Back in 2011, Lee B. Farkas received a 30-year prison sentence for his role in a long-running mortgage fraud that federal prosecutors said caused about $2.9 billion in losses and brought down a bank with $12 billion in assets. That same year, billionaire Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam got 11 years in prison for insider trading—the longest sentence ever handed down for such a crime. In 2009, Marc Dreier, a former New York lawyer, received a 20-year sentence for bilking hedge funds and other investors out of $700 million. And in 2010, Scott Rothstein was sentenced to 50 years for running a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
But fast forward to 2018 and the number of federal prosecutions for white-collar offenses has plummeted. The decline has occurred steadily over time, but under the Trump administration, such prosecutions have fallen below 6,000 per annum for the first time in 20 years, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization at Syracuse University.
