On Bernard Madoff, psychopaths, and preventing fraud in B.C.

In a few hours, Bernard Madoff will plead guilty to 11 counts of securities fraud, perjury and other offences.

Prosecutors claim that Madoff, former chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange, orchestrated a $64.8-billion fraud.

He will be  the latest in a long line of swindlers who've ended up in a U.S. prison.

What should trouble the public is that regulators only seem to find out about their  Ponzi schemes  after victims have been bilked out of their life savings.

And politicians don’t seem very interested in passing laws or regulations to prevent psychopathic con artists from wreaking havoc on society and draining seniors’ bank accounts.

One of my first feature stories in the Georgia Straight addressed this issue. In 1994, I wrote a cover story about a UBC psychology professor, Robert Hare, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on psychopathic behaviour.

He developed a psychopathy checklist, which was used to assess inmates. By the mid 1990s, Hare and his colleagues had defined psychopathy as a discrete disorder that encompassed numerous personality and behavioural traits.

Psychopaths are glib, superficial, charming, manipulative, ruthless, emotionally shallow, and utterly lacking in remorse. They lie for the fun of it. Those with a propensity for violence might end up as serial killers, but they are more likely to become con artists and swindlers.

Hare has received lots of publicity over the years. He  has written  books, lectured around the world, and inspired many students to follow in his footsteps.

In 2005, the Buros Mental Measurements Yearbook review listed Hare’s revised psychopathy checklist as the “gold standard” for measuring this disorder.

But still, swindlers like Madoff continue to ply their trade because regulators and politicians have not paid enough attention to weeding out psychopaths before they obtain licences to practise chicanery.

On March 28, Hare will give a free Vancouver Institute public lecture in Lecture Hall No. 2 at the Woodward Instructional Resources Centre at UBC.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Finance Minister Colin Hansen, Attorney General Wally Oppal, NDP attorney general critic Leonard Krog, and NDP finance critic Bruce Ralston showed up to hear what Hare has to say?

Then perhaps for a few days, they could drop the partisan rhetoric and craft a plan to deal with financial scoundrels before they commit their crimes. Hare would probably give them some  excellent advice on how to prevent them from becoming brokers, mutual-fund salespeople, money managers, and stock promoters.

Except there's one problem with this idea. The guy in charge of the province might not like the idea, especially if it stepped on the toes of some of his largest campaign donors on the eve of a provincial  election.

I'm talking about those campaign donors in the financial-services sector who are glib, superficial, charming, manipulative, ruthless, emotionally shallow, and utterly lacking in remorse. I didn't use the word psychopath. I'll leave that definition to the professionals.