Breaking News: Rich Person Gets Away with Rich Person Crime

lots of beanie babies — Surely there is some penalty simply for the crime
of unleashing the Beanie Baby frenzy upon the world?
/joeltelling

It is a well-known fact that if you are very rich, you will never have to go to jail for your fancy international rich-people crimes. But rarely does a judge make someone’s wealth the explicit reason for not sending a very rich person to jail over that person’s undoubtedly jail-worthy crimes.

Ty Warner is the billionaire tycoon behind the Beanie Babies empire. He is worth $2.6 billion dollars. This qualifies him as Very Rich. But Warner, after taking his own self-inventory, apparently decided that he was not rich enough to pay his share of federal taxes, so he illegally hid “more than $100 million from the Internal Revenue Service in a secret Swiss bank account.” The crime is tax evasion, classic good ol’ fashioned tax evasion of an insane amount of money in an actual real-life secret Swiss bank account. This calls for jail time, right, judge?

Apparently not. Yesterday, judge Charles Kocoras sentenced Warner to a mere two years probation and 500 hours of community service. Kocoras didn’t dispute the massive tax evasion, of course. He just thought Warner was a really nice guy, especially with his checkbook (except when it comes to the IRS). Per the Chicago Sun-Times:

Citing Warner’s generosity to Vasilakos and dozens of other beneficiaries of his $2.6 billion self-made fortune, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras spared Warner from prison for illegally hiding more than $100 million from the Internal Revenue Service in a secret Swiss bank account.

Warner’s many charitable works were “motivated by the purest of intentions” and demonstrated a “depth of humanity” that he had never seen in any other criminal defendant, Kocoras said as he instead sentenced the convicted tax cheat to two years of probation and 500 hours of community service.

“Society will be best served by allowing him to continue to do his good works,” the judge said.

Give me a break. Is this judge licensed to be a judge? Because that reasoning—”Society will be best served by allowing him to continue to do his good works”—means that Warner, and other plutocrats, can do whatever they want, as long as they cut some checks to charity along the way. More simply: they can buy their way out of jail time.

Here’s another, more legal way for rich people to donate to charity: by doing so and then writing those charitable deductions off of your tax bill. See, this way, you donate to charity and pay your taxes. That’s why the tax code is set up that way. But now, according to Judge Kocoras, the rich needn’t even worry about doing the tax-paying part of it.

Warner has to pay back taxes and fines, but that money doesn’t mean anything to him. He has $2.6 billion, after all. Other billionaires watching this may think, well, I’ll hide $100 million, and if I get away with it, all the better; if I get caught, fine, whatever, take the money, it was worth a shot. It’s not like anyone will ever have to go to jail over this stuff.