Here's Why White-Collar Criminals Often Go Free

I don’t know quite how to characterize The Chickenshit Club (Simon & Schuster), by Jesse Eisinger. It’s an absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism, a not entirely ­persuasive polemic. It’s a first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy. It’s also an expansive parable: of righteousness and compromise, overreach and underreach, excess, deceit, greed—the whole American show. It’s fun to read but a real downer to think about.

The book offers an edifying tour of a century of white-collar crime—what Al Capone called “the legitimate rackets.” A recurrent theme is that the government is terrible at prosecuting it and always has been. “There has never been a golden age of white-collar prosecutions,” Eisinger writes. “The rich and powerful have always been rich and powerful.”