We never thought that we would quote from an old news source in Somalia about crime in another country. Somalia is perceived to be the most corrupt country in the world according to Transparency International.
According to Somalia Online, Salvatore Ferranti, an Italian mafia boss, was released from jail in 2008 after attending four jails in Italy that had difficulties in accommodating him because he weighed 462 lbs. He was eventually put under house arrest instead because he was too fat to jail.
What is interesting is this may be becoming a “huge” trend. Our investigations led us to another example, George Jolicoeur weighing in at about 600 lbs from Florida, who would have dismissed Salvatore Ferranti as a light weight. Jolicoeur was arrested in 2010 for obtaining a fifty dollar rebate by falsely claiming that ten one gallon drums of ice cream he had bought were damaged. He had previous form for similar food related scams.
Now in isolation these two examples of incidents where someone is too fat to jail would not normally be of interest to us. However, as we had heard hundreds of thousands of rumours that several fat cat or simply fat bankers, brokers, financiers et al should have been jailed long ago, we investigated matters further.
We noted when undertaking a Google Search for “too big to jail” that we got about 3,310,000 results. Most of these articles were about bankers but are there really that many bankers who are too big to jail?
We conducted more analysis on Google: “fat cat bankers” got about 754,000 results, “fat cat financiers” and “fat cat brokers” only got about 34,000 and 11,000 results respectively but “fat cats” got about 2,800,000 results.
There is clearly a discrepancy somewhere or our logic may be slightly flawed but it would appear that not all the fat cats are too big to jail so why haven’t any gone to jail yet for the systemic mayhem they caused over the last decade or so!
Our suggestion to Governments facing economic stagnation resulting from all the financial crises over the last few years is to invest in “enormous” infrastructural projects – in particular they could build “mammoth” new prisons or zoos to house those fat cats who were once too big or fat to jail?
This article was first published on 26th December 2012.
