
The Veneer of Justice in a Kingdom of Crime
In the 1980s savings and loan crisis, prosecutors convicted roughly a thousand bank executives and sent many to prison. After the 2008 meltdown, which the film pegs at a conservative 13 trillion dollars in economic damage, the Department of Justice prosecuted no one. This film, produced by BestEvidence, tracks that gap through four chronological chapters: Background, The Untouchables, The Cover-Up, and The Criminal King. It opens by dismantling Goldman Sachs' legal defenses against fraud charges and showing how the DOJ quietly adopted the same arguments. It then extends Martin Smith's 2013 PBS Frontline report The Untouchables, arguing that the DOJ's stated reason for declining to prosecute, so-called collateral consequences, was never based on any actual regulatory opinion but was fed to prosecutors by the very banks under investigation. Using internal documents, testimony, and a detailed paper trail, the film names the one bank it says gained direct access to DOJ conference rooms to negotiate its own immunity, and argues the collateral consequences doctrine functions as a self-granted shield against criminal indictment.