So you just admitted that all the hypotheticals about victims in poverty and $10 thefts are nonsense. He took millions from Nissan and Renault, neither of whom are exactly widows and orphans.

And they were all quite happy to go along with it, for a long, long time. Did he hold a gun to their heads and make them hire him? And couldn't their Boards just fire him?

> hypotheticals about victims in poverty and $10 thefts are nonsense

Hypotheticals, sure. I’m not familiar with his every crime. Just the big ones.

> Did he hold a gun to their heads and make them hire him? And couldn't their Boards just fire him?

It sounds like the answer to the above questions, for you, is yes. Fraud. Embezzlement. All okay, because the ultimate victims, the shareholders, either didn’t push back better or were further defrauded by a possibly corrupt, possibly incompetent Board. We can’t know either way because the guy up and offed to Beirut, where he sits a fugitive of multiple international arrest warrants.

> a possibly corrupt, possibly incompetent Board

So there we are. The people in charge of controlling him, the people whose job it is to supervise him, didn't.

You can apply that logic towards a variety of other crimes: the principal who doesn't properly supervise the teacher who beats students, the police chief who doesn't properly supervise the officers who form their own drug running gang. There's usually someone else you can blame besides the people who commit the immediate crime; there's always someone if you find creative ways to blame the victims. Most people grow out of thinking this way, though.

It doesn't make you a monster if you just happen to admire a criminal. That's human nature; people have admired all sorts of criminals, especially stylish ones who get away with things. There's a whole film genre about them.

But, like, if we're going to discuss them on a message board, we should probably be clear about the fact that Danny Ocean and his gang deserve to be --- in fact, really kind of need to be --- in prison.

> people in charge of controlling him, the people whose job it is to supervise him, didn't

Sure. I made an analogy to Enron elsewhere.

But their incompetence, potentially collusion, doesn’t excuse Ghosn. And the path to holding them responsible is through him. The flip side of this, also unexplored, is that people with skeletons in their closets don't tend to hide them alone. Who else is complicit? Who among them was blackmailed, and which decisions were unduly influenced by that?