John Catsimatidis Quotes

The company accountant is shy and retiring. He's shy a quarter of a million dollars. That's why he's retiring.

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for 'Barron's' magazine and I found a lot to write about.

Bernie Madoff... was regulated up and down and every which way, and it didn't do any good - he ran away with everyone's money.

Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman] and I have observed many accounting-based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with pen than small sums with a gun.

I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that there have been serious abuses on Wall Street.

A father and two sons run Adelphia. It's a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? 'Let's send the monkey to Mars, Dad!'

From coast to coast, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have ensnared people not only at hedge funds, but at technology and pharmaceutical companies, consulting and law firms, government agencies, and even a major stock exchange.

Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.

Those who perpetrate fraud against our financial institutions will be met with the full force of law enforcement.

You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.

I want to be clear. No company is too big to be prosecuted. We have zero tolerance for corporate fraud, but we also recognize the importance of avoiding collateral consequences whenever possible.

We did not investigate Wall Street because we were troubled by large institutions making a lot of money; we took action to stop a blatant fraud that was ripping of small investors.

Such a crime as the embezzlement of any of the coins struck at the Mint, or of any of the metals brought to the Mint for coinage, would be punished under the laws of Pennsylvania, by a fine and penitentiary imprisonment at hard labor. The punishment annexed to this crime by the laws of the United States, enacted for the special protection of deposits made at the Mint, is DEATH.

The justice department spent more time and effort on Barry Bonds than all the financiers and bankers who ripped off the country with their bonds.

We have decriminalized Wall Street malfeasance.

The subconscious moral sense or the people has come to a distinct realization of the fact that crimes are possible in what we call high finance as they are in lower quarters.

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

We're constantly having to go head-to-head with the Bernie Madoffs of the world who just want more and more money.

Britain is the epicentre of financial fraud. Most major players outsource their fraud here because London is the unregulated cesspit of global finance.

We've got the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble when it comes to crime in this country. The FBI says burglary and robbery cost U.S. taxpayers $3.8 billion annually. Securities fraud alone costs four times that. And securities fraud is nothing to the cost of oil spills, price-fixing, and dangerous or defective products. Fraud by health-care corporations alone costs us between $100 billion and $400 billion a year. No three-strikes-and-you're-out for these guys. Remember the S&L scandal? $500 billion.

The criminal law needs to be improved to meet new forms of crime, but to denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud, is ridiculous and unworthy of the age in which we live.

Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, has seen a few financial schemes in his time. As the lead local prosecutor in the world's financial capital, he has battled frauds like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which stole billions of dollars from investors worldwide.

Was I believer in Enron Corporation? Yes, sir, I was.

Securities fraud generally and insider trading in particular should be eminently deterrable crimes.

In the movie 'Wall Street' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.