’Twas not always so. After Enron collapsed in 2001, federal prosecutors convicted the company’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, which surrendered its accounting license, as well as its three top executives. The former Enron C.E.O. Jeffrey Skilling is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence. By contrast, Goldman is still the world’s pre-eminent investment bank, and Lloyd Blankfein is still its C.E.O. Perhaps it was too hard to prove that the bank’s actions — which included betting against structured financial products while it was selling them to clients — violated the letter of the criminal law. Eisinger does not address that question head-on, which may disappoint some readers. His point, however, is that the Justice Department’s prosecutors didn’t try very hard — and the few who did were reined in by their politically appointed bosses.

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Andersen was already collapsing because it had shredded its own reputation, but the business community and the corporate defense bar played up the idea that an overzealous prosecution had put thousands of people out of work. Bigwig defense lawyers like Mary Jo White (future chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission) claimed that Andersen proved that the Justice Department should go easier on companies. In the Obama administration, the idea that some companies are “too big to jail” was endorsed by both Breuer and Holder. Even the bank HSBC, which laundered hundreds of millions of dollars of drug money and illegally facilitated transactions with countries like Iran and Libya, got away with a fine.

This solicitous attitude toward corporations was part of a larger cultural shift in the business and legal world. Defending executives became an increasingly lucrative practice for elite law firms, which recruited star prosecutors from the Justice Department. Corporations accused of misconduct lawyered up, offering extensive internal investigations but erecting imposing defenses around individual executives. Banks cultivated plausible deniability, their internal oversight systems too feeble to pin responsibility on any individual; Goldman executives used the abbreviation LDL — “let’s discuss live” — to hide their traces. Prosecutors and regulators could either negotiate a modest settlement and declare victory or take on the daunting task of bringing actual people to trial — with the significant risk of losing. “A symbiotic relationship developed between Big Law and the Department of Justice,” Eisinger writes. Corporations got off paying symbolic penalties, defense firms raked in huge fees, and prosecutors earned P.R. victories — as long as everyone played along.

Increasingly, the prosecutors and the defense attorneys on opposite sides of the table are the same people, just at different points in their careers. Conducting a criminal investigation of an executive isn’t just risky; in addition to jeopardizing a future partnership at a prestigious law firm, perhaps most important, it incurs “social discomfort,” especially for the well-mannered overachievers who now populate the Justice Department. No one wants to be a class traitor, especially when the members of one’s class are such nice people.