Jeff Grant might be the only white collar criminal who has gone on to become a white collar criminal defense attorney.
He’s also an ordained minister.
And he has started a remarkable group – the White Collar Support Group – a community of individuals with white collar justice issues who meet weekly on Zoom to share their experience, strength, and hope.
“Our members have a desire to take responsibility for our actions and the wreckage we caused, make amends, and move forward in a new way of life centered on hope, care, compassion, tolerance and empathy,” Grant says. “No matter which stage of the journey they are on, we have members who give of themselves freely and want to help.”
“Our experience shows us that many of us are suffering in silence with shame, remorse, and deep regret. Many of us have been stigmatized by our own families, friends and communities, and the business community. Our goal is to learn and evolve into a new spiritual way of life and to reach out in service to others.”
Grant says that more than 1,400 justice impacted individuals have participated in the free White Collar Support Group meetings since he started it more than nine years ago.
All meeting attendees agree to confidentiality, anonymity, and civility during our meetings, which take place via Zoom every Monday evening at 7 pm EST.
“I was a lawyer, got addicted to prescription opioids, made a lot of bad decisions, committed some white collar crimes, lost my law license, tried to kill myself, got sober,” Grant told Corporate Crime Reporter last week. “About twenty months into sobriety, I was arrested for white collar crimes, specifically SBA loan fraud. I went to prison for 13 months from 2006 to 2007, came out of prison, went to theological seminary, graduated with a master’s divinity, started working in the churches. Got ordained in 2021. I got my law license reinstated by New York, and now I am a white collar attorney out in the world practicing law.”
“As far as I know, I’m the only white collar lawyer in the country who’s been to prison for white collar crime. And that leads us now to the White Collar Support Group, which we started a little over nine years ago. We have 1,400 members and over 450 meetings on Zoom on Monday nights. And we’ve launched these new initiatives to try to improve the lot of people going through the criminal justice system, and hopefully add some sanity to what’s become a very insane criminal justice sector.”
Why do you call it insane?
“I think that it’s been so disrupted that nobody – either from the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Prisons or even the legal profession – nobody knows what’s up or down anymore. Everyone’s just trying to do their best with very limited resources and very limited information about how to move the needle forward, both on a policy level and certainly representing individuals who are facing the criminal justice system.”
In a press release you put out this morning, you talk about work you are doing with a professor at Yale University.
“We have a community based program that is in essence ethics rehab. We try to retrain people to act more responsibly, to take responsibility for their actions, to clean up the wreckage they’ve caused and to move forward in a more spiritual way of life. And hopefully that helps them with their jobs, with their families and with their character.”
“The Yale study is going to research the efficacy of our support system, but also monitor what people who are prosecuted for white collar crimes actually go through in terms of their life difficulties and the amount of effort and energy they put into their recovery, and then how that translates to beneficial outcomes.”
You are also looking at pardons and expungements. The Trump administration has been looking at a lot of pardons recently.
What’s your take on it?
“As a support group, we would like to see many more pardons. We are grateful to both the Trump administration and the Biden administration for having doled out a lot of pardons over the last few months.”
“But a pardon is not an expungement. A pardon is a forgiveness in the federal system. So technically, even with a pardon, you still have a record. Many states have actual expungement laws where if your record has been expunged – and in some other states it’s called a pardon – it’s as if you’ve never been convicted at all.”
“The federal system has that for only a very, very small number of juvenile drug crimes. For everyone else, the only opportunity to get your record revised is through a presidential pardon. And so even with the amount of pardons that the Presidents have given out, it’s still a very small percentage of people who have been convicted for white collar crimes who get pardons.”
“Congress can pass an expungement law. So while pardons are exclusively left to the President in the Constitution, there’s no language that prevents Congress from passing an expungement law.”
“Expungements would be a much more powerful tool, more powerful even than a pardon. And so we could take the cases of many states that have expungement laws and many countries that have expungement laws and draft legislation – which we’re in the process of doing – find some champions in Congress to sponsor bills for a legislative expungement law that would literally treat people who meet the criteria – we treat them as if they were never convicted in the first place.”
What would you propose for those criteria?
“It would be used for certain types of crimes – relatively low level crimes. And then you would look at the way the person has improved their life, dedicated their lives to the betterment of society since they were convicted. That is basically the criteria in most states.”
“As to how that would work functionally – whether that would be done through an agency, whether that would be done through the courts – that’s all to be decided. But there is a lot of precedent for it, and we think that the most important thing is to have a culture shift toward community based support.”
“Our White Collar Support Group is a good example of community based support. Participating in a white collar support group would lead a person to be able to get a pardon or an expungement much more readily.”
Corporate crime inflicts far more damage in society than all street crime combined. The Justice Department under both administrations, under the last number of administrations, has not taken corporate crime seriously. These big corporate law firms representing big corporations often throw these individual white collar executives under the bus.
“I do understand that there are many more opportunities for corporations to avoid the sting of criminal prosecution, whether that be through monetary based restitution or payments, whether it be deferred prosecution agreements or non prosecution agreements,” Grant said. “And of course, they can afford the best and the brightest lawyers.”
“So corporations generally have the opportunity to be treated better than individuals. For the most part, unless they’re very wealthy, individuals don’t have those opportunities.”
On the whole, are white collar criminals treated more fairly than street criminals?
“I don’t think so. I think that’s a myth.”
On the whole, corporate criminals are treated more fairly than street criminals?
“I would say that corporations are, but individual people prosecuted for white collar crimes are not.”
Why would there be that kind of difference in the system?
“For many years, there was a penalty for crack cocaine where it was treated thirty times more seriously than powdered cocaine. That was a policy decision that was made, I believe, essentially to privilege people who lived in higher income areas, and to the detriment of people who lived in mostly impoverished areas and inner city areas.”
“In white collar crime, the severity of the sentencing is based on the amount of loss. And so you could have two people who have done the exact same act, but in one situation, there’s $10 million worth of loss while in another situation, there’s $1 million worth of loss. And the person who created $10 million loss is going to be treated to a multiplier of severity, more than the person only creating $1 million of loss, even though the actual behavior could be identical.”
“Because the sentencing for white collar crimes is based on the amount of the intended loss, even if the actual loss wasn’t that amount, white collar crime could be treated much more severely even than street crime.”
In your Monday night Zoom sessions, do your participants express resentment at the corporations they used to work for?
“There is always some kind of comparison going on as to the way one individual is being treated compared to a corporation or other individuals. A perfect example was during Preet Bharara’s time as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was prosecuting a lot of insider trading. The traders themselves were being prosecuted for trading on non-public information. But largely, the companies themselves were not being prosecuted, even though the trading on non-public information might have been part of the company culture or ethos.”
“There was a lot of that kind of conversation – I was doing what everybody was doing, I was doing what the next guy was doing, I was doing what I was told to do. That kind of thinking is pervasive.”
“Whether it’s the government prosecuting the little guy to get to the big guy, or it’s the corporation throwing the little guy under the bus, no matter what happens, the little guy gets hurt.”
Your white collar clients are exclusively individuals?
“Yes.”
Wouldn’t it make sense for a corporation that wanted to prevent wrongdoing to hire someone like yourself to learn lessons?
“For the life of me I do not understand why corporations, financial institutions, hedge funds – why they are not actively engaged in the process of educating their employees as to how to behave compliantly, why they are not learning the lessons of people who have been through it. And not just through cautionary tales. But through active processes that encourage people to stay on the straight and narrow path. I don’t know why.”
What are some bottom line lessons you have learned through your work that would help corporations?
“I’m asked this question all the time during my lectures to students. What I tell them is this – the number one way that people can avoid the trap that leads to white collar crime is to live within their means. It’s amazing to me how many people will spend money based upon projection of what they are going to make in the future as opposed to living within their means. And once they do that, they are trapped. Then they have to make that money, they have to make that mortgage payment, they have to pay that private school tuition. And they are afraid of disappointing their family.”
“And in many cases, people with white collar careers are narcissistic. They are in materialistic environments that reward the wrong actions, the wrong outcomes.”
“If I were speaking to 500 people recently hired by a hedge fund or financial institution, and I say to them – two percent of you statistically are going to be prosecuted over the next five years for some kind of financial crime, would that dissuade them from taking the risks they shouldn’t take? Largely, the answer is no, because the rewards are so out of proportion with the risks. Everybody thinks they are going to make a fortune. And everybody is willing to take on a certain amount of risk.”
“If institutionally, the company made it clear that they do not endorse this risk, they are not going to allow them to do business outside of the guardrails, and if we catch you working outside the guardrails, we will terminate you, that would give some incentive for people to toe the line, even if it meant that salaries and the bottom line of the companies was a bit lower. At least everybody could live with themselves. It would support character building and best practices instead of being a slave to quarterly updates.”
What portion of major corporations have cultures that enforce those types of guardrails?
“I don’t know, but I suspect it’s very small.”
It’s a societal problem. And you are dealing with individuals who are a symptom of that problem.
“It’s definitely a societal and a cultural problem. No question we reward the wrong thing. The fact that we are paying market traders more than we are paying school teachers is a cultural travesty. That’s the world we live in.”
“We try to get people in the criminal justice system to focus on the long term issues. For most people, the worst thing that can happen is they go to prison. They make all of their decisions based upon not going to prison. Those of us who have been with the support group for long enough can say unequivocally, the worst thing that can happen to you is not having a comeback story. From the very beginning, you have to focus on what life is going to be like five or ten years down the road and how to rehabilitate yourself and have a comeback story. If you do that, life doesn’t have to be over just because of criminal justice involvement, whether that means prison or not.”
“You can have a happy, productive, fulfilling life after prison or after you lose your professional license. It will be different, but it certainly can be happy and fulfilling.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Jeff Grant, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 18, May 5, 2025, print edition only.]