all around him and sees people
hiding debt in accounts that he knows will never be repaid. Millions of
dollars are being thrown away all around him. All the myths that he
learned in business school, "The corporation as a community run by
thoughtful innovators striving to do good while doing well," are
shattered before him. As he is being groomed by his superiors in the
company and his rise to power begins, he realizes the upper limits of
just how much money he will make in his career at MCI. And it isn't
enough. Plus, his company is being ripped off by delinquent customers
everyday and he is the one responsible when they don't pay up. They are
all getting away with it, why can't he?

The entire scheme is viewed by the perpetrators as nothing more than a
college prank, they justify it by telling themselves that no one will
miss the money, and for a while no one does. They get increasingly bold
and sloppy with their methods and start to go after larger customers
with higher levels of oversight. It is fun to watch the dizzying high
come crashing down as Pavlo realizes that he cannot keep control of all
of the accounts he has been siphoning, and he is running out of shells
to shuffle money under.

The book does a good job of giving a frank perspective on how the
culture of graft and corruption works. The demands to collect money from
his clients are so unrealistically high that Pavlo has no choice but to
bend the rules to make his quota. Corporate won't tell him explicitly to
shirk regulations, but it is understood. Once he sees how easy it is to
break the rules, and that everyone is doing it, there isn't much ground
to cover for him and his buddies to come to the realization that he
could be making money for himself instead of chucking it away into
delinquent accounts.

Stolen Without a Gun is a "How-To" guide for students of the U.S
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) Act and shows
that too often a white collar criminal pushes externalities on their
families and friends; Pavlo loses his wife and two children and his
coworkers end up in jail. In the end the protagonist goes to jail also,
as the cover suggests, and presumably has a change of heart about his
life of crime. But a quote from the last pages of the book suggests
otherwise, "Bottom line, we are...getting what we deserve. We had our
eyes wide open. Our only real regret is that we got caught. Case closed."