Vincenzo Ruggiero, Dirty Money: On Financial Delinquency
| Author | Gregg Barak |
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474517707913 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
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on legislatively and administratively dictated sentencing uniformity and for reign-
ing in the enormous power that federal prosecutors currently enjoy. The easy
availability of sentencing ‘‘enhancements,’’ the ability to rely on drug weights
based on hearsay, and the draconian sentences available to prosecutors all need
to change. Disappointingly, the prosecutors themselves seem all too willing to wield
the power at their disposal without regard to the damage they do to the individuals
involved or the ideals of criminal justice fairly applied. Hard Bargains reminds us
that harsh laws, organizational imperatives, racial bias, and inertia together pack a
terrible punch.
Doris M Provine
Arizona State University, USA
Vincenzo Ruggiero, Dirty Money: On Financial Delinquency, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK,
2017; 272 pp. (including index): 978-0198783220, $87 (cloth)
Vincenzo Ruggiero has written another erudite, cultured, and urbane treatise on
the crimes of finance. Among his numerous writings on economic crime, the two
most recent book-length treatments, The Crimes of the Economy: A Criminological
Analysis of Economic Thought (2013) and Dirty Money: On Financial Delinquency,
the text reviewed here, have coalesced in this reviewer’s mind and imagination to
make Ruggiero the premier scholar of criminology writing on the subject today.
At the very end of his Introduction, Ruggiero writes:
After reading this text for the umpteenth time, I feel humiliated, hurt in my identity as
a critical scholar; I am infuriated for I am forced to put my ‘radicalism’ or ‘extremism’
in perspective. The reality of financial delinquency is far more radical and extreme
than any member of the critical criminological community. (p. 8)
While this reflexive statement on radicalism, academia, and dirty money cannot
be challenged by the availability of political or social evidence, it does not apply to
the actual contributions that Ruggiero has made to the field of economic crime.
For my money, when it comes to analyzing or diagnosing the crimes of finance,
Ruggiero is the ‘‘philosopher king’’ of our times. His significant gifts for making
sense not only of the fields of white-collar and corporate crime, but also of the
intellectual history of criminology, should earn him academic influence on par with
Beccaria, Bentham, Bonger, Sutherland, and Geis.
In this book, Ruggiero explains how dirty money and financial delinquency
become instruments for the production of harm and victimization. Dirty money
refers to ‘‘the illegitimate appropriation of financial resources by individuals and
groups holding expert knowledge and, often occupying positions of power’’ (p. 2).
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Punishment & Society 20(5)
Financial delinquency, by contrast, refers to the social problem of mixing the
accumulation of licit and illicit capital without state power willfully controlling
or separating these two forms of money acquisition.
Of equal...
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