I’ll Kill You: It’s Okay to Think It. Not Okay to Send a Message.
A man named Vincent McCrudden was convicted in a Central Islip court two weeks ago of threatening to kill more than 40 Wall Street regulators. He was charged with sending threatening emails and posting threating messages online. In at least one case he posted a reward on the Internet, offering $100,000 to anyone who would hunt down and kill certain Wall Street people. He will serve a 28 month prison sentence and get anger-management treatment before release.
McCrudden was a Wall Street trader himself. He lived in a nice house in Dix Hills, Long Island, got dressed in a suit and tie every morning five days a week, went to work at Alnbri Management and went home. He was otherwise a completely pleasant fellow. Who knew murder was on his mind?
Actually, he told the judge at the sentencing, it wasn’t. He said his motive was to get these federal regulators to stop what he felt was regulating him more than others. He was used to the rough and tumble of Wall Street. He figured that if he threatened to kill them they would take their pencils and papers and go off to more amenable quarry. And for the most part, they did.
How does it turn out that after all this time he got arrested, tried and convicted? When a regulator at the National Futures Association and then another at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority went to the police and said they feared for their lives, a whole lot of other people stepped up to the plate to say that McCrudden had it in for them too.
Furthermore, he’d been making these threats for years. When he worked in the industry in Chicago, he was ordered to get counseling in 2007, which he did, for allegedly threatening people. (The charge this time is “transmission of threats to injure.”)
In a way, this seems to say more about Wall Street than it says for McCrudden. Those who work on Wall Street know it’s all about greed, dirty tricks and dog eat dog. Since McCrudden actually never did kill the people he threatened, maybe this sort of thing was just business as usual.
Indeed, only events that took place outside of the McCrudden story got him arrested, since law enforcement is ever-vigilant of gun related crimes. (He has been in jail since his arrest 15 months ago.) In early January 2011, a gunman (Jared Loughner) killed six people, including a Federal Judge and wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.
Maybe McCrudden wasn’t walking the walk, but he was talking the talk. Although McCrudden had nothing to do with those shootings, the month after them, the police went out and got McCrudden.